Paul Gottfried - Biography

Paul Edward Gottfried (born 1941) is Horace Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, and a Guggenheim recipient. He is an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and Mencken Club President.

Career

He is the author of numerous books and articles on intellectual history, paleoconservatism, ancient historiography, and political theory. Gottfried has also been a close friend of important political and intellectual figures: Richard Nixon, Pat Buchanan, John Lukacs, Christopher Lasch, Robert Nisbet, Murray Rothbard, and Joseph Sobran. In his memoirs, he speaks of his "encounters" with these and other personalities. He is a critic of the neoconservatives within the conservative movement and the Republican Party. Gottfried contributes frequent articles on conservative politics and stresses the growing indistingushability from the Left of anything that passes for establishment conservatism in the late modern Western world.

Philosophy

Much of his historical-theoretical contributions have sought to demonstrate the obsolescence of inherited political and ideological distinctions. This theme runs through his recent trilogy, which traces the rise and expansion of the democratic managerial state. His third book-length attempt to define Conservatism in America addresses the rise of "value conservatism" in a highly critical fashion. In this work, he contends that traditions arise from the practices and life experiences of inter-generational communities and have nothing to do with the marketing of privileged values by talk show hosts, journalists, and professional politicians.

Gottfried has often portrayed culture and morality in contemporary Western societies as being shaped by public administration, a sympathetic cultural industry and public education. He has focused on the democratic welfare state as a force of change given its power to recode social behavior and to restructure or subvert communities. Gottfried pays special attention to the social engineering that takes place in our society with popular consent, and with the advance of democratic pluralism as a state ideology.

Gottfried's political columns have been generally critical of neoconservatives, whom he associates with "global democratic idolatry" and "irresponsible name-calling". He has been especially concerned about the efforts of the neoconservatives to marginalize an older Right. He has also voiced doubts about the possibility of maintaining free institutions with the weakening of the bourgeois society that created them. He makes no secret of his cultural and social pessimism, a trait that, he has observed, has become more acute the more he reflects on the course of Western societies during his lifetime.

Selected publications

Books

• Conservative Millenarians: The Romantic Experience in Bavaria, Fordham University Press, 1979 ISBN 0-8232-0982-8
• The Search for Historical Meaning: Hegel and the Postwar American Right, Northern Illinois Univ Press, 1986 ISBN 0-87580-114-5
• The Conservative Movement, Twayne Pub 1988, with Thomas Fleming (second edition 1992) ISBN 0-8057-9724-6
• Carl Schmitt: Politics and Theory, Greenwood Press 1990, ISBN 0-313-27209-3
• After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State, Princeton University Press, 2001 ISBN 0-691-08982-5
• Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Towards a Secular Theocracy, University of Missouri Press, 2002 ISBN 0-8262-1417-7
• The Strange Death of Marxism: The European Left in the New Millennium, University of Missouri Press, 2005 ISBN 0-8262-1597-1
• Conservatism in America: Making Sense of the American Right, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007 ISBN 0-2306-1479-5
• Encounters: My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers, ISI Books, 2009 ISBN 1-933859-99-7
• Leo Strauss and the American Conservative Movement, Cambridge University Press, 2012

Articles

• “Anti-War Anti-Americanism?”. Telos 114 (Winter 1999). New York: Telos Press.
• “The Multicultural International”. Orbis (Winter 2002)
• “The Invincible Wilsonian Matrix”. Orbis (Spring 2007)
• “The WASP Roots of Liberal Internationalism”. Historically Speaking (Fall 2010)

External links

Selected articles

• Goldbergism: The Lowest (Terminal) Stage Of Conservatism, VDare.com, March 27, 2003.
• "How Russell Kirk (And The Right) Went Wrong", VDare.com.
• My Guy: Paul Gottfried on Patrick Buchanan, Policy Review, Summer 1995.
• "What’s In A Name? The Curious Case Of Neoconservative", VDare.com.

Column archives

• LewRockwell.com
• VDARE.com
• Taki's Magazine
• Alternative Right

Interviews

• 2007 Interview at the Property and Freedom Society
• Interview on Germans, Jews, Catholics, and Calvinists at the Idiots