A. James Gregor
A. James Gregor (1929–2019) was an American political scientist at UC Berkeley, the leading academic theorist of "developmental fascism" — the thesis that fascism, in its Italian form and its imitators, functioned historically as a developmental dictatorship for late-modernizing nations.
Work
- The Ideology of Fascism (1969), Italian Fascism and Developmental Dictatorship (1979), Mussolini's Intellectuals, and studies of Chinese communism interpreted through the same developmental lens.
- Argued fascism was not mere reaction but a revolutionary syncretic ideology: nationalism plus state-directed modernization for societies where liberal capitalism arrived too late and revolution from the left threatened the national state.
- His framework influenced both academic fascism studies and the New Right's self-understanding; he also consulted on security matters and wrote on Marxism-Leninism as a parallel developmental ideology.
Infrared relevance
Gregor is read in red-brown discourse as the scholar who normalized the comparison between fascist and communist developmental states — a comparison Infrared rejects in one direction (Soviet socialism was qualitatively different: abolition, not management, of capital) while acknowledging in the other: that nationalism is a real material force every successful revolution has mobilized. His work is essential reading for understanding how the European New Right borrows socialist categories (see European New Right, Nazi-Maoism, Strasserism).