The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West
By A.J.A. Woods
Verso, 245 pages, $24.95
The conservative scholar Paul Gottfried devotes a chapter of his 2009 memoir Encounters to an unlikely mentor: Herbert Marcuse, the émigré German-Jewish philosopher and doyen of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, who taught him as a doctoral student at Yale. “Unlike my Cold War liberal professors and current PC colleagues,” Gottfried recalls, “this graying German radical thrived on debate.” In one seminar, he remembers, Marcuse recruited him to present a critique of Marx’s analysis of the 1848 Paris uprising. A vigorous confrontation of opposing views followed, after which Marcuse praised Gottfried’s “valorous efforts” and awarded him an A. “I am still embarrassed to admit,” Gottfried concludes, “that I learned true liberal intellectual exchange from a declared Marxist-Leninist.”
This fond tribute might surprise anyone broadly familiar with Gottfried’s profile. A retired history professor who edits the flagship paleoconservative magazine Chronicles, Gottfried is perhaps the right-most living American intellectual to have held a tenured position at a liberal arts college (Elizabethtown College) and to have published a sizeable corpus of scholarly works with reputable university presses. He gained wide notoriety around a decade ago for having mentored Richard Spencer and coined the term “alt-right”; last year, the dissident right publishing concern Passage Press honored his career by releasing an anthology of his writing. More recently, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts provoked controversy when he toasted Gottfried as one of the “sages of our age.”