Abstract
Massimo Rosati has left us much too early.
I got to know Massimo Rosati only four years ago when I joined the faculty of the University of Rome Tor Vergata on a temporary fellowship. Our collaboration soon turned into friendship, and our research interests coincided almost naturally—Massimo’s interest in post-Kemalist Turkey as a “postsecular society in the making,” and mine in post-Soviet Russia). Massimo spearheaded a number of concrete projects, which with hindsight make the time spent at Tor Vergata one of the most productive of my professional life thus far. The foundation of CSPS (the Center for the Study and Documentation of Religion and Political Institutions in Post-Secular Societies, www.csps.uniroma2.it) was followed by a tight schedule of activities: the creation of the book-series Modernità Postsecolare; fund-raising; workshops (we published the results of one of these workshops as Multiple Modernities and Post-Secular Societies in 2012); lectures; a new project on religious assistance in Italian penitentiary institutions with Valeria Fabretti; nerve-wracking discussions with the administration and heart-lifting exchanges that reminded us what we were doing this for. Hardly a week passed in the entire period I knew Massimo (apart from holidays) where he and I would not be in contact by phone or mail in order to discuss issues and plans related to CSPS.
Apart from the activities related to CSPS, which were the most common theme of our conversations, Massimo was engaged in various other professional activities. One was the work on his forthcoming book, The Making of Post-secular Society: The Turkish Laboratory. This book constituted a new step in Massimo’s long engagement with Durkheim, on the one side, and Habermas, on the other. Massimo’s work was inspired profoundly by Durkheim. Among his works we find his influential Italian translation of Durkheim's Elementary Forms of Religious Life (2005, with a second edition in 2013), his original reinterpretation of Durkheim in Solidarietà e sacro (2002); his co-editing, with W S F Pickering on the anthology Suffering and Evil: The Durkheimian Legacy (2008) and his book Ritual and the Sacred: A Neo-Durkheimian Analysis of Politics, Religion and the Self (2009). But he also continued to be in critical conversation with Jürgen Habermas, ever since his first academic dissertation on Habermas’ theory of communicative action in 1993 (published in 1994). Massimo had the necessary curiosity and intellectual dedication to fill theoretical debates with empirical analysis. He looked at the religious world of post-Kemalist Turkey with sympathetic and critical eyes and, in The Making of Post-secular Society, has brought together his neo-Durkheimian approach to religion with a critical rethinking of the Habermasian notion of the post-secular. I have learned a lot from Massimo’s conceptual and methodological approach, and I am sure that it will continue to inspire other researchers in the future.
The other area of professional activity of Massimo Rosati was the official, the institutional, side. After completing his PhD at the University of Florence in 1998, he obtained a post as assistant professor at the University of Perugia, and then shortly thereafter, at 35, the University of Salerno hired him as an associate professor. Rosati taught sociology in Salerno for slightly longer than three years and then, in 2008, moved to the University of Rome Tor Vergata, where he earned a reputation as dedicated teacher of general sociology who took very seriously his work as supervisor of numerous MA and PhD theses. As recently as December 2013, he turned out to be the youngest sociologist in Italy to obtain the newly established “habilitation” as a full professor. He was a professional who navigated skillfully, patiently, and with the necessary degree of irony both international and Italian academic waters, with their often diverging incentive-structures. I admired him for this capacity. He was an example for a whole generation of young academics.
Massimo Rosati was an active member of the editorial board of several sociological journals and joined many of those networks where today the mission of the university, in times of over-bureaucratized routines and the attendant deadline-driven frenzy, seems to have migrated: the Gallarate-Cortona permanent seminar in Critical Theory, the Urbino-group and the Colloquium Philosophy & Society in Italy, the yearly Prague conference Philosophy and Social Science, the Istanbul Seminars of ResetDoC, the various Centers for Durkheimian Studies (especially in the UK and Brazil), the Hrant Dink Foundation in Turkey, and the Center for Critical Research on Religion. In November 2013, he was furthermore nominated director of the Roman Center for Jewish Studies (CERSE). His dedication as a public intellectual and his impact on Italian cultural life can also be felt on the pages of his blog Living Together, Differently, on the website of Reset, with posts about memory, post-secularism, and the bridging of cross-cultural and religious divides (http://www.reset.it/blog/author/rosati). His last post was a reflection on ritual and remembrance, dated 27 January, the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, three days before passing away.
Massimo Rosati has left us much too early. His dedication to his family, his capacity for hard work, his respectful care for his friends, and his ability to translate his intellectual and human curiosity into an admirable academic output—all this has been interrupted suddenly and cruelly by an unforeseeable deterioration of his health. I wish I would never have had to write these lines. To Massimo, in highest esteem.