A. James Gregor

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." 2Early life 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