Review of Gottfried’s Strange Death of Marxism – Wegierski

Book Review of The Strange Death of Marxism by Paul Gottfried

By Mark Wegierski

The Strange Death of Marxism: The European Left in the New Millennium
by Paul Edward Gottfried
Columbia, MO and London University of Missouri Press
154 pages, $31.00

 

Professor Paul Edward Gottfried, who teaches at Elizabethtown College, Pennsylvania, is one of the leading American “paleoconservative” theorists and, indeed, has been credited with coining the term. The central idea of most of his earlier books, such as After Liberalism Mass Democracy in the Managerial State (Princeton University Press, 1999) and Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt (University of Missouri Press, 2002), is that there has now arisen in Western societies, a “managerial-therapeutic regime” which combines the soulless economic conservatism of big business with the distribution of resources to “politically-correct” interest groups, with coercive “therapy” for recalcitrants. Gottfried has argued that “the regime” has subverted the more authentic meanings of both the Left and the Right.

In The Strange Death of Marxism, he examines the political transformation from old-style Communist Parties to the “post-Marxist” Left. He offers critical summaries of the thought of such figures as Louis Althusser and the various members of the Frankfurt School, such as Theodore Adorno, Herbert Marcuse and Jurgen Habermas. Looking at the French and Italian Communist parties, Gottfried notes that while their political rhetoric often embraced questionable notions about the Soviet Union, the social profile of their membership was extremely conservative. As far as the Frankfurt School, Prof. Gottfried does note the unusual interpretation which Paul Piccone, the editor of Telos, a scholarly journal of eclectic social and cultural philosophy, gives to those theorists, as actually being critics of the managerial-therapeutic regime. However, Gottfried tends to see them as originators of some of the most pernicious ideas underlying the current-day system, especially the theory of the so-called “authoritarian personality.” At its sharpest, Gottfried argues, this theory endeavors to categorize social outlooks deemed politically incorrect as “psychological aberrations” requiring semi-coercive “therapy” if it is discovered in an individual and of the mass indoctrination of society through mass media and mass education to combat them at the collective level. It lays the groundwork for “soft totalitarianism.”

Where Gottfried significantly differs from most conventional current-day conservatives is his identification of America as the main originator of this “soft totalitarianism.” According to Gottfried, it initially got underway in Europe with the “re-education” of Germany in the aftermath of World War II where, he argues, traditionalist conservatism and nationalism was just as severely dealt with as Nazism. Indeed, conservative anti-Nazis were seen as suspect by the American authorities, whereas many former Nazis who eagerly adopted “liberal democracy” were embraced by the Americans. Gottfried points out the surprising Nazi past of some of today’s leading theorists of the politically-correct German Left.

Gottfried argues that trends such as multiculturalism, feminism, and gay rights, had indeed emerged in the United States earlier than in Europe, and that today, the differences between the American and EU “regimes” are minimal. He also points to the largely similar, globalization visions of both American democracy-boosters such as Francis Fukuyama, and of the typical left-wingers in Europe, who claim to be critics of globalization.

Following the arguments of Christopher Lasch, Gottfried expresses praise for the old-style socialist working-class-based parties. “The working class consciousness that had marked the socialist past, and was connected sociologically to profoundly conservative attitudes, has ceased to count” (144).

However, it may be possible that Prof. Gottfried’s picture of the Left is overdrawn in the case of some European countries. Is the entire Left today really so abjectly self-hating in regard to their own nationality, and so contemptuous of family life and religion? Does a belief in social justice for working people necessarily entail the adoption of the current-day agenda of multiculturalism and “alternative lifestyles”?

Prof. Gottfried argues that the pre-1960s Left in such countries as Canada, Britain, and the United States, would have found most of the concerns of the post-Sixties’ Left of little importance or in fact repugnant. Indeed, while ferociously fighting for its vision of social justice and equality for the working majority, it usually considered notions of family, nation, and religion as a “pre-political” part of human existence, which it had no desire to alter. Some of the leading figures of this patriotic, pro-family Left may include William Morris, Jack London, George Orwell, Christopher Lasch, and the Canadian political theorist Eugene Forsey.

