Alfred de Grazia
Alfred de Grazia, (born December 29, 1919 in Chicago, Illinois) is a philosopher, educator, poet, playwright, historian, and a reformer and innovator in politics and the sciences.
He strove to carry pragmatism and phenomenology into every aspect of social and natural science, and into history and the humanities. He published a unique sociology of political representation, and two stylistically contrasting though scientifically consistent texts of political science. He initiated the paradigm of holistic quantavolution, whereby the world in its every sphere changes largely via sudden, intense, large-scale, correlative events.
Alfred de Grazia has been a participant and close observer in various critical scenarios of the 20th century, and the early 21st century. He led a special operations company in World War II, managed political campaigns and advised politicians, and consulted with government, voluntary and corporate groups. He elaborated a complete system for world government and federative solutions for Israel-Palestine.
Alfred de Grazia produced a score of caustic and ironic plays in a moral context, as well as two collections of highly diversified poetry in the same mood, and four autobiographical books.
Background and schooling
Alfred de Grazia was born on December 29, 1919 and raised on the Near North Side of Chicago during the "Roaring Twenties." All four of his grandparents were born in Italy, specifically in Sicily. His grandparents on his father’s side remained in Sicily, in the town of Licodia-Eubea, in the shadow of Mount Etna. His maternal grandparents had immigrated at a young age from a village near Palermo to Chicago, where his mother, Catherine Lupo, was born. Alfred’s father, a leftist and musician, left Sicily in his youth after a political altercation and became a well-regarded band-conductor, clarinetist and musical union leader in Chicago. Alfred was named after him. Alfred was the second of four brothers, all of whom would leave their mark on American culture and politics. He studied at Franklin Grammar School, and at Waller High School and Lake View High School. He was taught the violin at seven and switched to the cornet at twelve. Baptized a Catholic, but placed among Protestants, he was mostly spared religious indoctrination in his childhood and did not receive First Communion until the ripe age of 39, in 1958, after his agnostic Jewish wife Jill Oppenheim had converted to Catholicism. At fifteen he entered the University of Chicago on a half scholarship, studied there from 1935 to 1940, and in 1947 (A.B., 1939, Ph.D., 1948), and at Columbia University Law School in 1940. Historian John Gillis called De Grazia’s autobiography of his childhood, The Babe, "a wholly new kind of work, as vivid and fascinating in detail as it is systematic in its method."
The Indelible Stamp of the University of Chicago
At college, Alfred de Grazia was enveloped by the controversies over the "Chicago Plan's" universal curriculum, by philosophical debates between pragmatism and Thomism, and between the sciences and the humanities; it was the great age of the University, in the hey-day of Robert Maynard Hutchins, also the period of the Great Depression. Teachers of the highest standing raged over what ideas and books were to be foisted upon their students. De Grazia’s book, The Student, gives a first hand account of these heady years. His teachers included Hutchins and Mortimer Adler on the one hand and T.V. Smith, Charles E. Merriam, Nathan Leites, and Louis Wirth on the other hand. Harold D. Lasswell was to be a friend and guru for over 40 years.
Music and Athletics
Alfred de Grazia was economically self-sufficient at sixteen, earning his educational expenses at University of Chicago and livelihood at a variety of jobs. He fed himself mostly by working as a busboy at Billings Hospital Cafeteria. He played solo trumpet and was Manager of the University Band. He worked as well with the Orchestra. He starred on the University championship water polo team, which won national honors. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa honorary scholastic society. He had long nurtured an interest in jazz as well, and in 1938 and 1939 he led a jazz combo which played during the summer aboard British and Dutch Atlantic Ocean steamships, affording him his first trips to pre-war Europe.
Military Experiences
In World War II, Alfred de Grazia served in the ranks from Private to Captain, in artillery, intelligence, and psychological warfare, participating in six campaigns from North Africa to Germany, receiving several decorations. He worked with a small group of men who were innovating in tactics and techniques of war front and occupation propaganda; he was involved in fateful decisions regarding the Abbey of Monte Cassino, in the liberation of Rome and its new government, in the introduction of Italian troops into the Allied line, in the development of the First French Army, in the liberation of Southern France and Alsace, and in the conquest and control of Germany. At war's end he commanded psychological warfare operations of the American Seventh Army in Southern Germany. He had previously served in the British Eighth Army and American Fifth Army. De Grazia recounted these four war years in The Taste of War. His heavy war experience was brought into play later on as advisor in the Korean and Viet Nam Wars and on occasion as a consultant to the State Department and Department of Defense.
