The Search for Historical Meaning: Hegel & the Postwar American Right

by Paul Edward Gottfried

Praised by President Richard Nixon as his favorite read for 1987, The Search for Historical Meaning presents the postwar American conservative movement against a background of ideas with which it has only rarely been identified. This important book―updated with a new preface―examines the influence of Hegelian concepts on the historical attitudes and cultural judgments of prominent postwar conservatives who, because of their concern with personal freedom as a political and ontological value, denounced Hegel while ascribing their own Hegelian ideas to less offensive sources. Gottfried argues that the lack of a true historical perspective was a serious defect in the postwar American conservative movement, and it grew worse in the years that followed. Essential reading for conservative thinkers, political philosophers, and American political historians, The Search for Historical Meaning concludes with an incisive examination of the American conservative movement that has implications for today.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, History

195 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 1986

About the author

Paul Edward Gottfried is an American paleoconservative political philosopher, historian, and writer. He is a former Professor of Humanities at Swarthmore College and Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. He is editor-in-chief of the paleoconservative magazine Chronicles. He is an associated scholar at the Mises Institute, a libertarian think tank, and the US correspondent of Nouvelle École, a Nouvelle Droite journal.

Reviews

[Jared · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strauss gives historicism a bad name, Frank Meyer was a Hegelian, and the recognition of our place in a historical past in necessary for political mobilization, left and right, even if the intellectual right gave up historical justification and Burkean conservatism following Strauss. Intriguing analysis for both the theoretical content and the intellectual history.

[Sean · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gottfried is an eminently fair, superlative intellectual historian who seamlessly weaves together complex histories and thinkers to tell a compelling (and persuasive) narrative.

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Been wanting to read this for years but there’s no ebook edition. An exploration of the mostly European emigres and ex-communists who influenced the postwar conservative movement by an at least indirect familiarity with Hegelian historicist thinking. Gottfried thinks they marshaled such thinking to defend western Christian bourgeois civilization as opposed to Marxist and fascist uses of Hegel but Straussian thought predominated over time trying to relate to what Gottfried thinks is a contrived view of tradition, but did so with the overt influence of less offensive thinkers to the Anglo-American mind. Gottfried himself seems attracted more to the realist than idealist aspects of historicism of how modern ideals of liberty and equality are incarnated in time. Hegel’s influence is discussed in Karl Wittfogel’s hydraulic hypothesis for the Oriental despotism of Soviet communism, James Burnham’s thesis of the managerial revolution for the post-constitutional bureaucratic despotism of liberal society, Eric Voegelin’s influence from Kant for the guiding influence of ideas on history, Friedrich Hayek’s anti-positivist evolutionism and Russell Kirk’s Burkeanism for a defense of Western tradition without mechanical optimism or Spenglerian pessimism.