DR

I grew up in Louisville Kentucky, the home of Muhammad Ali, in the 1970s and 1980s.

My mother taught chemistry at an experimental public high school, which I also attended, called the Brown School. The school was a kind of institutional outgrowth of the local Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, and it embodied much of earnestness and good will — but also the debilitating naiveté — of that movement. The school was integrated both in terms of race and class, which was unusual for that time and place.

I remember reading Mao’s “little red book” and Huey Newton in high school, but real politicization began when I attended Eugene Lang College at the New School for Social Research. I arrived there in 1989 just as the Soviet Union was unraveling. Everybody was reading Arendt and Foucault; so being a contrarian I was reading Marx, Althusser, and Lukács, and trying, but mostly failing, to understand Gramsci.

Politically speaking, there was a lot of activism at the time against the first Gulf War, and I was involved in that. But mostly the atmosphere was one of overwhelming political defeat.

I attended graduate school at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), which was a very exciting place for historical comparative research in the 1990s. There I was fortunate to be able to study with a brilliant group of scholars: Perry Anderson, Rebecca Emigh, Michael (Mick) Mann, and for a time Ivan Szelenyi.

At UCLA, there were intense debates among Weberians, Bourdieuseans, and Marxists.

At the same time, the “transitions” were underway in Eastern Europe, and as a result the whole issue of “transitions to capitalism” was on everybody’s agenda. So all in all it was quite an exciting time and place.

But politically, again, the late nineties were an incredibly depressing period. The historical conjuncture was one of overwhelming defeat and demobilization, and self-identifying as a “Marxist” was very difficult intellectually and politically.

I was fortunate in the early 2000s to be able to do research in Italy, where I met Emanuela Tallo, whom I later married. Much of my understanding of Italian politics comes from her. She taught me to really understand an Italian newspaper. Emanuela also played a big role in developing the basic thesis of my first book, which gradually emerged after numerous discussions we had about the character of fascism.

When I met her, Emanuela had recently written a thesis on the importance of the myth of the Risorgimento in the Repubblica di Salò, under the direction of Giuseppe Parlato, a historian of fascist syndicalism. Emanuela brought home to me the paradoxical incorporation of democratic themes into the fascist project, as well as constantly pushing me to concretize my abstract theoretical claims with historical documents.