Alfred de Grazia

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Alfred de Grazia in Naxos, Greece, August 2003
Alfred de Grazia in Naxos, Greece, August 2003

Alfred de Grazia, (born December 29, 1919 in Chicago, Illinois) is a political scientist,~philosopher, educator, and writer in the field of politics, as well as autobiographical works, poetry and plays. He led a special operations company in World War II, managed political campaigns and advised politicians, and consulted with government, voluntary and corporate groups. He elaborated a complete system for world government and federative solutions for Israel-Palestine. He initiated the paradigm of holistic quantavolution, whereby the world in its every sphere changes largely via sudden, intense, large-scale, correlative events. In 2008, he completed his book Canaan State, USA, advocating the creation of a new state in the Middle-East, joining Israel and the Palestinian Territories, inhabited by the Israeli and Palestinian populations, as well as the Palestinian refugee population, and re-named by its biblical name of Canaan, which State would then join the United States of America as the 51st State of Union.

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[edit] Early life

Alfred de Grazia was born on December 29, 1919 and raised on the Near North Side of Chicago. Alfred’s father, Alfred de Grazia Sr., a leftist and musician, left Sicily for the United States in his youth after hitting the mayor of his home-town of Licodia-Eubea (province of Catania) with his clarinet during a political altercation. Alfred de Grazia Sr. became a well-regarded band-conductor, clarinetist and musical union leader in Chicago. He was particularly known for conducting big-band promenade concerts of classical music at the Grand Band-Stand of the Municipal Pier of Chicago in the 1930's and 1940's. He married Katherine Lupo, born in Chicago of Sicilian parents, whose brother was the boxing champion Charles Kid Lucca, light-weight champion of Canada from 1910 to 1914. Besides Alfred, they had three sons: Sebastian de Grazia (born in 1917) who received the 1991 Pulitzer Prize in Biography, Edward (born in 1926) who became a well-known First Amendment Lawyer, playwright and co-founder of Cardozo Law School at Yeshiva University, and Victor de Grazia (born in 1929) who became Deputy-Governor of Illinois. With his first wife, Jill Lauterbach Oppenheim, he had seven children. The eldest, Catherine Vanderpool, heads the American School for Classical Studies in Princeton, Victoria de Grazia is a professor of history at Columbia University and member of the American Academy, Jessica is an attorney and adviser to the British government, Paul works in the fishing industry, John lives on an Indian reservation, Carl (deceased) was a musician, Chris is a builder. Alfred de Grazia is married to the French author Anne-Marie de Grazia and is living in France, in a village in the Pays de la Loire region.

At fifteen he entered the University of Chicago receiving an A.B. in 1939, and much later a Ph.D., in 1948. He supported himself alone during the whole period of his studies, working at first as a busboy at Billings Cafeteria of University of Chicago Medical School, then as a trumpetist and as administrator of the University of Chicago Maroon Band, and as leader of a jazz combo, which allowed him to visit Europe twice before WWII, playing aboard transatlantic steamers. He also spent one year at Columbia University Law School in 1940. He described these years in his autobiography of his childhood, The Babe. [1] and in The Student [2]

In World War II, Alfred de Grazia served in the ranks from Private to Captain, in artillery, intelligence, and psychological warfare, participating in six campaigns from North Africa to Germany, receiving several decorations. By war's end he commanded psychological warfare operations of the American Seventh Army in Southern Germany.[citation needed] De Grazia recounted these four war years in The Taste of War. [3] With his fiancee, then wife Jill Oppenheim, he carried on a rich and humorous home-front/war-front correspondence of well over 2000 lengthy letters, possibly the largest of WWII,preserved extant and published on the web under the title Letters of Love and War [4]

[edit] Political Science

After the Second World War, he had a brief stint in publishing, and finished his work for his doctorate later published as Public and Republic: A History of American Ideas of Representation, [5], one of the few books in political science to be selected for the initial White House Library collection.[citation needed]

A graduate of the "Chicago School" of Political Science, he pioneered, following Charles Merriam, Harold Lasswell, Nathan Leites, and H.F. Gosnell, the “Political Behavior” movement that for some time dominated political science. He founded, and edited for ten years The American Behavioral Scientist, later acquired by Sage Publications, then in its infancy, where it spawned the largest collection of scholarly magazines in the social sciences in the United States. Alfred de Grazia also invented The Universal Reference System, the first computerized social science bibliographic service.[citation needed]

[edit] Political Affairs

Alfred de Grazia supplied much of the theory for the Federalism Task Force of the Hoover Commission on the Organization of the Federal Government in 1947-48. He helped in salient stages of their careers candidates of the Independent Voters of Illinois, like the repeatedly press voted "Best U.S. Senator", Paul Douglas, the candidates of the Democratic Clubs and Senator Alan Cranston of California, Robert E. Merriam of Illinois, (see his article on the Chicago Mayoral Election of 1955 [6] Governor Nelson Rockefeller, and others.