Political Behavior and the American Behavioral Scientist
After the Second World War, he did a brief stint in publishing, and finished his work for the doctorate, which later, under the title of Public and Republic: A History of American Ideas of Representation, was one of the few books in political science to be selected for the initial White House Library collection. A graduate of the "Chicago School" of Political Science, he pioneered, following Charles Merriam, Harold Lasswell, Nathan Leites, and H.F. Gosnell, the “Political Behavior” movement that ultimately captured political science, providing to it especially a general theory of representation and apportionment. He founded, and edited for ten years ''The American Behavioral Scientist. This journal, which redefined the scope of political science, was later acquired by Sage Publications and became the centerpiece for the largest set of social sciences journal publications in the world. Alfred de Grazia also invented The Universal Reference System]], the first computerized social science bibliographic service, and he designed other systems for use in welfare tracking and inventorying governmental functions.
Political Affairs
Alfred de Grazia supplied much of the theory for the Federalism Task Force of the Hoover Commission on the Organization of the Federal Government in 1947-48. He helped in salient stages of their careers candidates of the Independent Voters of Illinois, like the repeatedly press voted "Best U.S. Senator", Paul Douglas, the candidates of the Democratic Clubs and Senator Alan Cranston of California, Robert E. Merriam of Illinois, Governor Nelson Rockefeller, and others.
Teaching and Founding an Experimental College
Alfred de Grazia taught for the first time at the University of Chicago, briefly, at the age of twenty, a graduate course in comparative political parties and elections; he spent the latter part of his teaching career (1959-1977) at New York University as Professor of Social Theory. In-between he taught at University of Minnesota, Brown University, and Stanford University, and lectured at various other schools in America and abroad, including Gothenburg, Istanbul and Lethbridge. (In one year, 1951-2, he held appointment to the faculties of three universities, Brown, Harvard and Columbia.)His usual courses were entitled Social Invention, Political Behavior and Leadership, Methodology, Psychological Factors in International Politics, and Propaganda, Communications, and Public Opinion. Alfred de Grazia helped conceive reorganization plans at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (with Frank Keppel) and Stanford University (in connection with a Ford Foundation program).He directed a Center for Applied Social Research at New York University in 1959-61.He designed a fully innovative college and led an experiment in higher education 1970-1972 at Valais, Switzerland, called the University of the New World. Its several radical innovations included personal study plans and evaluations for every student, rule by an assembly chosen by lot from the school community, and the "Studio" as a continuous all levels club-like substitute for conventional departments.
To found it, he formed a team composed almost entirely of students, teachers, and adventurers from different places, notably Kevin Cleary, Richard Kramer, Peter Tobia, Philip and Elizabeth Jacob, Robert Cheasty, St. Clair Drake and Elizabeth Johns. Also involved was Nina Mavridis, who later became his second wife (she divorced him to marry the German musicologist Peter Bockelmann). The Swiss experiment ended in failure, for lack of funding and from an internecine struggle for survival among the leaders; in retrospect, nevertheless, through the minds of its hundreds of participants, it appeared as a short lived success, a benchmark of their lives. Other attempts at founding radical colleges also failed: at St.Kitts and Nevis (where his beloved partner, Jean-Yves Beigbeder, was eaten by sharks); at Tunis (in the name of the great medieval Arab, Ibn Khaldun); at Apt in Southern France (stalled in local incomprehension).
Books in Political and Social Science
Alfred de Grazia's books, beginning with Public and Republic in 1950, are to be found in most substantial libraries. His total published production runs to some two score volumes. At first he wrote largely in political theory and method. Several major earlier works in the field are Elements of Political Science (1952), The Western Public (1954), The American Way of Government (1957), Science and Values in Administration (1961), Political Behavior and Organization, 2 vol. (1962), Apportionment and Representative Government (1963), and Republic in Crisis: Congress Against the Executive Force (1965). Besides, he edited Grass Roots Welfare (1958), and wrote American Welfare (1960, co authored by Ted Gurr ).
Voluntarism and the New Conservatism Period
As indicated earlier, Alfred de Grazia undertook responsible roles in Chicago, New York, and California local politics and in national politics, in the Republican, Democratic and Independent movements. He directed a group of experts in a sweeping study of the functions and reform of the United States Congress, under the auspices of the American Enterprise Institute. Some of the many proposals of the report, entitled Congress: First Branch of Government (1966-7), ultimately achieved adoption. He supplied much salient doctrine to the New Conservatism before the term was used and abused, including voluntary welfare theory, anti-bureaucratic systems designs, and the strengthening of the independence and competence of the legislative branch of government. Much of this work was done with the aid of the William Volker Fund, the American Enterprise Institute, the Relm and Earhart Foundations, and New York University.
