Immanuel Wallerstein, a highly influential sociologist and radical intellectual, died at the age of eighty-eight on August 31. I never knew Wallerstein personally. I would see him at academic conferences from time to time, always accompanied by his wife, Beatrice, who would sit in the front row at his talks. Yet Wallerstein was a towering figure in my intellectual development.

Wallerstein was the last surviving member of the affectionately named “Gang of Four” — an ensemble of scholars dedicated to the study (and abolition) of global capitalism that also included Samir Amin, Andre Gunder Frank, and my doctoral advisor, Giovanni Arrighi. Giovanni and Wallerstein spent many years together at the Fernand Braudel Center — an institute founded by Wallerstein at SUNY Binghamton — and I’ve heard many, often hilarious, stories about the tight-knit community of radical scholars that blossomed there.

I’ll leave it to others to recount those tales. For me, Wallerstein leaves behind a way of thinking — an approach he called “world-systems analysis” — that, at its core, remains as compelling today as when I picked up the first volume of The Modern World-System as a young woman.