A. James Gregor
Encyclopedia
A. James Gregor is a Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley
who is well known for his research on fascism
, Marxism
, and national security. According to Griffin (2000), Gregor was part of a movement of young scholars in the 1960s who rejected the traditional interpretation of fascism as an ideologically empty, reactionary, antimodern dead end. He demonstrated the major debt Italian Fascism owed to European ideological currents in sociology and political theory. Gregor stressed fascism's coherence as a serious theory of state and society, and argued that it played a revolutionary and modernizing role in European history. His theory of generic fascism portrayed it as a form of "developmental dictatorship." Gregor wrote an influential early comprehensive survey of existing theoretical models of fascism.
. His father, Antonio, was a machine operator, factory worker and anarchist. During World War II, his mother, an Italian citizen who had never taken American citizenship, was classified as an "enemy alien".
Gregor graduated from Columbia University
in 1952 and thereafter served as a high school social science teacher. During this period he commenced publishing articles in political journals on both the "Right" (The European
) and the "Left" (Science and Society and Studies on the Left
). In 1958 his writing appeared in an academic journal for the first time with "The Logic of Race Classification" published in Genus, a journal edited by Corrado Gini
, a leading Italian sociologist. Gregor's article was a defense of Gini's theories and he subsequently became a friend and collaborator of Gini's until Gini's death in 1965.
Gregor returned to Columbia for post-graduate work in the late 1950s.
and received his PhD from Columbia in 1961 with his dissertation on Giovanni Gentile
. Gregor became assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Hawaii
from 1961 to 1964. Gregor joined the University of California at Berkeley in 1967 where he remains.
Gregor was also an opponent of the United States Supreme Court
's Brown v. Board of Education
decision ending the practice of racial segregation in American schools. In recent years, Gregor has claimed that he supports desegregation in every respect, and that he merely opposed the use of the judicial branch's powers to engineer change. Instead, Gregor has argued that desegregation should have occurred through legislative action, witnessed in the Civil Rights laws that Congress passed in the years thereafter. According to Gregor, his primary concern with Brown lies in the threat of a judicial branch overstepping its constitutional powers.
Idus A. Newby's book Challenge to the Court: Social Scientists and the Defense of Segregation, 1954-1966 published in 1967 contains an extensive discussion of Gregor's works on race, which, Newby asserts, were among the main institutional centers of scientific racism
in the 1960s. Nearly half of the book is a response by Gregor, in which he vehemently denies Newby's allegations that he is a racist or adopts a particular perspective on race. Gregor has regularly asserted that the intellectual climate that prevails prevents serious discussions about race, ethnicity and their relationship to genetics.
Gregor has argued that scholars are very far from a consensus on what fascism really is, noting that "Almost every specialist has his own interpretation." Gregor limits the genuine article to Mussolini's Italy.
He has argued that apart from the superficial old-fashioned Marxist rhetoric, Marxist movements of the twentieth century, discarded Marx and Engels and instead in practice adopted theoretical categories and political methods much like those of Mussolini.
After undertaking numerous case studies of right-wing movements in recent decades, including European movements (Jean-Marie Le Pen's Front National (NF) and Germany's Republikaner Partei (REP)), Islamic jihadis, Hindu nationalists, black nationalists, and post-Mao Chinese nationalists, Gregor concludes there is little real neofascism in the world today. Thus he believes Fascism died in World War II.
In the 1960s, Gregor held numerous workshops and lectures to convince policymakers and academics of the exigencies of U.S. support for securing victory over North Vietnam. Gregor has continued to demonstrate an interest in maintaining anti-Communist and U.S. interests in Southeast Asia. During the 1970s and '80s, in what he understood to be U.S. interests, Gregor served as an uncompensated advisor to Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos
.
He has also conducted inquiries into American security issues in Asia particularly in reference to Sino-American relations in the form of his 1986 book The China Connection: U.S. Policy and the People's Republic of China and his 1987 follow-up, Arming the Dragon: U.S. Security Ties with the People's Republic of China. In 1989 he wrote In the Shadow of Giants: The Major Powers and the Security of Southeast Asia. As result of his work, Gregor was named to the Oppenheimer Chair of Warfighting Strategy 1996–1997 at the Marine Corps University in Quantico. In recent years he has translated a major political essay written by the Italian Fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile
into English together with a commentary on Gentile's political thought. Until his recent retirement in 2009 he taught a popular series of political science courses on revolutionary change, Marxism, and Fascism at UC Berkeley. As of 2011, Gregor is working on his new book on Political Religion.
