{"id":142457,"date":"2019-09-09T12:00:35","date_gmt":"2019-09-09T11:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=142457"},"modified":"2019-09-06T11:31:05","modified_gmt":"2019-09-06T10:31:05","slug":"immanuel-wallerstein-an-obituary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/09\/immanuel-wallerstein-an-obituary\/","title":{"rendered":"Immanuel Wallerstein: An Obituary"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0<\/em>5 Sep 2019 – Acclaimed Marxist sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein, author of numerous works on capitalism as a world-system, including a sterling four-volume study completed in 2011, died on 31 Aug at the age of 88. <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Immanuel Wallerstein, credit: Mehr News Agency https:\/\/www.iwallerstein.com\/<\/p><\/div>\n

The\u00a0death of Immanuel Wallerstein is an irreparable loss for the social\u00a0sciences. He was unquestionably the most remarkable American sociologist of the\u00a0twentieth century, and the one with greater international projection.<\/p>\n

His major\u00a0accomplishment was to inspire successive generations of sociologists to discard the\u00a0unit of analysis in which they had been trained (national societies) and rather focus\u00a0on the world system (world economy and the sovereign state system). Following\u00a0insights of Fernand Braudel, Wallerstein believed that the increasing dependencies\u00a0and interdependencies within the world system turned it into an unit of analysis\u00a0capable of generating better working hypotheses for the study of the national\u00a0societies themselves.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Such an analytical break was largely misunderstood in the USA. However, being a global intellectual who was familiar with the social sciences in various languages, Wallerstein was hardly affected. He consorted with almost all the leaders of the liberation movements against colonialism before and after the independences, and set up projects with social scientists of those countries to help build new scientific communities. Let us recall just one particular case: the Center for African Studies of the then recently founded Eduardo Mondlane University, whose director was Aquino de Bragan\u00e7a.<\/p>\n

Wallerstein was a sociologist fully committed to the fate of the world and, above all, to the fate of the more vulnerable populations, whose liberation, he believed, would be possible only in a post capitalist, socialist society. That is why he was always there with us in the World Social Forum, from 2001 to 2016. The latter date was when we both were together for the last time.<\/p>\n

His scientific stance made him question Western, Eurocentric thinking as a\u00a0whole \u2014 one of our many affinities. It still moves me to recall, when we first\u00a0met in Coimbra, the generous appraisal he made of a little book on epistemology I\u00a0had just published:\u00a0Um discurso sobre as ci\u00eancias\u00a0<\/em>(1987). He immediately offered\u00a0to have it published in\u00a0Review<\/em>, the prestigious journal of the Fernand Braudel Center,\u00a0of which he was Director, at the State University of New York-Binghamton.<\/p>\n

Soon after, he\u00a0chaired a large international project concerned with anti-Eurocentric epistemologies,\u00a0funded by the Gulbenkian Foundation, which he titled \u201cTo Open the Social\u00a0Sciences.\u201d Immanuel Wallerstein\u2019s relations with the Center for Social Studies\u00a0(CES), of the School of Economics of the University of Coimbra, were wide and far\u00a0reaching. One of our researchers and faculty, Carlos Fortuna, had already earned his\u00a0doctorate at Binghamton under his supervision.<\/p>\n

During one of Wallerstein\u2019s visits to\u00a0CES we amply discussed the relevance of the concept of semi-periphery to\u00a0characterize countries like Portugal. We realized that Portugal, like other countries\u00a0in Europe, had features that distinguished them from other countries in other\u00a0continents. Thus started our work to reformulate the theory of the semi-periphery\u00a0in order to adapt it to our reality. The outcome was one of the most fruitful ways of\u00a0analyzing Portuguese society. That is why we proposed that the University of Coimbra\u00a0take the honor of granting Immanuel Wallerstein an Honorary Degree in 2006.<\/p>\n

The best way to honor Immanuel Wallerstein\u2019s memory is to carry on with\u00a0our work, bearing in mind the enthusiasm, the professionalism, and the brilliant manner in which he managed to combine scientific objectivity and commitment to\u00a0the damned of the earth \u2014 a stance he never failed to impress on us.<\/p>\n

_________________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Boaventura de Sousa Santos is Professor of Sociology Emeritus at University of Coimbra (Portugal), and Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. He earned an LL.M and J.S.D. from Yale University and holds the Degree of Doctor of Laws, Honoris Causa, by McGill University. He is director of the Center for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra and has written and published widely on the issues of globalization, sociology of law and the state, epistemology, social movements and the World Social Forum. His most recent project ALICE: Leading Europe to a New Way of Sharing the World Experiences<\/a> is funded by an Advanced Grant of the European Research Council. bsantos@ces.uc.pt<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Immanuel Wallerstein held several positions as visiting professor at universities worldwide, was awarded multiple honorary degrees, intermittently served as Directeur d\u2019\u00e9tudes associ\u00e9 at the \u00c9cole des Hautes \u00c9tudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and was president of the International Sociological Association between 1994 and 1998. During the 1990s, he chaired the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences. The object of the commission was to indicate a direction for social scientific inquiry for the next 50 years. In 2000 he joined the Yale Sociology department as Senior Research Scholar. In 2003 he received the Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award from the American Sociological Association.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 portside.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

5 Sep 2019 – Acclaimed Marxist sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein, author of numerous works on capitalism as a world-system, died on 31 Aug at the age of 88. His death is an irreparable loss for the social sciences. He was unquestionably the most remarkable American sociologist of the twentieth century, and the one with greater international projection. RIP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":142453,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[226],"tags":[1425,1142],"class_list":["post-142457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-obituaries","tag-immanuel-wallerstein","tag-obituary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=142457"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142457\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/142453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=142457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=142457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=142457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}