A. James Gregor
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A. James Gregor is a Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley who is well known for his views on fascism and security issues.
He was born Anthony Gimigliano on April 2, 1929 in New York City. His father, Antonio, was a machine operator, factory worker and socialist. During World War II, his mother was classified as an "undesirable alien".
Gregor graduated from Columbia University in 1952 and got a job as a high school social science teacher. During this period he published a number of essays in The European. 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 close friend and collaborator of Gini's until the sociologist's death in 1965.
Gregor returned to Columbia for post-graduate work in the late 1950s. In 1960 he obtained employment as a philosophy instructor at Washington College and received his PhD from Columbia in 1961. 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. It should be important to note that Gregor supports desegregation in every respect, but he merely opposed the use of the judical branch's powers to engineer change. Instead, Gregor argued that desegregation should occur through legislative action, witnessed in the Civil Rights laws that Congress passed in the years thereafter. For Gregor, the primary concern with Brown v. Board of Education 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 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.
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. More recent is his book The Faces of Janus. The book argues that fascism was actually a left wing philosophy. In the words of the American Historical Review he also asserts that fascism "was a compelling and coherent synthesis of ideas generated by some of the most creative thinkers of our time."
Never advocating fascism as a political system, Gregor has 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, in an effort to dispel the forces of North Vietnamese Communism, Gregor held numerous workshops and lectures to convince policymakers and academics of the exigencies of U.S. support for securing the victory of South Vietnam over Ho Chi Minh's brutal regime. Gregor has continued to demonstrate an interest in maintaining stability in Southeast Asia. During the 1970s and 80s, Gregor served as an advisor to President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines.
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. In recent years he has emerged as one of the few translators of the works of Italian fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile into English and teaches a popular series of political science courses on revolutionary change and fascist philosophy at UC Berkeley.
Gregor's views are on race has been a substantial matter of debate among his critics. Gregor's marriage to University of Nevada Professor Maria Hsia Chang, however, should disprove many myths about his alleged "racist" views that have been leveled upon him by his critics, namely the embittered faculty and staff of the the Ethnic Studies Department at UC Berkeley. A number of leftist intellectuals in Berkeley harbor great distaste for Gregor's views. Most likely, these academics are very unhappy with the validity of Gregor's attacks on their beliefs. More specifically, Gregor predicted that the Marxism that many leftists espoused during the 1960's lack any validity whatsoever in the modern world of political and economic development.
Moreoever, Gregor has always vigorously defended himself as free of racial bias and committed to "American values". In his graduate courses, Gregor has encouraged free and open discussion on a wide variety of issues, including Native American revolutionary movements, the conflict between moderate and radical Islam, and the challenges facing the Israel state today.
[edit] Professor
Gregor's lecturing style has made him both a popular and controversial university lecturer. His style is mixture of rapid-pace intellectual theory, humorous digressions, confrontational and blunt observations, as well as a policy of no tolerance for late arrivals, cell-phones, or student chatter. He is infamous for yelling and humiliating (to varying degrees, depending on his mood at the time) late students or any other transgressors. Moreover, he will frequently mock the student society for being, among other things: leftists, Marxists, nymphomaniacs, fat, revealing, drunk, drug-addicted, incoherent, lazy, gullible, and only focused on buying the latest gadgets and fashions. However, it should be noted that these critiques are always light-hearted, intentionally stereotypical, and only meant for a laugh.
He is also known for interjecting his speech with phrases such as "LOOK, people", "what we HAVE here...", and "anything else, comrades?". He is also a rather poor artist, as evidenced by his chalkboard renditions of trees, people, and the continent of Europe, all of which came out looking pretty much the same.
[edit] Books
- The Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. 256p.
- An Introduction to Metapolitics: A Brief Inquiry into the Conceptual Language of Political Science. New York, NY: The Free Press, 1971. 415p.
- Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time. New Brunswick: Transaction, 1999. 208p.
Interpretations of Fascism. Origins and Doctrine of Fascism: Giovanni Gentile. The Search For Neofascism.
