From Felipe
by Felipe Amin Filomeno
In 2003, I found The Long Twentieth Century on a bookshelf in a Brazilian bookstore. The book was listed among those required for the official exam for admission to the diplomatic career in Brazil and, as this was my professional goal then, I started reading the book, which ultimately brought me deeper into academia. Later in the same year, Giovanni and Beverly went to Brazil for an international conference and some of my professors, who were then reading his works, arranged to bring them to my home town – Florianópolis – to give a lecture and some talks. A couple of days before they arrived, one of my professors asked me to do a simultaneous translation of his lecture from Italian to Portuguese, but I didn’t trust my Calabrese roots so much as to assume that task. During the talks, my only direct contact with Giovanni was saying to him “Potrebbe fermare per favore?”, asking him to autograph my copy of The Long Twentieth Century. I continued to do research using his theories and, facing the difficulties in pursuing an academic career in Brazil, I decided that I would only go on in this profession if I could have my doctoral studies in the United States, especially under the mentorship of Giovanni and Beverly.
In 2007, I started my doctoral studies at Hopkins, excited to learn world-systems analysis with one of its masters. World-systems analysis, however, was not at all the most important subject that Giovanni taught me. Firstly, I was amazed by his own interpretation of Marx, Weber and Durkheim and I remember thinking to myself during his classes of Theories of Society “I am the dwarf on the shoulders of the giant.“. Secondly, I was struck by his qualities as an intellectual: humility, independence (how to label someone who says “A Weberian is anyone who calls himself a Weberian”?), flexibility (“when I realized an idea or concept wasn’t useful anymore, I would go after something else”) and rigour (“when you criticize an author, don’t focus on his weak points, focus on the strong points, so that you can make it better and move on”). Thirdly, I learned from his inspiring personal trajectory. In my own turn against my class background, coming from a country severely marked by inequalities, it was very encouraging to know that Giovanni once made the same move, as he embraced a leftist scholarship instead of becoming a businessman. Giovanni would also give me a hard time in my conversion from an economist to a historical sociologist, experienced as he was by his own “long march from neoclassical economics to comparative-historical sociology.”. Making comments on my drafts, he once said “Felipe, you write numbers in the body of the text and mention social classes only in footnotes, you have to bring the social classes to the body of the text and put the numbers on the footnotes.”. Because of this personal and intellectual attributes, Giovanni will always be a role model for me.
At the exact hour that he passed away in Baltimore, I was giving a lecture about his intellectual biography and Adam Smith in Beijing to a class of young college students in Brazil. It was very symbolic to me to be passing on his message when he was entering eternity in the other side of the world. I am thankful for his legacy and look forward to “focusing on the strong points and making it better” along with Beverly.
