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.
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An exacting, scrupulous historian of political ideas, Gottfried has never taught at an upper-tier university. That career disappointment is an evanescing leitmotiv in this memoir, which is far more concerned with what Gottfried learned from and enjoyed about his favorite acquaintances, most of them colleagues in academe and the world of philosophical-historical-political publishing, including Will Herberg, Paul Piccone, Peter Stanlis, Christopher Lasch, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese, Thomas Molnar, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, John Lukacs, and the Marxist father of the sexual revolution, Herbert Marcuse, whom Gottfried, though at the opposite end of the political spectrum, admired for his pedagogical liberality and European good manners. From outside the academy he recalls his entrepreneurial father, independent conservative scholar Russell Kirk, libertarian Murray Rothbard, columnists Samuel Francis and Pat Buchanan, and a figure almost as surprising as Marcuse in this context, Richard Nixon, whose knowledge, conversational panache, and personal warmth charmed Gottfried. Discussing his favorite people brings out a becoming modesty and a humane intellectual seriousness in Gottfried, which make him another—possibly the most—winning personality in the book. --Ray Olson
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“Encounters is the account of a modest man, a very profound thinker. His accounts of men and his meetings with them and his understandings of them are very valuable, thoughtful, and not at all self-indulgent. They tell us very much about his subjects and also, unconsciously, about the qualities of himself.”—John Lukacs, author and historian
“Paul Gottfried, an American intellectual of superior talent, has been treated abominably by Academia, not only for his conservatism but for his incorruptibility. Yet, Gottfried’s memoir proceeds without bitterness, self-justification, or a settling of scores. This sprightly account of his career in Academia and conservative politics illuminates the intellectual and political currents of our time and abound with fresh insights and mature evaluations of persons and places.”—Eugene D. Genovese, author and historian
“It was a real treat to coast the curve of time with Professor Gottfried as his many milestones of intellectual history reveal their greatness with charm and their foibles with candor. The author's searing self-awareness is an inspiration to all who eschew vulgarity for nobility.”— Rabbi Daniel Lapin; President, American Alliance of Jews and Christians.
“Paul Gottfried is a child of the century. He studied at Yale with Herbert Marcuse and has known Pat Buchanan, Will Herberg, Sam Frances, Richard Nixon, and many others. His autobiography Encounters narrates his intellectual journey, and will be indispensable as a source when the history of the conservative movement is written.”—Jeffrey Hart, professor emeritus of English at Dartmouth College, cultural critic, columnist
“Political philosopher Paul Gottfried, well-known for his studies of modern ideologies such as Marxism and neoconservatism, reveals the personal and intellectual influences that have made him one of our most provocative scholars. In this candid and beautifully written memoir, we learn more about friends such as Herbert Marcuse, Richard Nixon, and Patrick Buchanan than in a shelf of biographies. Encounters is indispensable reading for every student of modern American conservatism.”—Lee Edwards, author and Distinguished Fellow at The Heritage Foundation
"What jumps off the pages of Encounters is the amazing intellectual courage of an author who clearly and unequivocally states and defends what he believes. Agree with Gottfried or not, you will appreciate his refreshing honesty. A penetrating read."—L. Brent Bozell III, president of the Media Research Center
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The opposite of "Dreams from My Father",
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This review is from: Encounters: My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers (Hardcover)
PaulGottfried's new memoir, "Encounters: My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers," provides an ideal introduction to the works of this scholar, who is perhaps the most acute "political genealogist" of our time.
