Kreml, William P. 1941-
KREML, William P. 1941-
PERSONAL: Born August 5, 1941, in Evanston, IL; son of Franklin M. (a university vice president) and Margaret (Parker) Kreml; married Nancy Mace, October 12, 1991; children: Elizabeth, Suzanne. Ethnicity: "Caucasian." Education: Northwestern University, B.A., 1962, J.D., 1965; Indiana University—Bloomington, Ph.D., 1972. Politics: Democrat. Hobbies and other interests: Creative writing, politics.
ADDRESSES: Home—111 Southwood Dr., Columbia, SC 29205. Office—Department of Government and International Studies, University of South Carolina—Columbia, Columbia, SC 29208; fax: 803-777-8255. E-mail—kreml@mindspring.com.
CAREER: Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, assistant professor of business law, 1965-66; University of Tennessee, Knoxville, assistant professor of business law, 1966-68; University of South Carolina—Columbia, assistant professor, 1971-77, associate professor, 1977-84, professor of government and international studies, 1984-96, distinguished professor emeritus, 1996—, vice chair of department, 1991-93, interim chair, 1993. University of Peking, visiting professor, 1994, 1997; Mars Hill College, adjunct professor, 1998. Committee on the Constitutional System, cofounder and member; Concord Coalition, coordinator, 1995—. Military service: U.S. Army Reserve, 1959-62.
MEMBER: International Society of Political Psychology, American Political Science Association, Southern Political Science Association.
AWARDS, HONORS: Citizen of the Year Award for South Carolina, American Association of University Professors, 1984; named one of fifteen leading philosophers in the United States, Institute for Policy Studies, Washington, DC, 1988; Teaching Award, Mortar Board, 1996.
WRITINGS:
The Anti-authoritarian Personality, Pergamon (Elmsford, NY), 1977.
The Middle-Class Burden, Carolina Academic Press (Durham, NC), 1979, revised edition published as America's Middle Class: From Subsidy to Abandonment, 1997.
Relativism and the Natural Left, New York University Press (New York, NY), 1984.
A Model of Politics, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1985.
Psychology, Relativism, and Politics, New York University Press (New York, NY), 1991.
Losing Balance: The De-democratization of America, M. E. Sharpe (Armonk, NY), 1991.
The Constitutional Divide: The Private and Public Sectors in American Law, University of South Carolina Press (Columbia, SC), 1997.
Contributor to books, including The Democrats Must Lead, edited by James MacGregor Burns and others, Westview Press (Boulder, CO), 1992. Contributor of articles and reviews to periodicals, including Newsday, Alternatives, Chinese Social Science Quarterly, and Administration and Society.
WORK IN PROGRESS: Green River: The Twenty-first-Century Left.
SIDELIGHTS: William P. Kreml once told CA: "The body of my work has centered around the creation of an original political philosophy based upon psychology. I call this theory 'psychological relativism.' It is based on a subjective, rather than an objective, reading of Kant's and Hegel's different understandings of the analytic and the synthetic cognitions. It argues that, instead of recognizing Kant's and Hegel's notions of the analytic and synthetic cognitions as objectively determined positions on the forms of knowledge, these differentiated positions lay out the polar positions of a psychologically determined, relativistic preference for different kinds of knowledge. Kant's description of the equation '5 + 7 = 12' as a synthetic cognition, finding the differences in the two sides of the equation adequate to say that they are of a qualitatively distinct nature, contrasts with Hegel's notion that the equation is analytic since all elements are merely mathematical.
"My first work, The Anti-authoritarian Personality, deals with the affective range of authoritarian to anti-authoritarian personality traits and contends that a political theory of relativity is indeed possible. A more recent work, Relativism and the Natural Left, argues that the cognitive range of preference for analytic and synthetic cognitions has dictated a 'fission-fusion' within Western intellectual thought, the rationalistic positions of Plato and Aristotle on the one hand and the skeptical positions of Thrasymachus and Protagoras on the other, dividing according to their psychological differentiation and then reuniting with psychologically compatible positions later in intellectual history. The epistemological arguments within all of the social sciences are ultimately the result of cognitive preferences for either similar or unlike variables.
"In Psychology, Relativism, and Politics I complete the trilogy of relativistic works, defining the essence of psychological equity, its impact on material equity, and the role of the psychological variable in preferences for both specific public policies and for specific structural and procedural arrangements that favor one form of cognition over another.
"The Constitutional Divide: The Private and Public Sectors in American Law is an application of psychological relativism to Anglo-American jurisprudence. It argues that the sectoral divide, not the institutional divide between the political branches and the courts, is the principal divide in American constitutional history, and that the American sectoral separation is simply an extension of the sectoral divide that was defining itself, and English jurisprudence, since Magna Carta. I suggest that there have been two grand dialectical periods in Anglo-American legal history—the shape of the dialectic containing the alternate cognitions of analytic, synthetic, and then analytic forms—a position that contrasts with Hegel's view. I argue that the cognitively analytic and synthetic positions are now exclusively housed within the private and the public sectors respectively, and that it is permissible for the judiciary to expand the law through use of the synthetic cognition, as it did in the Warren Court period, to perfect the 'majoritarianism' that is encompassed within the synthetically constructed Bill of Rights that balanced the analytically constructed seven constitutional articles."