Paul Edward Gottfried (born November 21, 1941) is an American paleoconservative political philosopher, historian, and writer. He is a former professor of humanities at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. He is editor-in-chief of the paleoconservative magazine Chronicles. He is an associated scholar at the Mises Institute, a libertarian think tank, and the US correspondent of Nouvelle École, a Nouvelle Droite journal.

Gottfried helped coin the terms paleoconservative in 1986 and alternative right (with Richard Spencer) in 2008. and characterizes the H.L. Mencken Club, which he founded, as a white nationalist group. Although noted for working with far-right and alt-right groups and figures, he has said that he does "not want to be in the same camp with white nationalists" or associated with pro-Nazis, "as somebody whose family barely escaped from the Nazis in the '30s". He defended his thesis on Catholic Romanticism in Munich, 1826–1834 in 1968.

Career

Gottfried had written 13 books as of 2016. He has aimed to revitalize the Old Right to counter neoconservative and neoliberal influence in the conservative movement.

He is a former Horace Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient. He moved to Elizabethtown after his first wife died, and taught at the college until "a school official encouraged his early exit", according to a 2016 article in Tablet. Gottfried was expelled as a contributor to National Review in the 1980s; interviewed in 2017, he said National Review "didn’t throw anybody out because they were racist," but alleged that it and the conservative movement had been captured by interests supportive of immigration and multiculturalism. In the 1980s, he edited the journal Continuity for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which included some neo-Confederate writing. He was a key advisor in the 1990s to Pat Buchanan, notably during Buchanan's campaign in the 1992 Republican primaries against President George H. W. Bush.

Gottfried is an associated scholar at the Mises Institute, a libertarian think tank. Gottfried is the US correspondent of Nouvelle École, a Nouvelle Droite journal founded by GRECE in 1968. It is named for the famous writer H.L. Mencken; a Village Voice article about the club in 2013 noted Mencken's casual racism. The Village Voice said the club was "overwhelmingly geriatric" and met in airport hotels near Baltimore. Marilyn Mayo of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Center on Extremism said the ADL did not consider the club a hate group, but that it "attracts a number of white supremacists to their conferences".

Coining of alt-right and associations

Gottfried helped coin the term alternative right with a speech to the H.L. Mencken Club in 2008 envisioning a nationalist and populist right-wing movement; it was published by Richard Spencer in Taki's Magazine with the title "The Decline and Rise of the Alternative Right". Gottfried has been described as a former intellectual mentor to Spencer. As of 2010, according to the SPLC, Gottfried was a senior contributing editor at Alternative Right, a website edited by Spencer. He and Spencer co-edited a book in 2015. Three weeks later, Gottfried published a response article objecting to some of its points. He wrote, "I do know Richard Spencer and worked with him in 2010 when he edited the Taki's Magazine website. We did develop the term 'Alternative Right' together — it was a headline he put on one of my articles. But my subsequent strategic differences with him are a matter of public record, which should have been noted."

Books

  • Conservative Millenarians: The Romantic Experience in Bavaria. Fordham University Press (1979). .
  • The Search for Historical Meaning: Hegel and the Postwar American Right. Northern Illinois University Press (1986). .
  • The Conservative Movement. Boston: Twayne Publishing (1988); 2nd ed. with Thomas Fleming (1992). .
  • Carl Schmitt: Politics and Theory. Greenwood Press (1990). .
  • After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State. New Forum vol. 18. Princeton University Press (2001). .
  • Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Towards a Secular Theocracy. University of Missouri Press (2002). .
  • The Strange Death of Marxism: The European Left in the New Millennium. University of Missouri Press (2005). .
  • Conservatism in America: Making Sense of the American Right. Palgrave-Macmillan (2007). .
  • Encounters: My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers. Wilmington, DL: Intercollegiate Studies Institute (2009). .
  • Leo Strauss and the American Conservative Movement. Cambridge University Press (2012). .
  • War and Democracy. Arktos (2012). .
  • Fascism: The Career of a Concept. Northern Illinois University Press (2015). .
  • Revisions and Dissents. Northern Illinois University Press (2017). .
  • The Vanishing Tradition: Perspectives on American Conservatism. Northern Illinois University Press (2020).
  • Antifascism: The Course of a Crusade. Northern Illinois University Press (2021). .
  • A Paleoconservative Anthology: New Voices for an Old Tradition. Ed. Paul Gottfried. Rowman & Littlefield (2023). .

See also

  • Neoconservatism and paleoconservatism
  • Sam T. Francis<!--Long-time personal friend of his-->

References

  • Paul Gottfried at Mises Institute
  • Paul Gottfried on "Cultural Marxism", 2020 Chronicles video