Paul Gottfried

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Paul Gottfried

Paul Edward Gottfried is Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College and a Guggenheim recipient. He is an adjunct scholar of the Mises Institute.

He is the author of numerous books and articles in several languages 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, and Murray Rothbard. He is now writing his memoirs that will deal with his "encounters" with these and other personalities.

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, tracing the rise and expansion of the democratic managerial state, and has inspired an upcoming book, in press with Macmillan, on "value conservatism." Unlike others on the intellectual Right, such as James Burnham and Samuel Francis, Gottfried has often treated culture and morality in contemporary Western societies as reflecting the reach of political administration. He has focused on the democratic welfare state as a force of change because of its power to recode social behavior and to break down communities. What has made this process especially effective has been the identification of social engineering with popular consent and the advance of democratic pluralism.

Many of Gottfried's political columns feature sarcastic comments about neoconservatives, whom he charges with global democratic idolatry and irresponsible name-calling. Gottfried has also accused particular neoconservatives of having kept him from an endowed professorship at The Catholic University of America, and he has made references to this hostile act in commentaries concerning the decline of academic freedom. He is pessimistic about the possibility of maintaining free institutions in the face of the self-obliteration of the bourgeois society that created them. [1][2]

1 Books
2 Selected Articles
3 Column archives
4 See also

[edit] 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 (1988, second edition 1992)
After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State, Princeton University Press ISBN 0-691-08982-5
Carl Schmitt: Politics and Theory (Contributions in Political Science), Greenwood Press 1990 ISBN 0-313-27209-3
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
Baseless Conservatism: Making Sense of the American Right (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007)