(An overview of Paul Gottfried’s political project, and how it relates to the postwar thought of the German Right.)
“We who worry along paths / our ancestors took with surer steps, / what is left to us? / Is it to lie reflective on a banqueting couch, / to gaze at the dregs in our krater, / and to ponder elegant quandary, / as if a well-turned phrase might beguile / the bleakness of the hour, / or bring back the sap to a sick and withered race?”
“The Cynic”, a poem by Paul Gottfried1
This series is designed to show the influence of German right-wing thinkers on the work of the Saint Paul of paleoconservatism: Paul Gottfried. I will be examining the influence of seven thinkers, either explicitly right wing in their orientation or conservative in their conclusions.
The seven men he cribs from are, in order:
Friedrich Nietzsche
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Reinhart Koselleck
Carl Schmitt
Panagiotis Kondylis
Ernst Nolte
and Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing
Though Gottfried has favourably referenced other germanophone thinkers - many fellow historicists such as Spengler, Schumpeter, Savigny, Haller, Heidegger, Voegelin or even Marx - I do not consider these political philosophers as essential to the development of his thoughts and theories as the rest.
It is my conviction that Gottfried enriched his critiques of the incoherent American Conservative Movement with knowledge of how comparable right-wing formulas were failing in Germany. Like a Jewish-American Thomas Carlyle, he infused his reactionary masterpieces with insights from the German canon. The decalingual Gottfried has demonstrated a familiarity with political literature from all over the continent; but one can always detect a particular affinity for the vanquished German Right in his works, which contain copious references to thinkers still verboten in the Anglo-Saxon world.
Sympathy for the German Right2, is a trope that persistently features in his 14 books and countless articles. In a provocative article entitled “Is Evil A German Trait?” Gottfried takes Daniel Jonah Goldhagen to task for his book “Hitler's Willing Executioners,” and “his accusations that most Germans enthusiastically endorsed the Holocaust and that Christianity paved the way for this disaster.” Gottfried blames the tragedy of the Holocaust on an anti-semitic vanguard and modernity, not traditional European culture, or the ordinary Germans who “did not know of the mass murder of Jews {or} were afraid to intervene” for fear of reprisal.
With the pulpit cadence of a reactionary and a philo-European sensibility, he bashed the American empire and the imperial expression of the idea of a proposition nation dedicated to mass-democracy and degrading equality.
It was this affinity for German rightist scholars some would describe as “dangerous” that was a source of tension between Gottfried and his comrade-in-arms, the parochially Anglo-American Burkean traditionalist Russell Kirk. But then Kirk, merely a “literary figure and cultural critic” to the end, lacked a killer instinct.
“Many conservatives continue to indulge an outmoded habit of the anti-Communist Right: glorifying present-day political America as the embodiment of an ancient tradition seen in mortal combat with its enemies…
“Kirk purported to be showing how the American government and American culture took form from a cultural mix produced by Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem. Observe that Kirk insisted on such continuity even though the U.S. was then clearly on its way to becoming a self-identified multicultural society overseen by a post-Christian managerial elite…
“Instead of imagining that the old America was "enduring" in the present one, Kirk and his fellow-archaic conservatives should have been calling attention to a successor regime, whose sources are Washington-New York-Hollywood.”3
He would rather “lose with Socrates” than “win with Lenin.” And so his traditionalist ideas were muscled out of the public sphere. Not all ideas are consequential. Gottfried and his partner Sam Francis, learning from some historicist Germans, recognised the need for elite patronage and a social base to work from.
“Kirk's major contribution to the American Right… was as a literary figure and cultural critic. Accordingly, he never felt comfortable with the paleoconservatives, whom he considered politicised reactionaries and—as Kirk also considered the neoconservatives—obsessed ideologues.”
“For the most part Kirk could be counted on to end his work optimistically and to stress the traditionalist sources of what by then was a radically changed America.
“He did not allow himself to get drawn into embarrassing political fights, e.g., about immigration, anti-white racism enforced by our government and media, and the bloated social-engineering bureaucracies that are poisoning our civil society.
“The anti-ideologue Kirk ducked those wars that necessarily concern those on the right who notice the political culture…
“A glorification of imaginary or exaggerated continuity was not the only impulse in the postwar conservative movement. But it was there from the beginning.
And, for better or worse, Kirk… helped {to} nurture that belief.”4
Paul’s works, influenced by the German right’s glorification of hierarchy and history serve as a corrective to Kirk’s anglo-optimism and Burkean confidence in the legitimacy of gradual changes. On a technical level, Gottfried is the exponent of a type of “right-wing critical theory”5 holding to the “assumption that political behaviour is constrained by historical context and power relations.”6 This historicist style is only fitting, as Gottfried was a student of Herbert Marcuse7.
