A. James Gregor

A. James Gregor
A. James Gregor lecturing at UC Berkeley in 2004
Born	(1929-04-02) April 2, 1929 (age 87) 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)

Anthony James Gregor (born April 2, 1929) is a Professor of Political Science Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley who is well known for his research on fascism, Marxism, and national security. 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. Professor Zeev Sternhell has said of him "Professor Gregor is one of the rare specialists in Italian Fascism to have made a truly original contribution to the study of the subject."

He was born Anthony Gimigliano in New York City. His father, Antonio, was a machine operator, factory worker and a nonpolitical anarchist. Gregor served as a volunteer in the U.S. Army. He attended and graduated in 1952 from Columbia University and thereafter served as a high school social science teacher while working for his advanced degrees. 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.

In 1961 Gregor completed his work for his doctorate at Columbia as an Irwin Edman Scholar and with Distinction in History.

In 1959, A. James Gregor was a founding director of the International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics IAAEE. He undertook anthropological field studies in Central Australia, Southwest Africa, and in the Southern States of the United States. In 1960, he obtained employment as a philosophy instructor at Washington College. He 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.He became an associate professor of philosophy at the universities of Kentucky and Texas between 1964 and 1967. Gregor joined the Political Science Department at the University of California at Berkeley in 1967 where he remained until his retirement.