Farewell to Gianfranco Poggi, brilliant and distracted sociologist

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Gianfranco Poggi, who passed away on Thursday, was the stereotype of the distracted academic. He happened to meet him rather partially shaved. Or with the shirt out of place, with the jacket buttoned badly. But he was able to quote entire passages from the complete works of Max Weber by heart. To refer you to an article that has just appeared in a Korean magazine. He happened to see him consult the statutes, in the original language, of some forgotten Hanseatic city as if it were the most normal thing in the world.
He was above all a real rarity, a modest academic. Nothing in his daily behavior revealed his extraordinary intellectual and academic career, the almost absurd amount of prizes, awards and visiting fellowships around the world. If many academics do normal things thinking they are extraordinary, Gianfranco lived an extraordinary life thinking it was normal.
Born into a large Catholic family that produced an impressive number of intellectuals, he found himself involved in the difficult renaissance of the Italian social sciences as a young man. He participated in some of the first social surveys conducted in Italy and, above all, he played a fundamental role in introducing sociology, and above all social theory, in Italy. Early published essays on many authors now (but not then) considered classics bear his name. Professor in Edinburgh, and then in Sydney, and then in Virginia, and then at the European University Institute, Poggi returned to Italy, to Trento, only at the end of his career.
His books, all translated into various languages, revolve around two main themes, for which Poggi still remains the author of reference.
The first is the political sociology of the state. Against a frequent tendency to dissolve the organized, corporate aspect of power into a variety of more or less impalpable devices, Poggi has demonstrated that it is not possible to understand contemporary society if one ignores the centrality (and originality) of the development of modern western state. Theme to which he accompanied his constant concern for the rule of law, seen not as a given but as the fragile product of a series of perhaps unrepeatable historical circumstances. Had it been taken seriously, much of the chatter about globalization would have been spared.
The second, and perhaps more important, is his constant claim of the need for any serious scholar to confront the ‘classics’ of social thought, that extraordinary group of minds (above all Durkheim, Marx, Simmel and Weber) who defined the horizon of the social sciences. According to Poggi, the social sciences certainly have a cumulative dimension, where today’s knowledge surpasses and replaces the previous one. But they also have a founding set of concerns and ideas (and ambiguities, and limits…) that those authors have articulated in an unsurpassed way. To the many who argue that reading the classics is a useless if not wrong activity, Poggi replied, in one of his essays justifiably more famous than him, “Lego quia useless”. If only Poggi read at Anvur.
To know who Gianfranco Poggi was, one episode is enough. Not too many years ago, to become a university professor in Italy you had to give a lesson in front of a commission. One candidate, more out of ignorance than rashness, devoted a part of the lecture to contesting an interpretation which, many years before, had been made famous precisely by the most authoritative member of that commission. As expected, a rather heated debate ensued, one in which no prisoners are taken. Time running out, the wretch left the room immersed in gloomy predictions. Before you find out you passed the test. The warmest judgment had been written by the commissioner who had (unknowingly) challenged. A few days later, the same (ex-) commissioner called the (ex) wretch to propose that they write a book together, a more unique than rare event in his bibliography. It looks like a clumsy academic adaptation of Casablanca. And instead it is a true story, as I can certify given that that commissioner was Gianfranco Poggi and the (now ex-) wretch is whoever remembers it here.