Paul Gottfried

Paul Edward Gottfried
Gottfried speaking at an October 2017 event in New York.
Born	November 21, 1941 (1941-11-21) (age 81) Brooklyn, New York, United States
Alma mater	Yeshiva University (BA, 1963) Yale University (MSc, 1965) Yale University (PhD, 1967)
Era	Contemporary philosophy
Region	Western philosophy American philosophy
School	Paleoconservatism
Institutions	ISSEP (member) Mises Institute (associated scholar)
Doctoral advisor	Herbert Marcuse
Main interests	Welfare state, pluralism, Romanticism
Notable ideas	Therapeutic state, movement conservatism, alternative right
Influences Hegel Schmitt Burnham Szasz Rothbard Lasch Francis
Influenced Curtis Yarvin

Paul Edward Gottfried (born November 21, 1941) is an American paleoconservative philosopher, historian, and columnist. He is a former Horace Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient. He is editor-in-chief of Chronicles.

Early life and education

His father was a successful furrier from Budapest, who had fled Hungary after the July Putsch of 1934. The Jewish family relocated to Bridgeport, Connecticut, soon after his birth. Gottfried attended Yeshiva University in New York as an undergraduate and returned to Connecticut to attend Yale for graduate school.

Career

Gottfried is opposed to nation-building and is an avid critic of American interventionist foreign policy. Gottfried coined terms such as "paleoconservative", which he identifies with and "alternative right", which he rejects.

Gottfried is an associated scholar at the Mises Institute. In 2018, he joined the Institut des sciences sociales, économiques et politiques (Institute of Social, Economic and Political Sciences), founded by Marion Maréchal and Thibaut Monnier, in Lyon, France. Gottfried is the US correspondent of Nouvelle École, a Nouvelle Droite journal founded by GRECE in 1968.

Coining the alt-right

Gottfried wrote in a 2018 article for the National Post, "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."

Proximity to the alt-right

In 2018, Robert Fulford for the National Post suggested that Gottfried was the "godfather of the alt-right", suggesting his paleoconservative ideas were the origin of the alt-right "phenomenon". Three weeks later, Gottfried published a response article requesting he not be referred to in that manner.

The question of whether Gottfried is the "godfather or the alt-right" appears to have originated in a 2016 Tablet article titled, "The Alt-Right's Jewish Godfather", in which Gottfried states: "I just do not want to be in the same camp with white nationalists." He added: "As somebody whose family barely escaped from the Nazis in the '30s, I do not want to be associated with people who are pro-Nazi. ... Whenever I look at Richard [Spencer], I see my ideas coming back in a garbled form." Jacob Siegel, author of the Tablet article, describes Gottfried as having "tried to build a postfascist, postconservative politics of the far-right" for the past 20 years.

Selected publications

Books

• Conservative Millenarians: The Romantic Experience in Bavaria, Fordham University Press, 1979 ISBN 978-0-8232-0982-8
• 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 0-230-61479-5
• Encounters: My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers (1 ed.). Wilmington, Del: Intercollegiate Studies Institute. May 15, 2009. ISBN 978-1-933859-99-6.
• Leo Strauss and the American Conservative Movement, Cambridge University Press, 2012 ISBN 978-1-1070-1724-5
• War and Democracy, Arktos, 2012, ISBN 978-1907166808
• Fascism: The Career of a Concept, Northern Illinois University Press, 2015 ISBN 978-0-8758-0493-4
• Revisions and Dissents, Northern Illinois University Press, 2017 ISBN 978-0875807621
• Antifascism: The Course of a Crusade, Northern Illinois University Press, 2021 ISBN 978-1501759352

Articles

• "Why must Christians routinely grovel and apologize for crimes against Jews which they never committed?" Rothbard-Rockwell Report, vol. 6, no. 5 (July 1996): 1–4.
• "Anti-War Anti-Americanism?". Telos, vol. 114 (Winter 1999)
• "The Multicultural International". Orbis (Winter 2002)
• "The Invincible Wilsonian Matrix". Orbis (Spring 2007)
• "The WASP Roots of Liberal Internationalism". Historically Speaking (Fall 2010)

Reviews

• "Protestant Peculiarities in Contemporary America and Germany." Reviews of That Old-Time Religion in Modern America: Evangelical Protestantism in the Twentieth Century by D.G. Hart; Deconstructing Evangelicalism: Conservative Protestantism in the Age of Billy Graham by D.G. Hart; Evangeliche Kirche im geteilten Deutschland, 1945–1989/90, edited by Claudia Lepp and Kurt Nowak. Orbis, vol. 52, no. 1 (Winter 2008): 181–194. doi:10.1016/j.orbis.2007.10.010.