It may be noted that the trend in many current-day Western societies is to adopt both social liberalism and economic conservatism (the latter usually called “neo-liberalism” in Europe). For example, the Liberal government in Canada in the 1990s carried out such austerity measures against the broad mass of the Canadian public as not rescinding the Goods and Services Tax (the Canadian equivalent of a VAT), as they had explicitly promised to do; massively cutting the benefits available under Unemployment Insurance; massively increasing the contributions required for the Canada Pension Plan; and introducing drawbacks on the Old Age Pension and Old Age tax-exemption. The Liberal government has tended to cut those benefits available to the broad mass of the population as a whole while at the same, increasing funding to special-interest groups whether business cronies or “rainbow-coalition” members. At the same time, it has maintained one of the highest levels of immigration of any country today.

Prof. Gottfried unfortunately does not devote too much attention to the role of technology, mass-media, consumerism, and pop-culture in ushering in our near-dystopic age. Indeed, the “lived cultural reality” for many people in Western societies is American pop-culture, which tends to amplify socially-liberal, consumerist/consumptionist, and antinomian attitudes, especially among the young. Gottfried could have identified some of the varied resistance to hypermodernity not only in old-fashioned social democracy, but also in such tendencies as ecology and neo-mysticism (typified by such figures as C.G. Jung, Joseph Campbell, and Ken Wilber).

It is also important to consider that for most people in Western societies today, the mark of the regime’s success is that it offers very high levels of affluence and prosperity. This is far different from the situation in East-Central Europe, where it could be argued that the post-Communist transition has engendered widespread and deepening pauperization of large sectors of the populace. It is not often considered that it is only in a very homogenous society that such huge disparities of wealth and poverty can be maintained without some kind of violent situation arising. One dreads to imagine what would happen in Canada were there to be a major economic downturn. All the heterogeneous groups that have arrived in Canada in the last thirty years or so, would be at each other’s and the fading majority’s throats. It could easily develop into events similar to those seen in France recently.

The central point to be made is that Soviet Communism, despite its various radical and murderous elements, may have indeed been surpassed by today’s post-Western left-liberalism in its sheer destructive-ness and antinomianism toward more traditional societies. It could be argued that, in the end, it is hard to imagine anything more corrosive and destructive to Western society than policies of aggressive multiculturalism and mass, dissimilar immigration; and of antinomian and deconstructive art, ideas, attitudes and lifestyles. It is the abject, self-hating extremes of white Westerners, and the extreme social liberalism of current-day society as well as the triumph of economic conservatism which many of the old-fashioned social democrats would find repugnant.

 

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Wegierski, Mark. “Book Review of ‘The Strange D-eath of Marxism’ by Paul Gottfried.” The Social Contract, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Spring 2006), pp. 218-220. <http://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc1603/article_1403.shtml >.

Note: This book by Paul Gottfried is also available in Spanish translation as La Extrana Muerte Del Marxismo: La Izquierda Europea en el Nuevo Milenio (Madrid: Ciudadela Libros, 2007).

 

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Review of Gottfried’s Multiculturalism & Politics of Guilt – Wegierski

Book Review of Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt by Paul Gottfried

By Mark Wegierski

Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Toward a Secular Theocracy
by Paul Edward Gottfried
Columbia (MO) and London: University of Missouri Press
158 pages, $29.95

 

Professor Paul Edward Gottfried, who teaches at Elizabethtown College, Pennsylvania, here continues his critical and forthright analysis of “the managerial-therapeutic regime” which he began decades ago, but which was recently most trenchantly expressed in After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State (Princeton University Press, 1999) (reviewed in The Social Contract, Vol. IX, No. 4 (Summer 1999), pp. 274-276). The title of Gottfried’s new book is an ironic reference to Multiculturalism and The Politics of Recognition (an essay by Charles Taylor, with commentary by Amy Gutmann, Editor; Steven C. Rockefeller; Michael Walzer; Susan Wolf) (Princeton University Press, 1992). This work by Charles Taylor, et al., which represents the “official” view of multiculturalism at the very heights of current-day political theory, was brought out in a revised edition by Princeton University Press in 1994, with new commentary by K. Anthony Appiah, and Jurgen Habermas (edited and introduced by Amy Gutmann). (It is possible that there have been newer and expanded editions of the collection in the interval.) Professor Gottfried may be signaling by the choice of his title that his work offers a sharp critique of multiculturalism — and careful explication of what it “really” represents, beyond all the hazy rhetoric and abstract theorizing of “official” political theory and “official” political discourse.

