Charles Derber
Charles Derber is an American academic, author and political activist. He is a professor of sociology at Boston College. His work focuses on capitalism, globalization, corporate power and oligarchy, populism, authoritarianism and democracy, militarism, the climate crisis, cultural individualism, and social justice movements.
Early life and education
Derber was born in Washington DC in January 1944, the son of University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign professor Milton Derber. Derber protested the Vietnam War and read the works of Karl Marx and Herbert Marcuse while in jail, according to an interview with Derber. He attended Yale University, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1965 and was a member of Manuscript Society. He then studied at the University of Chicago where he earned a PhD in sociology.Career
Derber began teaching at Brandeis University in 1970 and switched to Boston College in 1980. He became a professor in 1991 and has taught in the undergraduate and graduate programs.Writings and views
Early works: attention, narcissism, and wilding
In 1980, he published a book entitled The Pursuit of Attention that focuses on ego-centeredness and "conversational narcissism" in everyday life, which he shows are structured by class, gender, and America's individualistic culture. H. Wayne Hogan wrote that the book "...adds nothing to the existing stock of knowledge on this subject." Mary F. Rogers, however, from the University of West Florida, wrote: "...this study is a refreshingly balanced, strongly grounded exploration of the routines Americans exploit in competing for attention. The author argues convincingly that those routines exhibit many features of market behavior."In Beyond Wilding, he used 1989 Central Park jogger case as a lens to examine "wilding," a term some perpetrators used to describe random acts of violence, as a larger metaphor for pervasive anti-social behavior in American society. He went on to publish the The Wilding of America: Money, Mayhem, and the New American Dream in 1996. Derber defines wilding as "self-oriented behavior that hurts others and damages the social fabric." Barbara Chasin wrote that the book analyzes "...the consequences of an unregulated American capitalist system." In 2013, Derber published his book Sociopathic Society. He writes that we are raising too many males to not have empathy. Relatedly, he has written that "Climate change is a symptom of the sociopathic character of our capitalist model."
Critiques of corporations and capitalism
Derber criticizes the expansive role and influences of corporations in society in his writing and commentary. In Corporation Nation: How Corporations Are Taking Over Our Lives and What We Can Do About It, he argues that America has entered a new Gilded Age dominated by corporate oligopolies, likened to robber barons, that seize wealth, erode democracy, and shape every aspect of life, from work and consumption to politics, while relying on public subsidies yet prioritizing profits over societal well-being. Using a polemical style, he critiques trends like massive mergers, job displacement with contractors, while synthesizing views from thinkers like William Greider and John Kenneth Galbraith. Derber proposes "positive populism," a broad alliance to reform large corporations into "public" entities accountable to stakeholders. He also wrote People Before Profit, which critiques corporate globalization and proposes alternatives. After the February 2018, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, which killed 17, sparked teen survivors' #boycottNRA campaigns, leading over a dozen companies to sever ties with the National Rifle Association. Derber told USA Today that companies face little downside in severing NRA ties: "The corporations are not taking a large risk by engaging in this. They’re incurring greater risk if they don’t try to ally themselves with this strong population majority and the emotionally compelling voice of these young people." He emphasized corporations' superior leverage over states and municipalities by citing Amazon's HQ2 bidding war as proof of municipalities' dependence.Political regimes
Derber's Regime Change Begins at Home and Hidden Power analyze what he sees as the fusion of political and corporate power in the United States, framing it as a threat to democratic institutions. In Regime Change Begins at Home, Derber conceptualizes American history since the American Civil War as a succession of alternating regimes, defining "corporate regimes" as systems of rule that undermine democracy via "corpocracy," the marriage between big business and big government while prioritizing monopolies and profits over citizens and fair competition. He saw George W. Bush era marking the third such regime rooted in Gilded Age and Roaring Twenties precedents. Hidden Power scrutinizes presidential alliances with corporate interests as hidden mechanisms that threaten democracy.His 2008 book Morality Wars analyzes hegemonic discourses from the Roman Empire to the present. It also examines religious and "born again" ideologies, from German fascism to contemporary evangelical politics in the United States. Another 2008 book, with Katherine Adam, The New Feminized Majority, examines the gendered character of values and politics in America. It argues that a new electoral majority has embraced progressive values historically associated with women, values now shared by millions of men.
Democracy, authoritarianism, and sociocide
In a 2024 Truthout interview, Derber and Yale R. Magrass discussed the "deep state" as an entrenched corporate-military-governmental alliance since the American Civil War that upholds class and caste hierarchies, undermining democracy. They note the military-industrial complex, through Pentagon ties to contractors like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, as its core, enabling a permanent garrison state post-WWII that is rooted in America's dual capitalist and racial legacies that influenced authoritarian regimes, including Nazis. Tracing this through the Gilded Age, Jim Crow, and post-WWII "garrison state," they highlight bipartisan roles, growth of the military-industrial complex under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Republican deregulation under Ronald Reagan and racial appeals under Donald Trump which fueled neofascism and identity politics over class solidarity. They advocate "left populism," drawing from abolitionism, 1930s labor movements, and Occupy Wall Street, to foster interracial alliances and achieve "deep democracy." They argued that Democrats need a realignment.His 2025 book, Bonfire: American Sociocide, Broken Relations and the Quest for Democracy, argues that market-driven competition and greed are breaking down social relations and community, leading to American sociocide, an epidemic of loneliness, and a breeding ground of authoritarianism.