Paul Gottfried and the Crisis of the German Right:
Paul Gottfried and the Crisis of the German Right:
Tracing the influence of German rightist thinkers on the philosopher-king of paleoconservatism
(A Paid Series)
An Index:
“The history of a philosopher is the history of his thinking, the history of the formation of his system.”
Karl Rosenkranz, on writing Hegel’s biography
"For those who can handle the truth, Paul Edward Gottfried serves as a fusion of Aristotle, Joseph de Maistre, and Carl Schmitt. What Aristotle did for the Greek polis, Gottfried has done for the nation-states of the West. . . ."
Chronicles Magazine, Blurb for “Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt” (2002)
“If, furthermore, America is and was in its origins mainly a bourgeois society, then it contains no corrective for the inherent degenerative tendencies of that order, and those who wish to resist the mortal consequences of these tendencies must go outside the American tradition…”
Samuel T. Francis, “The Harmless Persuasion”, “Beautiful Losers: Essays on the Failure of American Conservatism” (1993)
“It is understandable how the outrage against German political crimes should have led to such attacks upon the national culture. It is also understandable that emotional hurt and physical hardship alike have frequently made the victims of totalitarian societies wary of movements, such as that of the romantics, which deprecate rationalism and parliamentary rule. Nevertheless, it is always improper for the historian to play the hanging judge, passing sentence on a previous age. It is often emotionally satisfying to indict the dead in the name of current problems and prejudices, but neither crusading fervor nor pervasive bitterness can provide a balanced understanding of the past.”
Paul Gottfried, “Conservative Millenarians” (1979)
“It is high time that Americans trained in German history, move beyond the pious hysteria of their teachers, and examine their field outside the realm of bad theology.”
Paul Gottfried, “History or Hysteria”, “The American Spectator” (1975)
“Why are Europeans blamed for movements and concepts that we Americans have had the means and personnel to generate on our own?”
Paul Gottfried, “The Strange Death of Marxism” (2005)
What is the Crisis of the German Right?
The Crisis of the German Right refers to a mental event which divorced the German Right from key conservative values. I specifically refer to their estrangement from aristocratic inegalitarianism, historicism, and consequently a positive historical consciousness.
These resulted from, among other factors, the influence of a mass-democratic liberalism forced upon Europeans at gunpoint, postwar occupation culture and the dominance of guilt-tripping schools within German historiography, highlighting the prominence of historical atrocities.
These trends are not unique to Germany — indeed a facile dedication to abstract (liberal) propositions rather than the defence of a concrete social order likewise characterises the rest of the Western Right. Narratives of guilt which motivate progressive action, managed by a therapeutic state resembling the wartime occupation governments of Europe have increasingly influenced the rest of the Western scene. And neo-Jacobin American imperialists similarly march on through Asia, Africa and the Middle East, leaving bloodshed in their wake.
It is simply that the German experience sheds the most light on important factors presaging our contemporary cultural malaise. The coercive nature of postwar liberalism (Legutko’s ‘Coercion to Freedom’), the influence of pop-Americanism on the Right, and the levelling aspect of mass-democracy. Most significantly, the Crisis of the German Right in particular sheds light on a midcentury mental transition across the postwar west, as Conservatives went from defending specific groups and social arrangements to crusading for universal ideologies.
The German Rightist tradition, like the Southern one, contains some of the most influential and penetrating historicist thinkers, many of whom will be explored through the series. Second only to the sham that is American conservatism, it is the right-wing tradition that Paul Gottfried has grappled with for the longest time. He has an admirable intellectual selflessness, an out-group preference in favour of the western past not usually found in modern political theorists. If a Jew with relatives who died in the Holocaust can defend the German right, perhaps we can all learn something from that tradition.
Table of Contents:
A short, preliminary piece describing the origins of the metapolitical strictures imposed on the German Right following the Second World War.
A mission statement for the series, which aims to explore how seven German thinkers influenced the work of paleo-conservative philosopher Paul Gottfried.
A look at how Gottfried…
Uses Nietzsche’s inegalitarianism and anti-Christian comments to critique the modern West.
Defends Nietzsche from the Straussians, while distinguishing himself from the philosopher by being more parochial than Nietzsche and his white nationalist heirs.
And cites him in historical studies of Fascism and the anti-Fascist Left.
Rockford’s Right-Hegelian:
Gottfried and Hegel.
Amerikaner Begriffsgeschichte:
Gottfried and Koselleck.
Crown-Jurist of the Third Reich:
Gottfried and Schmitt.
Mass-Democratic Machtfragen:
Gottfried and Kondylis.
Zweiter Historikerstreit:
Gottfried and Nolte.
Contra Denazification:
Gottfried and Schrenck-Notzing.
Finis Germania:
Conclusion.