Other books by Gottfried include: Conservative Millenarians: The Romantic Experience in Bavaria (1979); The Search for Historical Meaning: Hegel and the Postwar American Right (1986); the two editions of The Conservative Movement (1988 and 1993, the former co-written with Thomas Fleming, editor of Chronicles magazine), on postwar American conservatism; as well as Carl Schmitt Politics and Theory, a highly nuanced work about the controversial yet often acute German right-wing theorist.

Today Paul Gottfried is probably the leading political theorist of the American “paleo-conservative” grouping (in fact, he is credited with coining that term). He has been a senior editor of The World & I, and is currently a senior editor at Telos, a journal of eclectic political criticism, and a contributing editor to Humanitas and Chronicles.

Prof. Gottfried has also paid a real price for his forthright political views, most notably being rejected from a major appointment to the Catholic University of America (Washington, D.C.). Ironically, this appointment was opposed more strenuously by neoconservatives (who often complain about this kind of academic exclusion), than by left-liberals. Considering that Gottfried may have supervised dozens of Ph.D. and M.A. students at Catholic University (as opposed to Elizabethtown, which lacks a significant graduate program), his deselection from CUA could be seen not only as an attack on him, but as an attempt to crush an entire intellectual tendency.

Reading Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt, one has the feeling that the author is writing what he wants to write, leaving aside excessively tactical considerations. In an age in which many so-called conservatives are deathly afraid of stating their views openly, or of going beyond any but the mildest critiques of current-day society, Gottfried’s book is highly refreshing.

The work is high-level political theory, grounded in an intimate knowledge of both the classics and new currents of political philosophy, as well as an acute understanding of the long history and evolution of political practice. Gottfried has a command of numerous languages, including Ancient Greek, Latin, German, French, Italian and Polish. This is something which is especially rare among most North American scholars and policy “experts” — the former who often deliberately misportray the classics and most of history, and the latter who often give ignorant lectures to countries abroad as to the internal politics and arrangements they should follow.

The book includes Acknowledgments (pp. ix-x), sometimes extensive footnotes, and an index (pp. 151-158). It begins with an excellent Introduction, “From the Managerial to the Therapeutic State” (pp. 1-16). Contrasting Europe and America, Gottfried says that while America may seem economically freer (with significantly lower taxes), its therapeutic regime is in many ways as advanced as that in Europe.

We are expected to take for granted, and view as beyond critical discussion, ‘universal nations,’ ‘open communities,’ ‘homosexual family units,’ and ‘pluralistic cultures.’… These things thrive because of government agencies, the judiciary, and ‘public’ education. They represent what democracy as public administration holds up as the happy alternative to how things used to be. And if the state moves boldly to ban insensitivity, that may be necessary to avoid mass backsliding into life ‘before the Sixties’ (pp. 4-5).

His first chapter, “The Death of Socialism?” (pp. 17-38), is a brilliant dissection of the politics and economics of the current-day period. Gottfried argues that old-fashioned social democracy, and even the Communist parties (for example, in Italy) and regimes, were, to a large extent, socially-conservative. The embrace by left-wing parties of current-day capitalism (along with multiculturalism, of course) has made them objectively “less” rather than “more” conservative. Gottfried also skewers capitalism as espoused by, for example, Virginia Postrel

Postrel’s eagerness to eradicate tradition and established community is so extreme that even a center-left reviewer writing in the New Republic finds her neophilia to be one of the ‘best arguments for conservatism with which I am familiar.’… Postrel’s enthusiasms are a perfect example of democratic capitalist boosterism, characterized by support for open borders, the mixing of peoples and races, and a continuing redefinition of nations and cultures… Postrel’s vision does not conflict with the consuming quest to change society in a progressive way pursued by social democrats, save for her difference with them over the degree of government intervention useful for the economy… Their quarrel with the other side is not about abolishing the past but about the best means to bring that about. (pp. 27-28)

Professor Gottfried is clearly impressed with certain aspects of the Left tradition of the West. Some of the most prominent of these social conservatives of the Left include William Morris, George Orwell, Jack London, and Christopher Lasch (who considered himself a social democrat). Gottfried has also closely studied the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, a curiously bivalent tradition which gave rise to both the theory of “the authoritarian personality” (which is one of the main props of the managerial-therapeutic regime), as well as some of the most cutting-edge critiques of the system.