I see Paul's unearthing of authentic German right-wing thought as a foundational influence on the reactionary theories and radical prescriptions of the American Paleoconservative movement, feeding into its essentially historicist8 and inegalitarian spirit. A spirit that defends the rationality of "irrational" traditions unguarded by the Straussian or Neoconservative factions within the American Right.
Gottfried’s output in my reading simply could not exist in its current classic form without a deep familiarity with the thoughts of German rightists - just as the works of Samuel T. Francis or James Burnham could not have been created without reference to the Italian elite theorists9. To achieve that intellectual coherence that they will be remembered for - which is atypical for American conservatives - the Paleocons had to venture beyond the “approved” Anglophone court intellectuals cited by their Neoconservative foes, engaging with foreign thinking to come up with the best assessment of the intellectual crisis of the post-Cold War American Right. this naturally had ramifications for the rest of the West.
I will focus on Gottfried’s three major interests, each explored in virtually all of his books:
An analysis of the modern managerial/therapeutic state.
A critique of western conservatism.
And the intellectual histories of political ideologies.
A common motif involves the skewering of Straussian attacks on “nihilistic” foreign theorists - often men of the German right such as Nietzsche or Heidegger. Straussians like Allan Bloom point the finger at these right-wing modernists, charging them with inspiring the purported “relativism” of the modern left. Another motif is a mournful commentary on the destruction of many particularist European national identities due to the American empire’s transmission of culturally radical ideas. Running through his works is a clear soft spot for old Europe, particularly Germany, and a contempt for contemporary America’s radical influence on world politics and culture.
Though Gottfried has cited a wide berth of theorists like Aristotle, Hobbes, Pareto (his “favourite” sociologist) or de Maistre as inspirations through his many books, what stands out in his work is a profound engagement with and critique of German right-wing thought through the ages. To use his personal, orthodox, European conception of the left-right spectrum, this list is not a inventory of libertarians and corporate-capitalists, but rather the anti-egalitarians and defenders of tradition defined as right-wing in the original European left-right model, dating back to those fateful divisions in the French national assembly in the wake of the revolution.
Gottfried has been described as a “historically centered traditionalist who admires the bourgeois civilization that had dominated the West in the nineteenth century.”10 To oversimplify, his paleoconservative political persuasion can be reduced to a desire for the restoration of the bourgeois, economically laissez-faire, culturally conservative, ethnically homogenous nation-state that America knew before the changes in its political economy brought on by the one-two-punch of the progressive era, and the cultural revolutions of the 1960s it precipitated. He is “a paleoconservative but one who prefers the Protestant Reformation to the Catholic Church and the bourgeoisie to the aristocracy.” Central to his work is that distinction between an “old liberalism” with “a Protestant, bourgeoisie ideology,” replaced by a new liberalism which is “post-bourgeoisie, managerial, and multicultural.”11
He is no bomb-chucking anarchist, and does not advocate for a classically reactionary program, by the standards of history12. His issue is not with the idea of a “state” - which in a Schmittian sense is useful for monopolising internal violent force and ritualising conflict dyads between nations - but with the specifics of the mass-democratic and multicultural modern managerial state obsessed with socially engineering away the prejudices of Middle Americans.
He respects villains loathed by his libertarian friends like Alexander Hamilton or Otto von Bismarck on the grounds that they were successful state-builders13. Gottfried also sympathises with the European national-populist movements who resist the EU’s centralisation of power and the resultant destruction of regional identities, both in Euro-Populism’s original 1990s incarnation led by parties like Lega Nord, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front and Jorg Haider’s FPO, or the current revolt against the European Union undertaken by statesmen such as Gottfried’s Hungarian “hero” Viktor Orban.
Alongside fellow conservative ultras such as Samuel T. Francis and Thomas Fleming, Gottfried began his career with polemical assaults on Neoconservatives and their Straussian cousins for failing to conserve anything and, in general, pilloried the post-Nuremberg paradigm of the west and its structurally inbuilt leftward drift.
Viewing the West through this lens, he composed several ideological histories, charting the development of western liberalism, fascism, antifascism and the post-Marxist Left. A common theme in these studies is a frustration with the inadequate political lexicon employed by movement conservatives, who consistently fail at accurately describing the social ills they seek to combat. This is in large part due to their enslavement to the cliche “small-government-versus-big-government” linguistic paradigm of their Cold War glory days. They unfailingly fall back on labelling their political opponents “Marxists,” an increasingly ineffective term of abuse given the pro-corporate turn of the post-Marxist American Left, and the spectre of socialism failing to induce fear in young minds with the Soviet Union a distant memory. Worse, some American conservatives insist they are at war with “liberal fascists,” playing into the broader, post-Nuremberg paradigm of antifascism, which inherently disadvantages the real Right. One may apply this criticism to their ahistorical insistence that Democrats are, in fact, the real racists, as paternalistic to blacks as the Southern planters of old, who must once more be brought to heel by Lincolnian, nationalist republicans.