Having spent an enormous amount of time trudging through "Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance" to write my reader's guide to the President's autobiography, "America's Half-Blood Prince," I was pleased to see that Dr. Gottfried made consistently opposite choices in molding his memoir. While "Dreams" is long, "Encounters" is short. "Dreams" is evasive, featureless, and self-absorbed, while "Encounters" is forthright, anecdotal, and interesting about Gottfried's better-known friends. Gottfried's academic career has been notoriously incommensurate with his talents. In "Encounters," he refers to his professional frustrations with a melancholic wit reminiscent of Nabokov's narrators, in asides such as "... a point that I have made to a generally unreceptive public in my recent books". Yet, the lack of an Ivy League chair is not an impediment to striking up a dialogue with idiosyncratic thinkers, as Gottfried repeatedly did through the U.S. Mail: "What makes my life ... perhaps even worth reading about is that it has gone nowhere in particular but has been nonetheless packed with fascinating encounters". Gottfried, for example, wrote to Richard Nixon, the most intellectual President since at least Coolidge, after the former President had publicly praised his 1986 book "The Search for Historical Meaning." They became rather good friends. In "Encounters," Gottfried notes: "Like John Adams and John Quincy Adams, Nixon was a brooding political thinker who fitted badly into a job that depended on public favor." The portrait of Nixon that Gottfried paints is rather similar to the onscreen portrayal that stage great Frank Langella essayed in last year's film "Frost/Nixon," especially in the touching final scene in which screenwriter Peter Morgan has Nixon muse that talk show host David Frost, with his gift for being liked, would have been a natural politician, while he, with his incisive mind, should have made a career out of asking tough questions. (Gottfried commented in a column after he finished his book that "I had the impression while watching Langella that I was standing again in Nixon's presence".) Gottfried argues that the source of Nixon's policy of détente with the Soviets and Red Chinese was that: "Nixon belonged to a tradition of pessimistic realism that would place him well to the right of his neo-Wilsonian critics ... The question is not whether this approach was correct. It is rather whether it was actuated by conservative assumptions about politics and human nature. ... He was thoroughly Hobbesian, in the sense that ... Nixon thought that violence was inherent in human nature. The purpose of statecraft was to institutionalize and restrict the manifestations of an all-too-human propensity." Encounters focuses less on retelling Gottfried's own life tale than on providing a buffet of succinct personal and political portraits of the more intriguing personalities he's befriended. Even limiting himself to those who are deceased, or at least older than he is, leaves him quite an array. For example, Gottfried profiles such unlikely bestseller-writers as historian John Lukacs, social critic Christopher Lasch, and Eugene Genovese. Genovese, the pre-eminent historian of antebellum plantation owners, puzzlingly called himself a Marxist until converting to Catholicism in the 1996. Gottfried pegs the always stylishly-dressed Genovese more plausibly as "an antibourgeois elitist trying to fit into American academia". Gottfried recounts a 1993 meeting called by Pat Buchanan "to come up with advisors for a new foundation ... [that] would serve as the intellectual nucleus for a second presidential campaign ..." The confab featured the penetrating Southern rightist Sam Francis, the exuberant libertarian economist Murray Rothbard, and the gentle traditionalist political philosopher Russell Kirk. Gottfried notes, however, with some understatement, that what Buchanan "needed was advice from someone who would be able to get Pat lots of votes on Election Day. While the present company was more honorable and more interesting than this hypothetical strategist, my friends did not strike me as being well-suited to manipulating the public". Still, Gottfried makes good use of this opportunity to sketch vivid portraits of Francis, Rothbard, and Kirk, and sympathetically yet critically outline the differences in the thinking of these influential thinkers. Chilton Williamson, Jr. defines paleoconservatism as "the expression of rootedness: a sense of place and of history, a sense of self derived from forebears, kin, and culture--an identity that is both collective and personal". [What Is Paleoconservatism? Man, Know Thyself!, Chronicles Magazine, January 2001] Gottfried's clarity about his own idiosyncratic roots and his empathetic sensitivity to others' roots makes him an ideal explicator of the evolution of schools of thought over time.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Becoming Paleoconservative,
This review is from: Encounters: My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers (Hardcover)
Paleoconservatives are reactive rather than reactionary. They do not idealize the past, much less seek to restore it. As exemplified by Prof. Paul Gottfried, the leading intellectual among them, paleoconservatives loathe the regnant political elite and how it glorifies the present as the most enlightened age in history. This viewpoint has become mainstream, and paleoconservatives hate it all the more. According to its tenets, something approaching human perfection will be achieved when through the ministrations of equally firm and benevolent government, people are irreversibly "liberated" from the last remaining vestiges of sexism, racism, homophobia, and sundry inhibitions inculcated by repressive religious and/or cultural practices. Allegedly only then will individuals be truly free for self-actualization. Nauseating nonsense, say the paleoconservatives. Neither radical freedom nor the intrusive government necessary to mold individuals for it is desirable; both are incompatible with ordered liberty in community with others.
