Giovanni Arrighi

Giovanni Arrighi (7 July 1937 – 18 June 2009) was an Italian economist, sociologist and world-systems analyst, from 1998 a Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University.

His work has been translated into over fifteen languages.

Arrighi was born in Milan, Italy in 1937.

He received his Laurea in economics from the Bocconi University in 1960.

Arrighi began his career teaching at the University College of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and later at the University College of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, where he developed arguments about how the labor supply and labor resistance affected the development of colonialism and national liberation movements, and where he met Immanuel Wallerstein with whom he late collaborated on a number of research projects.

After returning to Italy in 1969, Arrighi and others formed the "Gruppo Gramsci" in 1971.

In 1979 Arrighi joined Wallerstein and Terence Hopkins as a professor of sociology at the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations at Binghamton University.

It was during this time that the Fernand Braudel Center became known as the main center of world-systems analysis, attracting scholars from all over the world.

His trilogy on the origins and transformations of global capitalism began in 1994 with a book that reinterpreted the evolution of capitalism, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times.

The book was published in at least ten languages.

In 1999, he published Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System with Beverly Silver, and in 2007, he published Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century, comparing Western and East Asian economic development and exploring China’s rise as an economic world power.

Although in many ways intellectually close to Immanuel Wallerstein, Arrighi tends to ascribe greater significance to the recent shift in economic power to East Asia.

He also emphasized his debt to Adam Smith, Max Weber, Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Karl Polanyi and Joseph Schumpeter.

Journal articles and book chapters since 2001

He had been diagnosed with cancer in July 2008.

His widow and collaborator is Professor Beverly Silver.

Giovanni completed a second edition of The Long Twentieth Century in 2009.

Arrighi died in his home in Baltimore on 18 June 2009.

A retrospective interview by David Harvey on his intellectual trajectory, The Winding Paths of Capital, was published in the March/April 2009 issue of New Left Review.

Monographs