Paul Gottfried

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 (French: ''New Right'') journal.

He helped coin the term ''paleoconservative'' in 1986 and ''alternative right'' (with Richard Spencer) in 2008.'''' The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has described him as a "far-right thinker". He founded the H.L. Mencken Club, which the SPLC considers 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".

Early life and education

Gottfried was born in 1941 in the Bronx, New York City. His father, Andrew Gottfried, was a furrier in Budapest who fled Hungary after the July Putsch of 1934. The family relocated to Bridgeport, Connecticut, soon after Paul Gottfried's birth. Andrew Gottfried had a fur business in Bridgeport and was involved in its Hungarian Jewish community.

Gottfried attended Yeshiva University in New York as an undergraduate. He returned to Connecticut to attend Yale for graduate school, where he studied under Herbert Marcuse (with whom he disagreed).

Career

Gottfried had written 13 books as of 2016. With Thomas Fleming in 1986 he coined the term ''paleoconservative'' (a term he identifies with), and with Richard Spencer in 2008 he coined ''alternative right''. 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 a friend of Richard Nixon after Nixon resigned from the presidency. 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. He was an advisor to the 1992 Republican primary campaign of Pat Buchanan against President George H. W. Bush. He worked for the journal ''Telos'', which embraced some far-right causes. He is opposed to nation-building and is a critic of American interventionist foreign policy. He has written that Murray Rothbard was a close friend and influence.

Gottfried is an associated scholar at the Mises Institute, a libertarian think tank. 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.

In 2008, Gottfried founded the H.L. Mencken Club, a group the SPLC has described as white nationalist. Richard Spencer was a board member. It is named for the famous writer H.L. Mencken, who was casually racist. The ''Village Voice'' in 2013 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".

Gottfried has spoken at ''American Renaissance'' conferences and written essays for VDARE.

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 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.

In a 2016 ''Tablet'' article, "The Alt-Right's Jewish Godfather", Gottfried said, "Whenever I look at Richard pencer I see my ideas coming back in a garbled form." He also said, "I just do not want to be in the same camp with white nationalists," and "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." Jacob Siegel, author of the ''Tablet'' article, described Gottfried as having "tried to build a postfascist, postconservative politics of the far-right" for the past 20 years, but that "Spencer and his acolytes wanted to cross the threshold into fascist thought and beliefs".

In 2018, Robert Fulford of the ''National Post'' described Gottfried as the "godfather of alt-right" and wrote that Gottfried's paleoconservative ideas were a major source of the alt-right phenomenon. 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."

Selected publications

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 Univ Press, 1986
*
The Conservative Movement
', Twayne Pub 1988, with Thomas Fleming (second edition 1992)
* ''Carl Schmitt: Politics and Theory'', Greenwood Press 1990,
* ''After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State'', 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
*
* ''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
* ''Antifascism: The Course of a Crusade'', Northern Illinois University Press, 2021

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. .

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Gottfried, Paul
1941 births
Living people
20th-century American historians
20th-century American male writers
20th-century American non-fiction writers
21st-century American historians
21st-century American male writers
21st-century American non-fiction writers
Alt-right writers
American columnists
American foreign policy writers
American male non-fiction writers
American people of Hungarian-Jewish descent
American political philosophers
American political writers
Critics of Marxism
Critics of neoconservatism
Intellectual historians
Jewish anti-communists
Jewish American historians
Jewish philosophers
Mises Institute people
Non-interventionism
Paleoconservatism
Writers from the Bronx
Yale University alumni
Yeshiva University alumni
Carl Schmitt scholars
Historians from New York (state)