Gottfried's autobiography reviews his growth as a person and scholar. He presents his life as a series of "encounters" with influential people, some famous and others not. His paleoconservatism comes out in his interactions with his students at Elizabethtown College. Their ignorance, typical of their generation, dismays him. They know virtually nothing about Western civilization except its reputation, altogether counterfactual, for the worst imaginable oppression of of women, nonwhites, Jews, homosexuals, etc. The author's most consequential encounters were with his father, Andrew Gottfried, an interwar Jewish refugee from Hungary. Though the Gottfried family lost members to Nazi genocide, the elder Gottfried proudly refused to wallow in feelings of Jewish victimization. This principled aversion to self-pity, whether in oneself or others, passed from father to son. It is typically paleoconservative. Readers will be fascinated by Gottfried's involved and formative experiences with such notable personages as Richard Nixon, Herbert Marcuse, Pat Buchanan, Sam Francis, and Russell Kirk. Sparkling acoounts of "encounters" with these and others less well known take up much of the book. This isn't in any way an autobiography written for fellow Jewish intellectuals. Gottfried comes across, in his own words, as "a Hebrew rather than a Rabbinic Jew or a passionate Zionist." His involvement with his own ethnicity throws light on what it means to be paleoconservative.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Intellectual Tour de Force,
This review is from: Encounters: My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers (Hardcover)
This autobiographical work revolves around Paul Gottfried's personal encounters with other significant figures rather than focusing on himself, as he contends that the "stimulating relations I have formed over the years should interest my readers more than my undistinguished professional life." (p. ix) Gottfried's standard of judgment is rather high here since he has authored numerous scholarly books and is generally considered the leading intellectual figure of the paleoconservative movement, and that his scholarly achievements took place while raising five children and confronting the tragic death of his first wife from cancer.
Although Gottfried devotes considerable attention to his father, a Hungarian-Jewish immigrant who became a successful businessman and local civic leader (whom Gottfried regards as more successful than himself), his book primarily dwells on various intellectual figures of diverse ideological hues, including the anarcho-libertarian Murray Rothbard; right-wing populist Samuel Francis; Catholic rightist Thomas Molnar; conservatives, Russell Kirk, John Lukacs, Robert Nisbet, Peter Stanlis, M. E. Bradford, and Will Herberg; Marxists Eugene Genovese, Paul Piccone and Herbert Marcuse. As someone who might seem as an outlier in this group, he also includes former President Richard Nixon, whom Gottfried shows to be a deep thinker. Moreover, it might be news to many readers of Gottfried's political articles that he would have close intellectual associates on the left, which exemplifies both his broadmindedness and that of these particular leftists. Gottfried mainly discusses these individuals in separate vignettes, which he weaves together into a coherent whole. The unifying trait of this ideologically diverse group is that they were all substantial thinkers with independent minds who eschewed the shallow politically correct cant and careerism that has characterized both the liberal and conservative establishments and reigns supreme in the modern American academy. These individuals were essentially non-conformists and outsiders like Gottfried himself. Gottfried points out that even the leftists under study expressed views that were quite contrary to the reigning left-liberal hegemony and, in fact, had rightist implications. For example, he devotes an entire chapter (more than he devotes to any other intellectual figure) explaining his attraction to Herbert Marcuse, the Marxist Frankfort School philosopher, whom Gottfried studied under at Yale University just prior to Marcuse's becoming the philosophical guru of the "New Left." While never accepting the content of Marcuse's political or social views--the "polypomorphous sex" that would allegedly exist in the Marxist Communist utopia--Gottfried has made use of Marcuse's (and the Frankfort School's) critical methodology to unmask the hegemonical power of the left, which, of course, was the polar opposite of the author's intent. Gottfried's treatment of Marcuse is not unique. Although he is favorably disposed to all the intellectual figures covered, he provides trenchant critiques of their ideas and his portraits are far from being hagiographic. Gottfried provides insightful comments not only on ideas but on personalities, which are often strikingly different from the conventional ones. For example, Gottfried points out that Nixon was a Hobbesian realist who believed it the role of statecraft to restrain the violent potentialities of mankind, though he concomitantly saw the vital need to appeal to American idealism to gain the necessary public support for policy. Gottfried also illustrates that the private Nixon was an accomplished raconteur, quite in contrast to his stuffy, straight-laced public persona. With its novel insights, the book provides a major contribution to understanding the social and political ideas of the latter part of the twentieth century. Written in a very readable style, and interspersed with enough human (and sometimes all-too human) interest episodes, the book should appeal to the educated layperson as well as the academic specialist. From a scholarly perspective, however, it is too bad that the work was limited to 220 pages, since many of Gottfried's novel insights deserve much more attention. Perhaps, he can further develop these in a future sequel.
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