Chapter 2, “Religious Foundations of the Managerial Therapeutic State” (pp. 39-70) looks at some possible origins of the seemingly all-pervasive current-day viewpoints. It would be too simple to say that it is all the result of current-day conditioning and propaganda. Gottfried locates one of the major sources of these outlooks in James Kurth’s view of the so-called “Protestant deformation” (p. 10). Gottfried cites Kurth:

All religions are unique, but Protestantism is more unique than all others. No other is so critical of hierarchy and community, or of traditions and customs that go with them. At its doctrinal base Protestantism is anti-hierarchy and anti-community. (p. 10)

Gottfried would argue that, although there may be many traditionalist and conservative Protestants, the so-called “mainline” Protestant denominations in the United States tend very heavily in directions supportive of the regime. Gottfried writes “Basic for American religious life is the fusion of a victim-centered feminism with the Protestant framework of sin and redemption” (p. 56). According to Gottfried, it is the broad mass of self-hating, guilt-driven WASPs in America who tend to valorize all the accredited minority claims, and promote mass, dissimilar immigration, as well as neutralize and suppress the resistance to the managerial-therapeutic regime from more conservative WASPs and many Catholic and Orthodox Christian white ethnics.

These American liberal Protestant outlooks have spread into Europe, where the more Protestant countries, such as Germany, tend to be further along the road of coercive political-correctness. Gottfried reveals the startling fact that “…[m]ore Germans are now languishing in prison for expressing (unprogressive or insensitive) opinions than there were in East Germany before the fall of the Communist regime” (p. 44).

Chapter 3, “The Managerial as Therapeutic State” (pp. 71-100), is a very sharp analysis of the various control-mechanisms of the current-day regime. In Gottfried’s analysis, it looks like an ultra-totalitarian system (in the normative rather than openly-violent sense), intimately concerned with the innermost thoughts of its “subject-citizens,” and consigning particularly troublesome dissenters to coercive “therapy.” Gottfried argues that many high-ranking political, legal, and feminist theorists, such as Richard Rorty, Stanley Fish, and Jurgen Habermas, have summarily dispensed with freedom of speech, the right to free association, religious freedom (for Christians), and freedom of conscience, as even purely theoretical requirements for their vision of “liberal” polity.

“A Sensitized World” (chapter four, pp. 101-117) points to the fact that the Western managerial-therapeutic regimes are now embarking upon global, “missionizing” projects. Professor Gottfried leaves it an open question whether non-Western societies, which are often filled with a highly ferocious traditionalism, are now going to be increasingly subject to such projects, or if Third World traditionalism will by some strange process continue to be valorized by self-hating Westerners. The heavily pervasive pop-culture of America is already functioning as an icebreaker for various aspects of current-day Western ideas, far ahead of possible political realignments in non-Western traditional societies.

Chapter 5, “Whither the Populist Right” (pp. 118-130) does not hold out much hope for these tendencies of resistance to the managerial-therapeutic regime. Gottfried decisively refutes the notion that these tendencies can be considered “far right” or “neo-fascist”:

It must…be asked if what European populist leaders famously demand — referenda, an end to welfare burdens, and more government accountability over immigration — are intrinsically ‘illiberal.’ However offensive they may be to the journalistic Left, these stands do invoke a recognizably liberal principle, the consent of citizens… The confrontation that has erupted is not between liberals and antiliberals but between two postliberal concepts of democracy, one, managerial-multicultural, and the other, plebiscitary national or regional. (p.122)

In the Conclusion, “A Secular Theocracy” (pp. 131-149), Gottfried reiterates the point about the all-pervasiveness of this current-day “soft totalitarianism” (p. 138). He foresees as main challenges to the regime either economic difficulties, or the frictions arising out of excessive, mass, dissimilar immigration. The managerial-therapeutic regime has enjoyed great support because economic prosperity (and the cornucopia of government benefits for large sectors of society), as well as what seems like a highly attractive cult of sexual and personal pleasure, are seen as the regime’s successes, in most people’s minds. However, it is possible that an over-extended welfare state will, at some point, have to significantly reduce benefits, and those to whom it reduces benefits first are highly likely to be those who lack the status of current-day victim groups (or those groupings who are considered decidedly less victimized than others). At the same time, the current-day New Class elites grossly underestimate the transformative and revolutionary potential of a dissimilar immigration so huge that it threatens to displace the native-born majority. What will happen if former majorities become ever-smaller minorities, while the new majorities will ever more insistently press their claims? Presumably, the regime will try to maintain prosperity by the upholding, as far as possible, of current-day capitalism (probably tactically accepting much of what is called “fiscal conservatism” today), combined with even more thoroughgoing efforts at conditioning and suppression of dissent.