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
who is well known for his research on fascism
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
, Marxism
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
, and national security. According to Griffin (2000), Gregor was part of a movement of young scholars in the 1960s who rejected the traditional interpretation of fascism as an ideologically empty, reactionary, antimodern dead end. He demonstrated the major debt Italian Fascism owed to European ideological currents in sociology and political theory. Gregor stressed fascism's coherence as a serious theory of state and society, and argued that it played a revolutionary and modernizing role in European history. His theory of generic fascism portrayed it as a form of "developmental dictatorship." Gregor wrote an influential early comprehensive survey of existing theoretical models of fascism.
Early life
He was born Anthony Gimigliano in New York CityNew York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
. His father, Antonio, was a machine operator, factory worker and anarchist. During World War II, his mother, an Italian citizen who had never taken American citizenship, was classified as an "enemy alien".
Gregor graduated from Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
in 1952 and thereafter served as a high school social science teacher. During this period he commenced publishing articles in political journals on both the "Right" (The European
The European (magazine)
The European was a privately circulated far-right cultural and political magazine that was published between 1953 and 1959. During this tenure, it was edited by Diana Mosley...
) and the "Left" (Science and Society and Studies on the Left
Studies on the Left
Studies on the Left was a journal of New Left radicalism in the United States published between 1959 and 1967 in Madison, Wisconsin, and later in New York....
). In 1958 his writing appeared in an academic journal for the first time with "The Logic of Race Classification" published in Genus, a journal edited by Corrado Gini
Corrado Gini
Corrado Gini was an Italian statistician, demographer and sociologist who developed the Gini coefficient, a measure of the income inequality in a society. Gini was also a leading fascist theorist and ideologue who wrote The Scientific Basis of Fascism in 1927...
, a leading Italian sociologist. Gregor's article was a defense of Gini's theories and he subsequently became a friend and collaborator of Gini's until Gini's death in 1965.
Gregor returned to Columbia for post-graduate work in the late 1950s.
1960s
In 1960 he obtained employment as a philosophy instructor at Washington CollegeWashington College
Washington College is a private, independent liberal arts college located on a campus in Chestertown, Maryland, on the Eastern Shore. Maryland granted Washington College its charter in 1782...
and received his PhD from Columbia in 1961 with his dissertation on Giovanni Gentile
Giovanni Gentile
Giovanni Gentile was an Italian neo-Hegelian Idealist philosopher, a peer of Benedetto Croce. He described himself as 'the philosopher of Fascism', and ghostwrote A Doctrine of Fascism for Benito Mussolini. He also devised his own system of philosophy, Actual Idealism.- Life and thought :Giovanni...
. Gregor became assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Hawaii
University of Hawaii
The University of Hawaii System, formally the University of Hawaii and popularly known as UH, is a public, co-educational college and university system that confers associate, bachelor, master, and doctoral degrees through three university campuses, seven community college campuses, an employment...
from 1961 to 1964. Gregor joined the University of California at Berkeley in 1967 where he remains.
Gregor was also an opponent of the United States Supreme Court
Supreme Court of the United States
The Supreme Court of the United States is the highest court in the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all state and federal courts, and original jurisdiction over a small range of cases...
's Brown v. Board of Education
Brown v. Board of Education
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 , was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students unconstitutional. The decision overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 which...
decision ending the practice of racial segregation in American schools. In recent years, Gregor has claimed that he supports desegregation in every respect, and that he merely opposed the use of the judicial branch's powers to engineer change. Instead, Gregor has argued that desegregation should have occurred through legislative action, witnessed in the Civil Rights laws that Congress passed in the years thereafter. According to Gregor, his primary concern with Brown lies in the threat of a judicial branch overstepping its constitutional powers.
Idus A. Newby's book Challenge to the Court: Social Scientists and the Defense of Segregation, 1954-1966 published in 1967 contains an extensive discussion of Gregor's works on race, which, Newby asserts, were among the main institutional centers of scientific racism
Scientific racism
Scientific racism is the use of scientific techniques and hypotheses to sanction the belief in racial superiority or racism.This is not the same as using scientific findings and the scientific method to investigate differences among the humans and argue that there are races...
in the 1960s. Nearly half of the book is a response by Gregor, in which he vehemently denies Newby's allegations that he is a racist or adopts a particular perspective on race. Gregor has regularly asserted that the intellectual climate that prevails prevents serious discussions about race, ethnicity and their relationship to genetics.
1970s
Since the 1970s, Gregor has spent most of his academic research on the study of fascism and it is for this that he is best known. In 1974 he wrote The Fascist persuasion in radical politics. Since then he had published major works on the subject, including "Mussolini's Intellectuals", "The Search for Neofascism", and "Marxism, Fascism, and Totalitarianism". It was largely as a consequence of this work that he was made a national Guggenheim Fellow and, subsequently, a Knight of the Order of Merit by the Italian Government. During this period Gregor published in major philosophical, political science, and security journals.Gregor has argued that scholars are very far from a consensus on what fascism really is, noting that "Almost every specialist has his own interpretation." Gregor limits the genuine article to Mussolini's Italy.
