Paul Gottfried | |
|---|---|
 Gottfried speaking in 2017 | |
| Born | Paul Edward Gottfried (1941-11-21)21 November 1941 (age 84) New York City, U.S. |
| Education | |
| Alma mater | Yeshiva University (BA) Yale University (MS,PhD) |
| Thesis | Catholic Romanticism in Munich, 1826–1834 (1968) |
| Doctoral advisor | Herbert Marcuse |
| Philosophical work | |
| Era | Contemporary philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy American philosophy |
| School | Paleoconservatism |
| Institutions |
|
| Main interests | Welfare state,pluralism,Romanticism |
| Notable ideas | Therapeutic state,movement conservatism,alternative right,white nationalism (denied) |
Paul Edward Gottfried (born November 21, 1941) is an Americanpaleoconservative political philosopher, historian, and writer.[1][2][3] He is a former Professor of Humanities atElizabethtown College inPennsylvania. He is editor-in-chief of the paleoconservative magazineChronicles.[4] He is an associated scholar at theMises Institute, a libertarian think tank,[5] and the US correspondent ofNouvelle École, aNouvelle Droite journal.[6]
Gottfried helped coin the termspaleoconservative in 1986 andalternative right (withRichard Spencer) in 2008.[2][1] TheSouthern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has described him as a "far-right thinker"[7] and recognizes the H.L. Mencken Club, which he founded, as awhite nationalist group.[7][8] 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".[2][1]
Gottfried was born in 1941 to a Jewish family in theBronx,New York City. His father, Andrew Gottfried, was afurrier fromBudapest who had fled Hungary after theJuly Putsch of 1934. The family relocated toBridgeport, Connecticut, soon after Paul Gottfried's birth. Andrew Gottfried had a fur business in Bridgeport and was involved in itsHungarian Jewish community.[1]
Gottfried attendedYeshiva University in New York as an undergraduate. He returned to Connecticut to attendYale for graduate school, where he studied underHerbert Marcuse (with whom he disagreed).[1][9] He defended his thesis onCatholic Romanticism in Munich, 1826–1834 in 1968.[10]
Gottfried had written 13 books as of 2016.[1] With Thomas Fleming in 1986 he coined the termpaleoconservative (a term he identifies with), and with political commentatorRichard Spencer in 2008 he coinedalternative right.[2][11] He has aimed to revitalize theOld Right to counterneoconservative andneoliberal influence in theconservative movement.[3] He is considered a prominentreactionary critic of theRepublican Party and has called himself a "right-wing pluralist".[12][13][14]
He is a former Horace Raffensperger Professor of Humanities atElizabethtown College inElizabethtown, Pennsylvania, as well as aGuggenheim Fellowship recipient.[15][16] 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 inTablet.[1]
Gottfried was a friend ofRichard Nixon after Nixon resigned from the presidency.[17] Gottfried was expelled as a contributor toNational Review in the 1980s; interviewed in 2017, he saidNational 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 andmulticulturalism.[18] In the 1980s, he edited the journalContinuity for theIntercollegiate Studies Institute, which included someneo-Confederate writing.[19] He was a key advisor in the 1990s toPat Buchanan, notably during Buchanan's campaign in the1992 Republican primaries againstPresident George H. W. Bush.[20][1] He worked for the journalTelos, which embraced some far-right causes.[9] He is opposed tonation-building and is a critic of Americaninterventionist foreign policy.[citation needed] He has written thatMurray Rothbard was a close friend and influence.[21]
Gottfried is an associated scholar at theMises Institute, a libertarian think tank.[5] In 2018, he joined theInstitut des sciences sociales, économiques et politiques (Institute of Social, Economic and Political Sciences), founded byMarion Maréchal andThibaut Monnier, inLyon, France.[22] Gottfried is the US correspondent ofNouvelle École, aNouvelle Droite journal founded byGRECE in 1968.[6]
In 2008, Gottfried founded the H.L. Mencken Club, a group the SPLC has described aswhite nationalist.[7] Richard Spencer was a board member.[23] It is named for the famous writerH.L. Mencken; aVillage Voice article about the club in 2013 noted Mencken's casual racism. TheVillage Voice said the club was "overwhelmingly geriatric" and met in airport hotels nearBaltimore. Marilyn Mayo of theAnti-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".[23]
Gottfried has spoken atAmerican Renaissance conferences and written essays forVDARE.[8] AnIntelligencer article about the far right in 2017 summarized Gottfried as a "nativist strategist" who had "spent a career agitating for an ethno-nationalist conservatism that celebrated white Western values and lamented what feminism and multiculturalism had done to dilute them".[24]
Gottfried helped coin the termalternative right with a speech to the H.L. Mencken Club in 2008 envisioning a nationalist and populist right-wing movement; it was published byRichard Spencer inTaki's Magazine with the title "The Decline and Rise of the Alternative Right".[2][1][25] Gottfried has been described as a former intellectual mentor to Spencer.[26][1][27] As of 2010, according to the SPLC, Gottfried was a senior contributing editor atAlternative Right, a website edited by Spencer.[28] He and Spencer co-edited a book in 2015.[3][1]
In a 2016 article in the online magazineTablet titled "The Alt-Right's Jewish Godfather", Gottfried said, "Whenever I look at Richard [Spencer], 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 theTablet article, described Gottfried as having "tried to build apostfascist, postconservative politics of thefar-right" for the past 20 years, but that "Spencer and his acolytes wanted to cross the threshold into fascist thought and beliefs".[1]
In 2018,Robert Fulford of theNational Post described Gottfried as the "godfather ofalt-right" and wrote that Gottfried'spaleoconservative ideas were a major source of the alt-right phenomenon.[29] 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 theTaki'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."[30]
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