Gottfried’s book is rather terse, and could have devoted more attention to an analysis of current-day capitalism, consumptionism, and a closer look at how the mass media works upon the average person (in its main self-designated functions of advertising, entertainment, and information). It is also possible that some of the ultimate roots of the evolution of the managerial-therapeutic regime lie in the very fact of the ever-accelerating advance of capitalism and technology. For many people today, that life of comfort, pleasure, and lifestyle freedoms apparently assured by the regime is more germane in their assent to it, than the strictures of political-correctness. Indeed, the broad masses are clearly far less interested in political-correctness than the New Class cadres, although the latter, of course, usually live lives of comparatively even greater material comfort. (One is reminded of that socio-economic category identified by David Brooks: “bobos” or “bourgeois bohemians.”)

Given the intertwining of the regime with capitalist growth — which is clearly ecologically unsustainable over the long term — more attention should have been paid in the book to possible resistance to the regime from such tendencies as ecology/environmentalism, neo-mysticism (such as that represented by Joseph Campbell and C.G. Jung), and the anti-globalization movements. There could have been more space given to such diverse figures as Ralph Nader, Noam Chomsky, the Mexico-based ecological critic Ivan Illich, G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, J.R.R. Tolkien, Peter Augustine Lawler (author of Postmodernism Rightly Understood The Return to Realism in American Thought, among other works), agrarian philosopher Wendell Berry, Camille Paglia, and Canadian traditionalist philosopher George Parkin Grant. There could have been some attempt to engage with the more positive aspects of communitarian political theory, and to look at such thinkers as, for example, British political theorist (formerly at Oxford, now at the London School of Economics) John Gray, and Jean Bethke Elshtain. Giving the work a more broadly cultural, ecological, technoskeptical, and communitarian focus might have helpfully increased its possible appeal without diluting its central message.

As it stands, the book is brilliantly and acutely political, but perhaps lacks a certain cultural depth. In a way it mirrors the writing of Hobbes (who is clearly one of the main inspirations of Carl Schmitt, Paul Gottfried, and James Burnham(1) — a thinker who has also clearly inspired Gottfried). Hobbes brought a very sharp precision to political philosophy, but the mechanistic qualities of his view of human nature had deconstructive effects. Professor Gottfried has given us the razor-sharp theory; the “poetry” of resistance to the managerial-therapeutic regime (unless one semi-anachronistically chooses to consider as such some of the prescient forebodings of Nietzsche) has yet to be written.

NOTE

1. James Burnham’s seminal work is The Managerial Revolution (1941). Burnham’s Suicide of the West (1964) describes various aspects of self-hatred and guilt massively undermining Western elites and societies. Burnham began his writing career on the Left, and was considered “Trotsky’s most brilliant disciple.” Much of Burnham’s writing is focused on an analysis of power and its exercise in inter- and intra-societal relations. George Orwell paid Burnham a curiously ironic compliment by apparently basing on Burnham his character “O’Brien,” the Grand Inquisitor-like figure, in 1984.

 

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Wegierski, Mark. “Book Review of ‘Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt’ by Paul Gottfried.” The Social Contract, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Winter 2002-2003), pp. 144-147. < http://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc1302/article_1136.shtml >.

Note: This book by Paul Gottfried is also available in German translation as Multikulturalismus und die Politik der Schuld: Unterwegs zum Manipulativen Staat? (Graz: Ares-Verlag, 2004).