He has argued that apart from the superficial old-fashioned Marxist rhetoric, Marxist movements of the twentieth century, discarded Marx and Engels and instead in practice adopted theoretical categories and political methods much like those of Mussolini.
After undertaking numerous case studies of right-wing movements in recent decades, including European movements (Jean-Marie Le Pen's Front National (NF) and Germany's Republikaner Partei (REP)), Islamic jihadis, Hindu nationalists, black nationalists, and post-Mao Chinese nationalists, Gregor concludes there is little real neofascism in the world today. Thus he believes Fascism died in World War II.
Democratic liberalism and teaching
Gregor continued to define himself as committed to the values and convictions of democratic liberalism, consistently arguing that the American brand of democracy has proven the most effective system of government and the most likely to endure.In the 1960s, Gregor held numerous workshops and lectures to convince policymakers and academics of the exigencies of U.S. support for securing victory over North Vietnam. Gregor has continued to demonstrate an interest in maintaining anti-Communist and U.S. interests in Southeast Asia. During the 1970s and '80s, in what he understood to be U.S. interests, Gregor served as an uncompensated advisor to Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos
Ferdinand Marcos
Ferdinand Emmanuel Edralin Marcos, Sr. was a Filipino leader and an authoritarian President of the Philippines from 1965 to 1986. He was a lawyer, member of the Philippine House of Representatives and a member of the Philippine Senate...
.
He has also conducted inquiries into American security issues in Asia particularly in reference to Sino-American relations in the form of his 1986 book The China Connection: U.S. Policy and the People's Republic of China and his 1987 follow-up, Arming the Dragon: U.S. Security Ties with the People's Republic of China. In 1989 he wrote In the Shadow of Giants: The Major Powers and the Security of Southeast Asia. As result of his work, Gregor was named to the Oppenheimer Chair of Warfighting Strategy 1996–1997 at the Marine Corps University in Quantico. In recent years he has translated a major political essay written by the Italian Fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile
Giovanni Gentile
Giovanni Gentile was an Italian neo-Hegelian Idealist philosopher, a peer of Benedetto Croce. He described himself as 'the philosopher of Fascism', and ghostwrote A Doctrine of Fascism for Benito Mussolini. He also devised his own system of philosophy, Actual Idealism.- Life and thought :Giovanni...
into English together with a commentary on Gentile's political thought. Until his recent retirement in 2009 he taught a popular series of political science courses on revolutionary change, Marxism, and Fascism at UC Berkeley. As of 2011, Gregor is working on his new book on Political Religion.
Books
- A survey of Marxism: problems in philosophy and the theory of history, New York : Random House, 1965
- "Contemporary Radical Ideologies: Totalitarian thought in the twentieth century", New York: Random House, 1969
- The ideology of fascism : the rationale of totalitarianism, New York: Free Press, 1969
- An Introduction to Metapolitics: A Brief Inquiry into the Conceptual Language of Political Science. New York, NY: The Free Press, 1971. 415p.
- The Fascist persuasion in radical politics, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974
- Interpretations of Fascism, Transaction Publishers and Morristown, N. J.: General Learning Press, 1974
- Young Mussolini and the intellectual origins of Fascism, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. 271p.
- Italian Fascism and Developmental Dictatorship, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979. 427p.
- Ideology and development: Sun Yat-sen and the economic history of Taiwan, with Maria Hsia Chang and Andrew B. Zimmerman, China research monographs, Center for Chinese Studies, University of California, Berkeley, no. 23, 1981
- The China connection: U.S. policy and the People's Republic of China, 1986
- Arming the dragon: U.S. security ties with the People's Republic of China, 1987
- In the shadow of giants: the major powers and the security of Southeast Asia, 1989
- Marxism, China, & Development: Reflections on Theory and Reality, New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publisher, 1995
- Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time. New Brunswick: Transaction, 1999. 208p.
- The Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. 256p.
- Giovanni Gentile : philosopher of fascism, New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2001
- A Place in the Sun: Marxism and Fascism in China's Long Revolution, Westview Press, 2000
- Origins and Doctrine of Fascism: Giovanni Gentile, Transaction Publishers, 2nd ed. 2004
- The Search for Neofascism, Cambridge University Press, 2006
- Mussolini's Intellectuals: Fascist Social and Political Thought, Princeton University Press, new ed. 2006
- Marxism, Fascism, and Totalitarianism: Chapters in the Intellectual History of Radicalism, Stanford University Press, 2008