My memories of Giovanni

by Jose Itzigsohn

I first became acquainted with Giovanni and his work when Beverly joined the faculty at John Hopkins. I was then a graduate student there and although I was never Giovanni’s student nor do I work in the same area as he did, he always took interest in my work and he had a big influence on my own development as a sociologist. It was through reading Giovanni’s work that I came to see my work in terms of world system analysis. During these years Giovanni has been a friend and someone I looked up to. He was an example of a scholar and intellectual. In spite of the enormous merit of his work and the great recognition he achieved, he was always approachable, and always willing to entertain a conversation about his arguments. For me Giovanni is one of the greatest scholars of this generation and The Long Twentieth Century is, in my opinion, one of the best books of all times.

I want to remember him here with two small anecdotes that paint the Giovanni I came to know. The first has to do with soccer, one of the recurrent topics of our conversations (being Argentinean I had a hard time accepting his unequivocal support for the Brazilian national soccer team, but I learned to get over it). I remember him one day telling me how he decided “to abandon the church,” meaning by that his support for AC Milan, once Berlusconi took it over. I always remember that because I was not able to do the same once a right wing politician took control of the club I support to launch a political career that has so far taken him to be the mayor of Buenos Aires. But beyond the soccer small talk, I have been thinking that his ability to “abandon the church” is at the core of the originality of Giovanni’s work. Reading his interview with David Harvey in New Left Review I am impressed by his ability to look for new ways to think about issues, to revisit theoretical questions from different angles, keeping always at the center the commitment for a more just and egalitarian world.

This leads me to the second anecdote, this one related to my conversations with him about his scholarship. I remember when I started hearing him talk about the changes in China; I could not understand his enthusiasm for markets. He was speaking from the left, but not from a position that I could make sense of. It was not a traditional Marxist position, or the support for state centered development that I learned in Latin America. It was not a social democratic or a “bringing the state back in” institutional argument, and certainly not a “post” of any kind. Frustrated with my inability to locate where he was speaking from, I thought I saw anarchist leanings in his claims (by a process of elimination that was the only possibility that I could entertain) and given what I perceived as a support for small producers, one day, confused and clueless, I asked him if he was a Proudhonian.  I still remember the disgust in his expression. He let me know in no uncertain terms that he did not have any sympathy for Proudhon’s arguments, that instead he was a Smithian. I could not conceive then of a Smithian left. Now, after reading Adam Smith in Beijing, although I am still not completely convinced about his analysis of contemporary China, the power of its logic is clear to me, and the idea of non-capitalist market development seems to me important and useful.  And perhaps that is the challenge that Giovanni left us: to think in systematic and original ways about our world and its possibilities for change. I miss him.