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Paul Gottfried

Paul Edward Gottfried (born November 21, 1941) is an American paleoconservative political philosopher, historian, and writer.[1][2][3] He is a former Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. He is editor-in-chief of the paleoconservative magazine Chronicles.[4] He is an associated scholar at the Mises Institute, a libertarian think tank,[5] and the US correspondent of Nouvelle École, a Nouvelle Droite journal.[6]

Paul Gottfried

Paul Edward Gottfried

(1941-11-21) November 21, 1941
Brooklyn, New York, U.S.

Yeshiva University (BA)
Yale University (MS, PhD)

Contemporary philosophy

Western philosophy
American philosophy

Paleoconservatism

Herbert Marcuse

Welfare state, pluralism, Romanticism

Therapeutic state, movement conservatism, alternative right, white nationalism (denied)

He helped coin the term paleoconservative in 1986 and alternative right (with Richard Spencer) in 2008.[2][1] The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has described him as a "far-right thinker".[7] He founded the H.L. Mencken Club, which the SPLC considers a white 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]

Early life and education[edit]

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.[1]


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).[1][9]

Conservative Millenarians: The Romantic Experience in Bavaria. (1979). ISBN 978-0-82320982-8.

Fordham University Press

. Northern Illinois University Press (1986). ISBN 0-87580114-5.

The Search for Historical Meaning: Hegel and the Postwar American Right

. Boston: Twayne Publishing (1988); 2nd ed. with Thomas Fleming (1992). ISBN 0-80579724-6.

The Conservative Movement

Carl Schmitt: Politics and Theory. (1990). ISBN 0-31327209-3.

Greenwood Press

. New Forum vol. 18. Princeton University Press (2001). ISBN 0-69108982-5.

After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State

. University of Missouri Press (2002). ISBN 0-826214177.

Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Towards a Secular Theocracy

. University of Missouri Press (2005). ISBN 0-826215971.

The Strange Death of Marxism: The European Left in the New Millennium

Conservatism in America: Making Sense of the American Right. (2007). ISBN 0-23061479-5.

Palgrave-Macmillan

. Wilmington, DL: Intercollegiate Studies Institute (2009). ISBN 978-1-93385999-6.

Encounters: My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers

Leo Strauss and the American Conservative Movement. (2012). ISBN 978-1-10701724-5.

Cambridge University Press

War and Democracy. (2012). ISBN 978-1-90716680-8.

Arktos

. Northern Illinois University Press (2015). ISBN 978-0-87580493-4.

Fascism: The Career of a Concept

Revisions and Dissents. (2017). ISBN 978-0-87580762-1.

Northern Illinois University Press

Antifascism: The Course of a Crusade. (2021). ISBN 978-1-50175935-2.

Northern Illinois University Press

A Paleoconservative Anthology: New Voices for an Old Tradition. Ed. Paul Gottfried. (2023). ISBN 9781666919738.

Rowman & Littlefield