While reading Paul Gottfried’s refrain on the politics of guilt last week I was again struck by the degree of continuity in his analytical judgments and concerns over the length of his career. From his earliest writings Paul has insisted on giving historical subjects authentically historical treatment—that is, by examining them contextually rather than in relation to self-contained egalitarian standards that are difficult to relate to social and political reality. This combined with contrarian feistiness has led him to repeatedly challenge the validity of liberal/neocon historiography, which displays a level of present-mindedness truly unique the history of thought. As a group today’s opinion elite proves unable to step outside of its own clustered worldview in order to examine it critically; thoughtful doubt about basic issues and concerns is forbidden. Paul’s habit—that of suggesting that reactionary resistance on the part of the old WASP elite to feminism and racial egalitarianism “seems to have been based on at least partly defensible beliefs about the cultural preconditions for constitutional government”—is for him old hat. Old also is the reluctance by ideological opponents to engage Paul’s analysis on equal footing. The response his scholarship merits simply cannot be found, in any source of literature. The basic questions he and other anti-liberal thinkers raise cannot be answered in terms of current orthodoxy and so must be swept under the rug. Of course this is no hard task given the imbalance in resources that exists between the real Right and its targets, a situation that is unlikely to change in the near term.
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More on the Politics of Guilt
While reading Paul Gottfried’s refrain on the politics of guilt last week I was again struck by the degree of continuity in his analytical judgments and concerns over the length of … [Read More]
Posted by Evan McLaren on August 31, 2009
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