Encounters is, like its author, modest and good-natured. After a chapter on his family background, followed by another one offering a very brief autobiography, Gottfried gets down to the main business: his acquaintance with 16 intellectuals of widely varying prominence in later-20th-century political philosophy. The names range from indisputably Old Right (Russell Kirk, Murray Rothbard), through more idiosyncratic types (Will Herberg, John Lukacs), to some who defy classification (Herbert Marcuse, Paul Piccone — neither of whom, I note, appears in the ISI’s encyclopedia of American conservatism).

The overall tone of the book is elegiac, and not only because most of Gottfried’s subjects — eleven of the 16 — are dead. Gottfried describes himself as “an author who has been asked, ‘Do you give out suicide razors with your books?’” . . . The Old Right was of course the losing side in the conservative wars of the 1980s. Thirsting for righteousness is all very well, but losing is always and unavoidably a melancholy business. . . .

Gottfried nurses little hope for the future of conservatism. As good-natured as he is, currents of disillusion and despair run through Encounters. . . . He believes . . . that American conservatism has no social base; and this belief has come upon him only after years of observation and reflection. . . .

The future looks dark indeed; and as dark as it looks to a dilettante like me, it must look darker yet to someone who takes the life of the mind as seriously as Paul Gottfried does. How intensely intellectual the Old Right is! If you haven’t read your Aristotle in the original Greek, these guys can sometimes be hard to follow.

In today’s political circumstances they are of course perfectly irrelevant. Is there any case to be made for paleoconservatism as a long-term investment? There is, although the case rests on deeply pessimistic premises.

It may be that the Old Right will come into its inheritance at last 20 or 30 years from now, in one of the little fragment nations that will emerge when corruption, fiscal incompetence, demographic idiocy, educational romanticism, willful scientific ignorance, ethnic warfare, and missionary imperialism have finally destroyed the United States of America.

In "Encounters: My Life With Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers," the Elizabethtown College history professor and Lancaster New Era editorial page columnist says his life, like the popular antique steam engine chugging through Amish country, "has gone nowhere in particular but has been nonetheless packed with fascinating encounters."

Some have been more frustrating than fascinating, the reader discerns as the author recalls the complicated relationships he's had with mentors, colleagues and adversaries of differing sociopolitical stripes — some of them amounting to cows on the tracks.