Encounters: My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers, by Paul E. Gottfried; ISI Books, 2009, US$28.

An American reviewer of this book wrote: “The future looks dark indeed, and as dark as it looks to a dilettante like me, it must look darker yet to someone who takes the life of the mind as seriously as Paul Gottfried does.” Few books could illustrate as sharply as this one does how we can be both helped and hindered by “the life of the mind”.

Gottfried is a professor in political science whose expertise runs to such baleful topics as Marxism, multiculturalism, and the rise of the managerial elites. But he is best known as a combatant in the “conservative wars” of recent decades. It was he who named the two sides the “neocons” and the “paleocons”, and the jacket of this book calls him “America’s leading paleoconservative intellectual”. The “paleo” persuasion is also known as the Old Right, or these days as the Alternative Right.

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Conservatism in America: Making Sense

of the American Right,

by Paul Edward Gottfried;

Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007, US$39.95.

This book can be read as the tale of a tremendous irony—how a false notion that led a movement and a whole superpower astray became in the end the plain truth.

Author of many works on intellectual history, Professor Gottfried has taken part in the struggles he writes of here, and that fusion of scholarship and hard experience creates a compelling tone. He is a “paleo-conservative” but is far from pushing a mere factional line. Like most “paleos”, he is above all his own man.

Dear Matchmaking Powers up above,

It’s not for me to meddle in your plan

It used to take Four Horsemen in their day

To push the Apocalyptic ending through

Our honourable forebears lived in shacks

And would find it hard to comprehend a time

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