[edit] Teaching and Founding an Experimental College

De Grazia taught for the first time at the University of Chicago, briefly, at the age of twenty, a graduate course in comparative political parties and elections; he spent the latter part of his teaching career (1959-1977) at New York University as Professor of Social Theory. In-between he taught at University of Minnesota, Brown University, and Stanford University, and lectured at various other schools in America and abroad, including Gothenburg, Istanbul and Lethbridge. In one year, 1951-2, he held appointment to the faculties of three universities, Brown, Harvard and Columbia. His courses were entitled Social Invention, Political Behavior and Leadership, Methodology, Psychological Factors in International Politics, and Propaganda, Communications, and Public Opinion. De Grazia helped conceive reorganization plans at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (with Frank Keppel) and Stanford University (in connection with a Ford Foundation program). He directed a Center for Applied Social Research at New York University in 1959-61. He designed a fully innovative college and led an experiment in higher education in 1970-1972 at Valais, Switzerland, called the University of the New World. Its several radical innovations included personal study plans and evaluations for every student, rule by an assembly chosen by lot from the school community, and the "Studio" as a continuous all levels club-like substitute for conventional departments, as exposed in the Bulletin of the University. [7][citation needed]

To found it, he formed a team composed almost entirely of students, teachers, and adventurers. Also involved was Nina Mavridis, who later became his second wife (she divorced him to marry the German musicologist Peter Bockelmann). The Swiss experiment ended in failure, for lack of funding and from an internecine struggle for survival among the leaders. Other attempts at founding radical colleges also failed: at St.Kitts and Nevis (where his beloved partner, Jean-Yves Beigbeder, was eaten by sharks); at Tunis (in the name of the great medieval Arab, Ibn Khaldun); at Apt in Southern France (stalled in local incomprehension).

[edit] Books in Political and Social Science

De Grazia's total published production runs to some two score volumes. At first he wrote largely in political theory and method. Several major earlier works in the field are Elements of Political Science (1952),[8] Public and Republic,[9] The Western Public (1954), [10] The American Way of Government (1957),[11] Science and Values in Administration (1961),[12] Political Behavior and Organization, 2 vol. (1962), [13] Apportionment and Representative Government (1963), and Republic in Crisis: Congress Against the Executive Force (1965)[14]. Besides, he edited Grass Roots Welfare (1958), and co-authored American Welfare.

[edit] Voluntarism and the New Conservatism Period

As indicated earlier, Alfred de Grazia undertook responsible roles in Chicago, New York, and California local politics and in national politics, in the Republican, Democratic and Independent movements. He directed a group of experts in a sweeping study of the functions and reform of the United States Congress, under the auspices of the American Enterprise Institute. Some of the many proposals of the report, entitled Congress: First Branch of Government (1966-7), ultimately achieved adoption. He supplied much salient doctrine to the New Conservatism before the term was used and abused, including voluntary welfare theory, anti-bureaucratic systems designs, and the strengthening of the independence and competence of the legislative branch of government. Much of this work was done with the aid of the William Volker Fund, the American Enterprise Institute, the Relm and Earhart Foundations, and New York University.

[edit] Designing the New World Order: Kalos and New Cities

De Grazia then moved toward a more radical merger of right and left ideas, especially represented in the book called Kalos: What is to be Done with Our World? (1968 ff.) [15]He wrote two special documents: 40 Stases and Theses for World Reconstruction,[16] published with 40 symbolic paintings by the Genovese artist and psychotherapist, Licia Filingeri, in 1995; in pamphlet format in English and Italian, there also appeared The Kalotic Catechism of the Divine Succession. (2003). Other polemical texts included Politics for Better or Worse (1973), [17]Eight Bads, Eight Goods: The American Contradictions (1975), akna Lectures to the Chinese[18]and Art and Culture: 1001 Questions on Policy (1979, prepared for the National Endowment for the Arts)[19].

Alfred de Grazia prepared and advanced proposals for new cities (The New City), and structures for Everyman (The Hacienda), beginning in 1969 with a plan for the rational transition of a traditional rural area of the island of Naxos, Greece, into urbanism and tourism .

