Paul Edward Gottfried (born November 21, 1941) is an American paleoconservative political philosopher, historian, and writer. He is a former Professor of Humanities at 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.
Gottfried helped coin the terms paleoconservative in 1986 and alternative right (with Richard Spencer) in 2008. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has described him as a "far-right thinker" and characterizes the H.L. Mencken Club, which he founded, as a white nationalist group. Although noted for working with far-right and alt-right groups and figures, he has said that he does "not want to be in the same camp with white nationalists" or associated with pro-Nazis, "as somebody whose family barely escaped from the Nazis in the '30s".