Designing the New World Order: Kalos and New Cities
Alfred de Grazia then moved toward a more radical merger of right and left ideas, especially represented in the book called Kalos: What is to be Done with Our World? (1968 ff.) He wrote two special documents: 40 Stases and Theses for World Reconstruction, published with 40 symbolic paintings by the Genovese artist and psychotherapist, Licia Filingeri, in 1995; in pamphlet format in English and Italian, there also appeared The Kalotic Catechism of the Divine Succession. (2003). Other polemical texts included Politics for Better or Worse (1973), Eight Bads, Eight Goods: The American Contradictions (1975), and Art and Culture: 1001 Questions on Policy (1979, prepared for the National Endowment for the Arts).
Alfred de Grazia prepared and advanced proposals for new cities (The New City), and structures for Everyman (The Hacienda), beginning in 1969 with a plan for the rational transition of a traditional rural area of the island of Naxos, Greece, into urbanism and tourism (all of which failed to materialize; their story is contained in www.grazian-archive.net).He built a house by the sea at Naxos in 1968 and continued developmental work along with much of his writing there.
Adviser to Governments and Corporations
Alfred de Grazia was an advisor to various national foundations, government agencies, and corporations, and was a senior consultant to the State Department, acting once as a delegate to the UNESCO General Conference, and organized and investigated psychological operations for the Defense Department in the Korean and Vietnam Wars. His reports on psychological operations, now largely declassified, include an early technical manual of the American Fifth Army published in the field (Cassino, 1944),Target Analysis and Media in Propaganda to Audiences Abroad (1952),Elites Analysis (1955), and Psychological Operations in Vietnam (1968). He was a consultant to General Motors Corporation, General Electric Corporation, Hawaiian Pineapple Company, and other groups.
Proposing the Paradigm of Quantavolution Science
Beginning in the 1960's, after encountering Immanuel Velikovsky, his interests turned increasingly toward the problems of neo-catastrophism, following the publication of a widely praised but controversial book upon scientific censorship, The Velikovsky Affair: Scientism against Science. He termed the re-conceived field and new paradigm "quantavolution." Putting class work aside, from 1977 onward he devoted full time to research and writing, culminating in the publication by 1985 of ten volumes of the Quantavolution Series; they deal with subjects as diverse as the Odyssey of Homer (The Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars) and the history of the Solar System seen as a binary electro magnetic transaction (Solaria Binaria, with Prof. Earl R. Milton as collaborator). Two volumes deal with the evolution of mankind (Homo Schizo I) and human nature today (Homo Schizo II); in these he proposes a short time instinct-delay theory of humanization, and linguistic-cultural hologenesis.
Also in this series are The Lately Tortured Earth, which is a proposed revision of the conventional earth sciences; God's Fire: Moses and the Management of Exodus, which interprets the Exodus in the light of modern science and psychiatry, offering a new theology and new considerations on the existence of gods; The Burning of Troy, a collection of special studies and memoranda and Chaos and Creation, first to be written, which presents the general theory of Quantavolution.
He coined the term "quantavolution" to denote his holistic theory of sudden, leaping, large scale changes as the major factor in natural history, evolution, and human development. Quantavolution Theory is the most general expression of the movement away from newtonism, darwinism and lyallism in physics, biology and geology, and includes a thoroughly integrated electromagnetic short time history of the solar system as a binary system. "A quantavolution is inherently both catastrophic and benefactive, the weighing and judgment of which calls upon a moral science with a definite complete catechism. The paradigm is descriptive and judgmental of all time past, predictive of the future because of human nature and nature itself, and prescriptive when applied to plans and designs for the future."[1] Novel elements of the Q theory affect drastically the issues surrounding the development of human nature, language, biological evolution, geomorphology, and theology. Thus, his "Homo Schizo" theory has a hologenetic physical cultural quantavolution from hominid to homo sapiens, brought on by sharp environmental crisis, as with a marked electro magnetic atmospheric shift, bringing on a micro-delay in instinctual response, hence, multiple personality, hence fear of self and drive for self control.