[edit] Adviser to Governments and Corporations

Alfred de Grazia was an advisor to various national foundations, government agencies, and corporations, and was a senior consultant to the State Department, acting once as a delegate to the UNESCO General Conference, and organized and investigated psychological operations for the Defense Department in the Korean and Vietnam Wars. His reports on psychological operations, now largely declassified, include an early technical manual of the American Fifth Army published in the field (Cassino, 1944),Target Analysis and Media in Propaganda to Audiences Abroad (1952),Elites Analysis (1955), and Psychological Operations in Vietnam (1968). He was a consultant to General Motors Corporation, General Electric Corporation, Hawaiian Pineapple Company, and other groups.

[edit] Campaigning for Global Federalism

He continued to afford time and energy to his proposed movement for world government, begun in 1969 with the book mentioned above, Kalos, What is to be done with our World? and pursued the plan as a guiding theme of the Swiss college. A number of his former students, Dr. Stephanie Neuman, Dr. Rashmi Mayur, Dr. Nina Mavridis, and Dr. Ibne Hassan, to name four, were for a time actively engaged. In 1985 he set up a World Headquarters for the Kalos movement at Bombay, with Arun Gandhi, Rashmi Mayur, and others, which collapsed upon his departure. In his study of the Bhopal poison chemical, Union Carbide disaster, A Cloud over Bhopal (1985), [20], he urged that multinational corporations be brought into a world order of responsibility.

[edit] Advocacy of a Constitutional Federation of Israel-Palestine

He continued to prepare and circulate proposals for World Union, and agitated especially against the tactics of the Israel and USA governments that fueled Islamic and indeed general resistance to American policies around the world. He urged a unified federation of Israel-Palestine. And he wrote for it a Constitution, which with associated documents was published on the Web. In 2002 all of his writings, old and new, on World Governance, were published on CD-ROM. It included the Constitution, which he considered to be a utopian antidote to the absolute pessimism and evasion everywhere prevailing in regard to the region. It was carried in Hebrew, Arabic and English on the Web.

[edit] Quantavolution

Beginning in the 1960's, after encountering Immanuel Velikovsky, his interests turned increasingly toward the problems of neo-catastrophism, following the publication of a book on the subject of scientific censorship, The Velikovsky Affair: Scientism against Science, in which de Grazia defended Velikovsky's work which had been criticized by the scientific community as "ignorant and incompetent in science and in historical scholarship: his method was tendentious, his data biased, his conclusions impossible."[1] He termed the re-conceived field and new paradigm "quantavolution." By 1985 he had published ten volumes of the Quantavolution Series; they deal with subjects as diverse as the Odyssey of Homer (The Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars)[21] and the history of the Solar System seen as a binary electro magnetic transaction (Solaria Binaria, [22] with Prof. Earl R. Milton as collaborator). Two volumes deal with the evolution of mankind (Homo Schizo I)[23] and human nature today (Homo Schizo II);[24] in these he proposes a short time instinct-delay theory of humanization, and linguistic-cultural hologenesis.

Also in this series are The Lately Tortured Earth,[25] which is a proposed revision of the conventional earth sciences; God's Fire: Moses and the Management of Exodus,[26] which interprets the Exodus in the light of modern science and psychiatry, offering a new theology and new considerations on the existence of gods; The Burning of Troy, [27]a collection of special studies and memoranda and Chaos and Creation,[28] first to be written, which presents the general theory of Quantavolution. Possibly the most widely read book in the series is Cosmic Heretics [29] about which Emeritus Professor of Chemistry and Science Studies Henry H. Bauer observed: "That Immanuel Velikovsky remained so long a public figure is arguably due to the efforts of Alfred de Grazia in the 1960s. The Velikovsky Affair [30] continues to be cited as an example of science's unwillingness to consider alternatives to its current world-view."[2] Bauer himself considered Velikovsky an unoriginal pseudo-scientist.[1]

De Grazia developed his own version of Velikovsky's theories, which he called "quantavolution" to denote his holistic theory of sudden, leaping, large scale changes as the major factor in natural history, evolution, and human development.

His "Solaria Binaria Theory" originates the solar system from a nova of the Sun and a stretched, lessening electric arc to a binary, now practically disappeared, around which the planets evolved. The theory was submitted to expert seminars at the University of Bergamo[31], and in Sofia at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences [32], with mixed receptions from the astrophysicists and astronomers present. His theory of "Lunagenesis" derives the Moon from the Earth in recent times in response to a passing binary fragment ("Uranus Minor"), and explains continental drifting, not by tectonic plate theory, but as a rafting of the remaining Pangea toward the great vacated basin, along the fracture lines of the globe occasioned at the moment of passage.

