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Revisions and Dissents
Paul Gottfried's critical engagement with political correctness is well known. The essays in Revisions and Dissents focus on a range of topics in European intellectual and political history, social theory, and the history of modern political movements. With subjects as varied as Robert Nisbet, Whig history, the European Union election of 2014, and Donald Trump, the essays are tied together by their strenuous confrontation with historians and journalists whose claims about the past no longer receive critical scrutiny. According to Gottfried, successful writers on historical topics take advantage of political orthodoxy and/or widespread ignorance to present questionable platitudes as self-evid...
Fascism
"For historians, [Fascism] offers clear and provocative insights and arguments, and the very detailed notes are especially helpful.... Recommended."― Choice What does it mean to label someone a fascist? Today, it is equated with denouncing him or her as a Nazi. But as intellectual historian Paul E. Gottfried writes in this provocative yet even-handed study, the term's meaning has evolved over the years. Gottfried examines the semantic twists and turns the term has endured since the 1930s and traces the word's polemical function within the context of present ideological struggles. Like "conservatism," "liberalism," and other words whose meanings have changed with time, "fascism" has been us...
After Liberalism
In this trenchant challenge to social engineering, Paul Gottfried analyzes a patricide: the slaying of nineteenth-century liberalism by the managerial state. Many people, of course, realize that liberalism no longer connotes distributed powers and bourgeois moral standards, the need to protect civil society from an encroaching state, or the virtues of vigorous self-government. Many also know that today's "liberals" have far different goals from those of their predecessors, aiming as they do largely to combat prejudice, to provide social services and welfare benefits, and to defend expressive and "lifestyle" freedoms. Paul Gottfried does more than analyze these historical facts, however. He b...
The Strange Death of Marxism
The Strange Death of Marxism seeks to refute certain misconceptions about the current European Left and its relation to Marxist and Marxist-Leninist parties that existed in the recent past. Among the misconceptions that the book treats critically and in detail is that the Post-Marxist Left (a term the book uses to describe this phenomenon) springs from a distinctly Marxist tradition of thought and that it represents an unqualified rejection of American capitalist values and practices. Three distinctive features of the book are the attempts to dissociate the present European Left from Marxism, the presentation of this Left as something that developed independently of the fall of the Soviet em...
Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America
This book offers an original interpretation of the achievement of Leo Strauss, stressing how his ideas and followers reshaped the American conservative movement. The conservative movement that reached out to Strauss and his legacy was extremely fluid and lacked a self-confident leadership. Conservative activists and journalists felt a desperate need for academic acceptability, which they thought Strauss and his disciples would furnish. They also became deeply concerned with the problem of 'value relativism', which self-described conservatives thought Strauss had effectively addressed. But until recently, neither Strauss nor his disciples have considered themselves to be 'conservatives'. Contrary to another misconception, Straussians have never wished to convert Americans to ancient political ideals and practices, except in a very selective rhetorical fashion. Strauss and his disciples have been avid champions of American modernity, and 'timeless' values as interpreted by Strauss and his followers often look starkly contemporary.
The Conservative Movement
At the beginning of the 1990s, conservative commentators have increasingly focused on the growing fragmentation of the American political and intellectual Right. From the early postwar years, when a small band of intellectual dissidents emerged in response to the Soviet threat, to the 1980s and the Reagan years, when the coalition of journalists, politicians, and lobbyists known as the New Right reached the height of its influence, the conservative movement has always been a complex, shifting set of ideologies and factions. In this revised and updated study, Paul Gottfried provides an insider's look at the factions and controversies, the personalities and ideologies, the rival journals and i...
Encounters
Paul Gottfried has spent a lifetime asking politically incorrect questions, untimely questions that have made him more unpopular among some timid "movement" conservatives than among critical theorists, Central European Marxists, and assorted other debating and dining partners. But in Encounters: My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers, Gottfried puts past political battles aside in order to recount his varied associations and friendships with a host of fascinating figures, including his father, Herbert Marcuse, Paul Piccone, Christopher Lasch, Richard Nixon, and Patrick J. Buchanan. Gottfried's memoir emphasizes the Forrest Gump-like quality of his often accidental relationships with these celebrities and stimulating personalities, the benefits of which were not social or professional but personal. He insists that his life would be of little general interest were it not for the fortuitous encounters that have raised it out of the ordinary. The result is a unique, enthralling narrative that makes a signal contribution to American intellectual history. - Publisher.
Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt
Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt extends Paul Gottfried’s examination of Western managerial government’s growth in the last third of the twentieth century. Linking multiculturalism to a distinctive political and religious context, the book argues that welfare-state democracy, unlike bourgeois liberalism, has rejected the once conventional distinction between government and civil society. Gottfried argues that the West’s relentless celebrations of diversity have resulted in the downgrading of the once dominant Western culture. The moral rationale of government has become the consciousness-raising of a presumed majority population. While welfare states continue to provide entit...
The Great Erasure
For those who are a part of it, and for those who feel represented by it, the postwar American "conservative movement" has been a roaring success. More Americans openly identify themselves with "conservative" than any other political ideology. There are more magazines, websites, television programs, and publishing houses that advocate "conservatism" than ever before. But the question remains: What is this movement, which has, for some half century, defined what is called "the Right"? A central crucible in its formation has been "the purge"-that is, the expulsion, often in an explicit fashion, of views or individuals deemed outside the boundaries of the official Right. Through the purges-spec...
War and Democracy
War and Democracy presents a selection of essays and reviews by Paul Gottfried written from 1975 to the present. They cover a variety of topics, both historical and contemporary, ranging from Oswald Spengler and the Frankfurt School to the destruction of classical liberalism, the dumbing down of higher education and the increasing dominance of administration in democratic governments. Most crucially, Gottfried sees Western governments as engaged in a messianic fantasy of bringing democracy to the world, an imperialist endeavor that has only brought disaster to all nations concerned, while liberties at home are being gradually curtailed. A recurring theme is the transformation of the modern W...
