A. James Gregor
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A. James Gregor (born April 2, 1929) is a Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley who is well known for his views on fascism and security issues.
He was born Anthony Gimigliano 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 and fascist theorist. Gregor's article was a defense of Gini's theories and he subsequently became a close friend and collaborator of Gini's until the Gini'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. 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. However, Gregor's own writings from that time do not seem to support such an argument.
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.
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, 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, Gregor served as an 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. 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. The courses have been criticised, however, for offensive comments Gregor has made concerning women and minorities, as well as for explicitly silencing alternate points of view concerning the material.
Gregor has 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 Israeli state today.[original research?]
[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.
