A. James Gregor - Work and Thought

Work and Thought

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.

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." 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 20th century discarded Marx and Engels and instead in practice adopted theoretical categories and political methods much like those of Mussolini.

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.