 

Review of Gottfried’s After Liberalism – Wegierski

Book Review of After Liberalism by Paul Gottfried

By By Mark Wegierski

After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State
by Paul Edward Gottfried
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
200 pages, $27.95

 

Professor Paul Edward Gottfried, who teaches at Elizabethtown College, Pennsylvania, is a longstanding veteran of the raging political and culture wars in America. His other books include, Conservative Millenarians The Romantic Experience in Bavaria (1979), a work which attests to his early-found miter in complex intellectual history; The Search for Historical Meaning Hegel and the Postwar American Right (1986), a work which combines his interests in Continental European political theory and American right-wing politics; the two editions of The Conservative Movement (1988 and 1993) on postwar American conservatism; as well as Carl Schmitt Politics and Theory (1990), a highly nuanced work about the controversial yet often acute German right-wing theorist. Paul Gottfried is today probably the leading political theorist of the so-called “paleoconservative” grouping (in fact, he is credited with coining that term), and could be called one of the leading “white generals” in the American “counterrevolution.” He has been a senior editor of The World & I, and is currently a senior editor at Telos, a scholarly journal of eclectic political criticism, and a contri-buting editor to Humanitas as well as Chronicles. He is also editor-in-chief of This World. After Liberalism, which has been published by Princeton University Press as the lead title in a major new series, “New Forum Books,” presenting original scholarship focusing on the juncture of culture, law and politics.

Referencing the 1996 American election, the author relates it to the main concepts discussed in the work notably the high degree of success and seeming inevitability of managerial ideology today. As long as the current-day regime is able to guarantee material prosperity and all the attractions of consumerism, “caring,” and sexual “free expression,” it will be largely unchallengeable. Gottfried notes that capitalist economic expansion and the expansion of the welfare state have, for the last few decades, occurred at the same time.

The main idea of this book is that current-day Western societies (and especially America) have moved in a postliberal and postdemocratic direction. They have moved in the direction of a “regime” of public administration that has little in common with nineteenth-century liberalism.

Chapter One, “In Search of a Liberal Essence” moves through various historical and contemporary definitions of “liberalism,” looking at the “semantic problem” of liberalism, and examining its “continuities and discontinuities.” The conclusion is that the term “liberalism” cannot be truly applied to most current-day thinking claiming that term.

Professor Gottfried then sets out to disentangle the meanings of “Liberalism vs. Democracy.” Anti-democratic liberals (such as the nineteenth-century French statesman Francois Guizot), liberals who wished to cooperate with nationalist democracy (such as the early-twentieth-century Vilfredo Pareto), and those liberals who advanced along the main lines of progress (such as John Stuart Mill) are looked at. What emerged in the twentieth century is characterized as “the intertwining of mass democracy and public administration.”

In “Public Administration and Liberal Demo-cracy” Gottfried looks at the processes of “building the welfare state” through “the politics of socialization,” leading to the “liberal democratic model” – which is neither truly liberal nor democratic.

The author then examines the administrative “new class” and its values. “Pluralism” – as defined by the New Class – is one of the central values of the late modern regime. It is the justification for the “war against dissent” – the categorizing of persons who think differently from the New Class as bigots or hatemongers, who have to receive either “sensitivity-training” or be silenced by social ostracism, professional marginalization, substantial fines, or even jail-terms. “Pluralism” and other approaches (such as the pretense to “scientific objectivity” and the deriding of metaphysics and religion) are simply seen as tropes for the attempt to exclude and eradicate “illiberal” views in society. In the process of its triumph in most Western societies, the managerial-therapeutic regime is tending in the direction of “a world democratic empire” – since the very existence of “illiberal” regimes is seen as a challenge to the proclaimed “universality” of “liberal democratic values.”

He considers “the populist alternative” to the managerial-therapeutic regime, which ironically arises partly as a result of the dynamics of mass-democracy. This is probably the best brief analysis available in English of such tendencies as Le Pen’s Front National, the Italian Lega Nord, and the Continental European “postmodern Right” (including the Nouvelle Ecole led by Alain de Benoist).

Gottfried argues that immigration policy is a major instrument, being used to expand the power of the managerial state. Massive, dissimilar immigration is one of the most salient aspects of the managerial regime. Traditional identities are broken down even further, and enthusiastic supporters and clients of the welfare-state are gained. However, excessive immigration creates frictions that may challenge the regime. The majority population is alienated from offering benefits to those with whom they have nothing in common; Gottfried rightly notes that some sense of commonality is highly important to the welfare state. It is only natural to resist offering outright “gifts” to those with whom we have nothing in common – the notion of “universal humanity” is not satisfactory enough for most people. Perhaps there is some hope that opposition to immigration may serve as a wedge to undermine the managerial regime. On the other hand, the inflow of immigration may be massive enough that groups from outside the West with “illiberal” outlooks may come to be a majority, and at some point put an end to managerial “pluralism” and “relativism.” However, this would almost certainly mean the relegation of white Westerners to the status of pariahs in what were once their own societies.