In 2002, de Grazia was appointed Professor of Methodology and the History of Science at the University of Bergamo. He set up a modest Center for Quantavolution Studies with the help of the Mainwaring Archives Foundation.

He wrote and published in CD-ROM form the book, Reconstructing American History from 1400 2000A.D (1999) [33]. Soon afterwards, the total unexpurgated World War II Correspondence with his wife Jill, Home Front and War Front,[34] appeared in CD-ROM. He headed in 2003-4 two research projects on the coincidence of natural disasters and legends in ancient times, and promoted quantavolution teaching and archiving at the Center for Studies in Quantavolution at Bergamo. He kept up the preparation of a special Encyclopedia of Quantavolution and Natural Catastrophe, and began writing a memoir to update developments affecting the sciences of quantavolution between 1980 and 2004.

In 2006, he published The Iron Age of Mars, which contained his most speculative work on quantavolution to date. In this two volume book, he reduced the onset of the Iron Age by centuries, claimed the origin of most iron from the skies, specifically from Planet Mars, argued for the origins of the earliest Hebrews and the Bible in Western Arabia, and depicted an enormous destruction and formation of new cultures and sciences everywhere in the greater Mediterranean region, starting as the Bronze Age moved into the Iron Age.

In contrast to his earlier works, his writings on quantavolution are largely self-published.

[edit] Autobiography, Poetry, Novels, Theater

The full story of his experiences in the Quantavolution Movement is related in his book, The Cosmic Heretics,[35] which became the first of several planned autobiographical volumes to appear in print. Published in early 1992 were the first three volumes, those dealing with the child (The Babe: Child of Boom and Bust in Old Chicago, Umbilicus Mundi)[36] education: (The Student: At Chicago in Hutchins' Hey day)[37] and soldiering in World War II: (The Taste of War).[38] To follow, he planned volumes on philosophy, academia and politics, on the Swiss university experiment, on the island and culture of Naxos, and on the family. A first volume of his poetry was published in 1967 as Passage of the Year and the second in 1997, Twentieth Century Fire Sale. In manuscript for some years and now published on the web are two short novels, Blackout and Ronald's Norm, both of them set in the Washington Square neighborhood of Manhattan...

Seventeen plays of recent years are appearing on the web and as a book in English and Italian translation (2004)[39]. A theatrical troupe, the Bergamaskers, was organized in the hope of performing them. In 2005-6, he produced two of the plays, The Rock of Sisyphus and The Gene of Hope [40] as movies. A personal account of a Swiss espionage case, involving an acquaintance, Chris Marx, which also forms part of the autobiographical series, is titled The Fall of Spydom; it was written at his home in the Vaucluse, France, during the period 1988-9, and was published in 1992. [41]

[edit] Size of Corpus and Its Distribution

In sum, Alfred de Grazia authored 4500+ published pages on numerous aspects of American government and history (published by Alfred A. Knopf, John Wiley, Scott Foresman, Doubleday, Sidgwick and Taylor, American Enterprise Institute, Metron Publications, et al), 3000+ pages on general political theory and world affairs, many pieces appearing in his role as founder and editor of The American Behavioral Scientist for a decade, 3000+ pages on quantavolution and ancient catastrophes,1500+ pages of autobiography, 2 volumes of poetry, 1 volume of theatrical plays, 2 novels, 2 theatre films, and several thousand pages that are being prepared for publication on CD-ROM and in book format. His work of the years 1990 to 2006 drew substantial support, dedicated principally to quantavolution studies and archives, from the Mainwaring Archives Foundation.

[edit] Reviews of his books

[edit] Bibliography

Alfred de Grazia has authored/co-authored or edited some 60 books and e-books. Below is a partial list:

  • (1951) Public and Republic: Political Representation in America
  • (1960) The American Behavioral Scientist (with Cornelius P. Cotler)
  • (1962) The Elements of Political Science
  • (1963) Essay on Apportionment and Representative Government
  • (1964) Revolution in Teaching: New Theory, Technology and Curricula
  • (1966) Twelve Studies of the Organization of Congress
  • (1966) The Velikovsky Affair
  • (1967) Congress and the Presidency (with Arthur M. Schlesinger)
  • (1968) The Behavioral Sciences: Essays in Honor of George A. Lundberg

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b Bauer, Henry H.: "The Velikovsky Affair", Aeon, May 1992
  2. ^ Bauer, Henry H. (1985). Inside the Velikovsky Affair. Skeptical Inquirer, 9 (3), 284-288.

[edit] External links

  • Grazian Archive: his website, which will ultimately carry the estimated two billion bytes of his writings, photographs, and films.
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