Struggling to Publish a Plethora of Books
His Solaria Binaria Theory originates the solar system from a nova of the Sun and a stretched, lessening electric arc to a binary, now practically disappeared, around which the planets evolved. The theory was submitted to expert seminars at the University of Bergamo, and in Sofia at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, with mixed receptions from the astrophysicists and astronomers present... His theory of "Lunagenesis" derives the Moon from the Earth in recent times in response to a passing binary fragment ("Uranus Minor"), and explains continental drifting, not by tectonic plate theory, but as a rafting of the remaining Pangea toward the great vacated basin, along the fracture lines of the globe occasioned at the moment of passage. He essayed a new theory of mythology and linguistics as well, and offered two novel proofs for the existence of gods. In all of this work, controversy was taken for granted. The pages of classical journals in the sciences and humanities were closed to quantavolutionary writings, with rare exceptions. If only because his output was so heavy, he could not expect to publish his work except over many years, and therefore used his early publishing and editing experience to design and supervise the production of his own works on numerous occasions. Seizing the opportunities afforded by the computer and micro-apparatus, he ended by assembling a complete publishing office, from composing to binding and shipping on the Island of Naxos.
Campaigning for Global Federalism
All the while he worked in these areas, he continued to afford time and energy to his proposed movement for world government, begun in 1969 with the book mentioned above, Kalos, What is to be done with our World? and pursued the plan as a guiding theme of the Swiss college. A number of his former students, Dr. Stephanie Neuman, Dr. Rashmi Mayur, Dr. Nina Mavridis, and Dr. Ibne Hassan, to name four, were for a time actively engaged. In 1985 he set up a World Headquarters for the Kalos movement at Bombay, with Arun Gandhi, Rashmi Mayur, and others, which collapsed upon his departure. Too, his present wife and novelist, Anne Marie (Ami) Hueber de Grazia has worked in the movement. In his study of the Bhopal poison chemical, Union Carbide disaster, A Cloud over Bhopal (1985), which she helped prepare, he urged that multinational corporations be brought into a world order of responsibility.
Autobiography, Poetry, Novels, Theater
The full story of his experiences in the Quantavolution Movement is related in his book, The Cosmic Heretics, which became the first of several planned autobiographical volumes to appear in print. Published in early 1992 were the first three volumes, those dealing with the child (The Babe: Child of Boom and Bust in Old Chicago, Umbilicus Mundi) education: (The Student: At Chicago in Hutchins' Hey day) and soldiering in World War II: (The Taste of War). To follow, he planned volumes on philosophy, academia and politics, on the Swiss university experiment, on the island and culture of Naxos, and on the family. A first volume of his poetry was published in 1967 as Passage of the Year and the second in 1997, Twentieth Century Fire Sale. In manuscript for some years and now published on the web are two short novels, Blackout and Ronald's Norm, both of them set in the Washington Square neighborhood of Manhattan...
Seventeen plays of recent years are appearing on the web and as a book in English and Italian translation (2004). A theatrical troupe, the Bergamaskers, was organized in the hope of performing them. In 2005-6, he produced two of the plays, The Rock of Sisyphus and The Gene of Hope as movies. A personal account of a Swiss espionage case, involving an acquaintance, Chris Marx, which also forms part of the autobiographical series, is titled The Fall of Spydom; it was written at his home in the Vaucluse, France, during the period 1988-9, and was published in 1992.
The De Grazia Family Experience
Numerous De Grazia's have been extensively involved in American intellectual circles and public affairs. Two of his brothers were professors of law and philosophy, and authors of important works (Sebastian de Grazia(dec.) was awarded in 1990 the Pulitzer Prize in History for Machiavelli in Hell). Edward de Grazia was a founding member of the faculty of the Benjamin Cardozo Law School, and has written extensively on freedom of the press. A third brother, Victor de Grazia(dec.), a political campaign manager and onetime Deputy to the Governor of the State of Illinois, headed a consulting firm that specialized in the jury process.
Alfred and his first wife, Jill Oppenheim (deceased), had seven children. (Their correspondence of a million words during World War II may be the world's largest of this genre, and, with regard to Jill’s letters, the best. In 1999 it became available on CD-ROM.) Two of his daughters are professors, Catherine Vanderpool in archaeology ( A Co-Director of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens and Princeton) and Victoria de Grazia in social history (Columbia University): author of How Fascism Ruled Women, and of Irresistible Empire, Editor of A Dictionary of Fascism; Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences;a third, Jessica Jeans, first assistant and chief of administration of the office of the District Attorney of Manhattan, for the past decade a consultant on security matters for international concerns and lately a consultant to the British Government for reconstituting the management of criminal prosecutions, has written on the international drug traffic and efforts to combat it. Two sons are craftsmen and musicians, working in Seattle. Carl, a music composer working as a clerk, died at 48 from cancer. John, variously skilled, has wandered widely. Alfred’s wife, Anne Marie Hueber, joined with him since 1977, is a French novelist and translator in three languages, and has been his collaborator on several projects, in publishing and in quantavolution research.