It is my contention that the framework of his attack on the managerial regime and its “artificial negativity”14 represented by establishment conservatism is largely taken from theorists of the German Right who remain obscure to the English-Speaking enjoyers of Gottfried’s corpus. Through his rediscovery of German conservative commentary, Gottfried infuses his attacks on American imperialism, his polemics against the therapeutic state, and his ideological histories with the historicist and inegalitarian foundations typical of the pre-war German Right, expressed with their nation’s characteristic systemic rigour. He critiques the American Empire in its liberal form by internalising the political discourse within those first nations put under its boot-heel.
Beyond his chronicling of the therapeutic state and his philippics against “Conservative Inc,” in his study of the career of political concepts, Gottfried is at times, knowingly or otherwise, engaging in what can be described as English-language “Begriffsgeschichte” - or “conceptual history”. A field of historical studies pioneered by unreconstructed rightists Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, Begriffsgeschichte involves the study of historical semantics used to historicise the meaning of concepts.15 In historicising the distinct meanings of words like “liberalism”, “fascism”, or “anti-fascism”, Gottfried overcomes the linguistic fog-of-war that obscures historical truths for political gains, and in turn deepens our understanding of political history, by stressing how “paradigmatic ideas and value systems” must be appreciated “in their particular contexts over time, not merely as unchanging ideologies or processes.” It is underscored that the meaning of concepts changes with developments in language, social relations and politics at large, as concepts are deployed in polemical duels. This allows observers to overcome false ideological genealogies and to appreciate the historically contingent nature of events and ideologies.
In adopting this historicist conceptual method, Gottfried learns from the failure of the denationalised German right, as the radically anti-nationalist impulse injected into German minds by postwar American re-educators spread from Germany to the rest of Western Europe. This cancerous outgrowth of the denazification initiative culminated in the domination of the historic American nation by the cultural and political dictates of the Globalist American Empire. Gottfried’s understanding of how both the American and German Rights were denied a historical context to defend demonstrates why globalist patterns of thought were able to spread almost totally unopposed by ineffectual conservative movements.
To explore Gottfried’s philosophy further, I believe we must directly compare his works with German thinkers, acknowledged or otherwise, with conclusions that resemble Gottfried’s. This is not an esoteric Straussian reading in search of a hidden message that reflects my own political prejudices, but an attempt at intellectual archaeology - a set of inferences in reaction to footnotes and conceptual similarities I have noticed through all of his books.
Though Paleoconservatives failed to take over the Republican party, and the Alt-Right degenerated into a racialist clown show, Gottfried produced a classic corpus that informs dissident right-wing thought to this day, and has been instrumental in revealing the grievances of modern social conservatives and right-wing populists.
Without further ado, let us explore Gottfried’s rehabilitation of a long-submerged German tradition, and the influence of this rightist theory on his works and worldview.
https://css.cua.edu/humanitas_journal/poem-the-cynic/
And more broadly a soft spot for the Euro-Right forms that flourished before America’s cultural and military occupation of that continent
https://web.archive.org/web/20130317074223/http://www.vdare.com/articles/how-russell-kirk-and-the-right-went-wrong
Ibid
Though he rejects the label as he lacks their anti-bourgeois intent
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-frankfurt-school-conservative/
See the essay “The Marcuse Factor” in his anthology War and Democracy
And Hans-Herman Hoppe was a student of Habermas
In this context referring to a pluralistic political stance that stresses the centrality of cultural traditions and historical experiences in determining events and political decisions, not the teleological faith in historical destinies lambasted by Karl Popper.
Mosca, Michels and Pareto
https://archive.lewrockwell.com/decoster/decoster167.html
Trepanier, Lee. (2016). Introduction to Symposium: Continuity or Creation? American Conservatism in Paul Gottfried’s Conservatism in America.. The Political Science Reviewer. 40. 1-5.
Meaning the “throne-and-altar” politics espoused by European ultras
http://www.whatwouldthefoundersthink.com/an-interview-with-paul-gottfried
To coin a phrase from Gottfried’s collaborator in critical theory, known for his leadership of the New Left magazine Telos, Paul Piccone.
For more details, see: