Gianfranco Poggi, who died on Thursday, was the stereotype of the absent-minded academic. It happened to him quite partially shaved. Or if the shirt doesn’t fit properly or the jacket is badly buttoned. However, he was able to quote entire passages from Max Weber’s complete works from memory. I would like to refer you to an article that just appeared in a Korean magazine. He happened to see himself consulting the statutes of a forgotten Hanseatic city in the original language, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.
Above all, he was a true rarity, a humble academic. Nothing in his daily demeanor betrayed his extraordinary intellectual and academic career, the absurd amount of prizes, awards and guest fellowships around the world. While many academics do normal things and think of them as extraordinary, Gianfranco lived an extraordinary life and thought it was normal.
Born into a large Catholic family that produced an impressive body of intellectuals, he was involved as a young man in the troubled renaissance of Italian social sciences. He took part in some of the first social surveys carried out in Italy and above all played a fundamental role in introducing sociology and above all social theory in Italy. The first published essays by many of the authors who are now (but not then) considered classics bear his name. Professor in Edinburgh, then in Sydney, then in Virginia and then at the European University Institute, Poggi only returned to Italy, to Trento, at the end of his career.
His books, all translated into different languages, revolve around two main themes for which Poggi remains the author of reference.
The first is the political sociology of the state. Contrary to the frequent tendency to resolve the organised, corporate aspect of power into a multitude of more or less intangible structures, Poggi has shown that it is not possible to understand contemporary society by considering the centrality (and originality) of the development of the modern West disregards state. A subject accompanied by his constant concern for the rule of law, which he does not take for granted but as a fragile product of a series of perhaps unrepeatable historical circumstances. Had it been taken seriously, much of the talk about globalization would have been spared.
Second, and perhaps more important, is his constant assertion that any serious scholar must engage with the “classics” of social thought, that extraordinary group of minds (most notably Durkheim, Marx, Simmel, and Weber) that defined the horizon of the social sciences . According to Poggi, the social sciences certainly have a cumulative dimension in which today’s knowledge surpasses and replaces what came before. But they also have a number of fundamental concerns and ideas (as well as ambiguities and limitations…) that these authors have articulated in an unparalleled manner. To the many who argue that reading the classics is a useless, if not wrong, activity, Poggi replied in one of his justifiably most famous essays: “Lego is useless.” If only Anvur would read Poggi.
One episode is enough to know who Gianfranco Poggi was. Not so many years ago in Italy, to become a university professor, you had to teach a lesson in front of a commission. One candidate, more from ignorance than imprudence, devoted part of his lecture to challenging an interpretation which the most authoritative member of that commission had made famous many years earlier. As expected, a rather heated debate ensued, with no prisoners being taken. When time was running out, the unfortunate left the room, immersed in dire predictions. Before you know you’ve passed the exam. The warmest judgment had been written by the commissioner who had (unknowingly) objected. A few days later, the same (former) commissioner called the (former) unfortunate and suggested that they write a book together, a unique rather than rare occurrence in his bibliography. It looks like a clumsy academic adaptation of Casablanca. And instead it’s a true story, I can attest, as that was Commissioner Gianfranco Poggi and the unfortunate (now former) is the one who remembers it here.