Size of Corpus and Its Distribution
In sum, Alfred de Grazia authored 4500+ published pages on numerous aspects of American government and history (published by Alfred A. Knopf, John Wiley, Scott Foresman, Doubleday, Sidgwick and Taylor, American Enterprise Institute, Metron Publications, et al), 3000+ pages on general political theory and world affairs, many pieces appearing in his role as founder and editor of The American Behavioral Scientist for a decade, 3000+ pages on quantavolution and ancient catastrophes,1500+ pages of autobiography, 2 volumes of poetry, 1 volume of theatrical plays, 2 novels, 2 theatre films, and several thousand pages that are being prepared for publication on CD-ROM and in book format. His work of the years 1990 to 2006 drew substantial support, dedicated principally to quantavolution studies and archives, from the Mainwaring Archives Foundation.
Bergamo and the Italian Quantavolution Circle
In 2002, Alfred and Ami sold their house in Princeton, New Jersey, and gave up a part time residence in Angouleme, France in order to move to Bergamo, maintaining at the same time the old Naxos home. At the University of Bergamo he was appointed Professor of Methodology and the History of Science. Among his new associates were the brilliant mathematician and revisionist of ancient history, Prof. Emilio Spedicato, Prof. Vladimir Damgov, a prominent chaos mathematician and physicist from the Space Research Institute of the Bulgarian Academy of Science, Admiral Flavio Barbiero of the Italian Navy and an explorer, and Rector Federico di Trocchio, biologist and historian of scientific controversies. He set up a modest Center for Quantavolution Studies with the help of the Mainwaring Archives Foundation. In 2000 he started up and developed an on-line CD DVD disk and print-bind plus electronic books on demand publication system to ensure and speed up communications in his chosen fields.
He stepped up his writing and editing of plays. He wrote and published in CD ROM (1999) and placed on line and at www.grazian archive.com the book, Reconstructing American History from 1400 2000A.D. Soon afterwards, the total unexpurgated World War II Correspondence with his wife Jill, Home Front and War Front, appeared in CD ROM.. He headed in 2003 4 two research projects on the coincidence of natural disasters and legends in ancient times, and promoted quantavolution teaching and archiving at the Center for Studies in Quantavolution at Bergamo. He kept up the preparation of a special Encyclopedia of Quantavolution and Natural Catastrophe, and began writing a memoir to update developments affecting the sciences of quantavolution between 1980 and 2004.
Advocacy of a Constitutional Federation of Israel-Palestine
He continued to prepare and circulate proposals for World Union, and agitated especially against the tactics of the Israel and USA governments that fueled Islamic and indeed general resistance to American policies around the world. He urged a unified federation of Israel-Palestine. And he wrote for it a Constitution, which with associated documents was published on the Web. In 2002 all of his writings, old and new, on World Governance, were published on CD ROM. It included the Constitution, which he considered to be a utopian antidote to the absolute pessimism and evasion everywhere prevailing in regard to the region. It was carried in Hebrew, Arabic and English on the Web.
The Iron Age of Mars
In 2005, Ami de Grazia's single volume abridgement of most of his work in quantavolution was published in book form as The Way of Q. He then completed and published in 2006, The Iron Age of Mars, which contained his most speculative work on quantavolution up to the present. In this two volume book, he reduced the onset of the Iron Age by centuries, claimed the origin of most iron from the skies, specifically from Planet Mars, argued for the origins of the earliest Hebrews and the Bible in Western Arabia, and depicted an enormous destruction and formation of new cultures and sciences everywhere in the greater Mediterranean region, starting as the Bronze Age moved into the Iron Age.
The Grazian Archive on the Web
His Web site www.grazian-archive.com, will ultimately carry the estimated two billion bytes of his writings, photographs, and films. Welcoming over two million file visits per year, it is working toward containing the full body of his works. The production of some 100 CDs of his individual works continues, and Eumetron on Naxos began turning out the complete works as bound books, produced and supplied as needed.
Reviews of his books
- William and Mary College Quarterly Historical Magazine, Volume 3.8, Issue 3, p. 438 Alfred de Grazia. Public and Republic; Political Representation in America. Reviewed by Herbert N. Drennon
- Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Jun., 1951), p. 92 Alfred De Grazia. Public and Republic; Political Representation in America. Reviewed by S. H. Brockunier
- American Quarterly, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Spring, 1954), pp. 88+90-91. The Elements of Political Science. by Alfred de Grazia. Review author: Steven Muller.