# Paul Gottfried **Paul Gottfried** (b. November 21, 1941, New York City) is an American intellectual historian and the leading theorist of [[Paleoconservatism]]. He is the bridge between the Old Right's critique of the managerial state and the online [[Alt-Right]]. He named both movements: he coined "paleoconservative" with Thomas Fleming in 1986, and "alternative right" in 2008. ## Formation Gottfried earned his PhD at Yale in 1968 with a dissertation on Catholic Romanticism in Munich, written under [[Herbert Marcuse]]. That pairing is often noted as an irony, but it matters: Gottfried absorbed the Frankfurt School's habit of treating liberalism as a system of administered consent, then turned it against the left. He spent most of his career as Horace Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, and later became editor-in-chief of *Chronicles*, the flagship paleoconservative magazine. ## The argument His major works build on [[James Burnham]]'s thesis that a managerial elite had displaced both owners and voters: - *The Conservative Movement* (1988) - *After Liberalism* (subtitled *Mass Democracy in the Managerial State*) - *Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt* (2002) - *Leo Strauss and the American Conservative Movement* (2012) - *Fascism: The Career of a Concept* (2015) Across them, Gottfried argues that the modern "therapeutic" state rules through bureaucracies, courts and the media rather than through representative institutions. On this reading, multiculturalism and antidiscrimination law are the managerial state's governing ideology, and [[Neoconservatism]] is not conservatism at all but a court party for that state. That last charge made him the most persistent intellectual enemy of the neocons inside the conservative movement. ## The alt-right coinage In 2008 Gottfried founded the H.L. Mencken Club, which the SPLC describes as white nationalist, a label Gottfried rejects. At its first meeting he gave a talk on "the decline and rise of the alternative right," and [[Richard Spencer]], then his editor at *Taki's Magazine*, took the phrase and built a movement on it. Gottfried has since distanced himself from what Spencer made of it. Still, the lineage is direct: the paleoconservative critique of the managerial regime supplied the alt-right's intellectual scaffolding, stripped of its academic caution. ## Why he matters now The "regime," "managerial elite" and "administrative state" vocabulary of today's [[The New Right Ecosystem]] and the post-liberal right is Gottfried's, whether or not the people using it cite him. He and [[Samuel Francis]] are the two figures through whom Burnham's analysis passed into the [[Pat Buchanan]] insurgency and then into the Trump-era right. ## See also - [[Paleoconservatism]] · [[James Burnham]] · [[Samuel Francis]] · [[Pat Buchanan Timeline]] - [[Alt-Right]] · [[Richard Spencer]] · [[Neoconservatism]] · [[Declinism]] · [[The New Right Ecosystem]]