Gottfried perhaps underplays what is likely to be the most tragic aspect of the managerial regime, and the greatest danger to the life and future of European societies – this mass, dissimilar immigration. First of all, European-descended Americans (and Canadians) are robbed of their traditional identities, so they see nothing worthwhile to preserve and fight for in terms of the continued existence of their own societies. Indeed, the managerial view seems to be that European nation-states are worthwhile mostly as receptacles for the continued existence and flourishing of those various precious minority cultures. (The visible minority population of Toronto, Canada’s largest city, has gone from less than 3 percent in 1961, to over 50 percent today. Predictably, in public one is only allowed to celebrate this shift to diversity, and to deliberate on how the needs of minorities can be better addressed by government and society.) These demographic shifts are perhaps the most radical, indelible kinds of change that can be experienced by any society.

Theoretically speaking, there could always be the chance of a cultural, intellectual, moral, or religious restoration of a society after the collapse of the ruling managerial ideology (if that society had retained its native majority), but these drastic kinds of population changes become, after a certain point, utterly irreversible. Ironically, the effects of old-fashioned social democracy on society (concerned with waging the class-struggle on behalf of the native working classes), are comparatively trivial. The managerial regime appears to be in the process of practically destroying most Western societies, in the space of no more than a century (beginning with the 1950s). What is especially frightening today is how utterly beholden most Western societies are to the values of the New Class, and how very little real opposition is actually being raised. On virtually every important front one can think of – demographic, as well as cultural, intellectual, moral, and religious – Western traditionalism has been in pell-mell retreat for decades. Indeed, Western societies might be described as in the process of being progressively accelerated to oblivion.

After Liberalism ends on a rather somber note, where the varieties of opposition to the managerial-therapeutic regime are not given much hope. The religious Right and the “archaic Right” are seen as incapable of mounting a challenge the former is seen as largely embracing the administrative state in the forlorn hope it will promote “family values” – while the latter is seen as having simply abandoned politics in favor of theological or literary forms of argument. Indeed, among the strengths of Gottfried’s book is the fact that it does not fall into archaic modes of argumentation. The intellectual Left is also seen as not offering much hope. “Any serious appraisal of the managerial regime must consider first and foremost the extent of its control – and the relative powerlessness of its critics” (p. 141).

One major criticism of the book could be that it unduly narrows the conservative and traditionalist critique of late modernity by focusing too much on early liberalism and the bourgeois spirit, thus largely excluding such tendencies as traditionalist Catholicism, organic nationalism, and such figures as Nietzsche and the anticapitalist “politics of cultural despair.” While the defense of classical liberalism and the bourgeois spirit might appear especially congenial in an Anglo-American context, organic and Nietzschean outlooks might be more evocative in Continental Europe, and might also constitute far deeper and more thoroughgoing types of critique. Indeed, perhaps all that can be achieved in late modernity is the maintenance of small but powerful niches of sharp political criticism – although one could also legitimately ask, to what final end? Some might argue that the conservative critique in late modernity should be as cultural, “fanciful,” creative-nihilist, and “utopian” as possible, dreaming of “new modes and new orders” – and focusing around Romanticism and Romantic nationalism.

After Liberalism is a very fine work, and it may indeed be the kind of book of analysis that George Orwell would have written, had he lived longer. As one reads the book, one can imagine one is reading our own world’s equivalent of Emmanuel Goldstein’s Theory and Practice of Oligarchic Collectivism. Gottfried’s highly theoretical and often sharply-phrased book could also be described as having a “right-wing Marxist” flavor to it. Indeed, it is the kind of critical book around which many future debates and discussions might well be structured.

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Wegierski, Mark. “Book Review of ‘After Liberalism’ by Paul Gottfried.” The Social Contract, Vol. 9, No. 4 (Summer 1999), pp. 274-276. Retrieved from: <http://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc0904/article_830.shtml >.