| A. James Gregor | |
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A. James Gregor lecturing at UC Berkeley in 2004
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| Born | April 2, 1929 New York City, New York |
| Residence | Berkeley, California |
| Citizenship | United States |
| Fields | Fascism Marxism Political Science Epistemology |
| Institutions | University of California, Berkeley Marine Corps University University of Texas University of Hawaii |
| Alma mater | Columbia University, B.A., Ph.D |
| Notable awards | Order of Merit of the Italian Republic Guggenheim Fellowship (1973) |
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 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.[1]
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He was born Anthony Gimigliano in New York City. 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.
In 1960 he obtained employment as a philosophy instructor at Washington College 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.
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."[2] 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.[3]
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.[4]
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.
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 Marxism in the Making of Modern China.
Italic text==Books==