Lloyd Rudolph

University of Chicago | UC · Department of Political Science

Dynastic politics, usually presumed to be the antithesis of democracy, is a routine aspect of politics in many modern democracies. This book introduces a new theoretical perspective on dynasticism in democracies, using original data on twenty-first-century Indian parliaments. It argues that the roots of dynastic politics lie at least in part in mod...

Perhaps inadvertently, since he gives no indication that he is aware of this field of knowledge, Richard Sorabji has made an important contribution to comparative political theory—a subject pioneered by Fred Dallmayr, Anthony Parel, and others—by interpreting Gandhi’s thought in the context of Stoic and other ancient Greek philosophers. But there a...

In the master narrative of the formation of the modern state, its unified, monopoly sovereignty is presented as universal, the natural culmination of a teleological process. We challenge the naturalness and universality of that claim by historicizing the sovereignty concept. We do so by examining the history of state formation in late medieval and...

Not long ago, many political scientists suffered from economics envy. Some still do. They view economics as the queen of the social sciences, claiming that it is “scientific,” like physics. Physicists and other natural scientists spend most of their time trying to explain phenomena, but non-behavioral micro-economists spend most of their time on ma...

The many years Susanne Rudolph and I spent editing and interpreting Amar Singh's diary for our book, Reversing the Gaze , led us to reflect on the multiplicity of forms of knowledge, starting with Amar Singh's first-person, subjective knowledge and extending to the situational truths of Gandhi's satyagrahas .

The authors of Explaining Indian Democracy reiterate their view on the changing role of the state in India and the meaning and consequences of centrist politics.

his provocative volume on the state departs markedly from a conventional analysis that universalizes and standardizes what the state is, does, and means. The writers mean to engage state and stateness as it is encountered in everyday life, ranging from urban and small town life to hospital treatment to cinema attendance and art exhibitions. These e...

This article on the making of US foreign policy for south Asia examines the US strategy of "offshore balancing" in historical perspective. It spans the cold war period when the US supported Pakistan against India in checking the rise of the latter, the post-cold war period when the Clinton administration seemed to be willing to accord recognition t...

What should count as knowledge in political science? We have tried here to show that subjectivity is valid and useful, that firstperson accounts of experiencetelling what I know,contribute to knowledge. The move to subjective knowledge does not require the abandonment of objectivity. Self-consciousness and reflexivity simply make it possible to ren...

The concepts of public space and civil society are deeply rooted in the Anglo-American world. It is nevertheless possible to use them in the Indian context, where the ashram can be considered as a local variant. Of course, the religious dimension of the ashram is opposed to the rationalism of the Enlightenment, but the civic virtue, the search for...

This paper considers what light the associational forms that Gandhi created shed on the debate about civil society and the public sphere in political and social theory. As John Keane remarks, "reflexive, self-organizing non-governmental organizations that some call civil society can and do live by other names in other linguistic and cultural milieu...

Journal of Democracy 13.1 (2002) 52-66 Conventional wisdom has it that India is the world's largest democracy, but few have recognized that it is so against the odds. The Indian experience runs against the widely held view that rich societies are much more likely to be democratic than poor ones, and that societies with large minority populations ar...

The dawn of liberalisation in the early 1990s saw the gradual emergence of a federal market economy, with decision-making powers shared between the centre and states. A measure of economic sovereignty and decentralisation has now placed the onus on state chief ministers to effect economic growth in their respective states. Not only do they need to...

What Amar Singh wrote from 1898 to 1942 was a personal diary, but what we read now is an ethnography - a cultural account of a way of life through which the diarist comes to know both himself and his culture. It illustrates the importance of subjective knowledge and human agency in the making and shaping of culture.

Economists and political scientists have become increasingly interested in the political economy of India during the past decade and particularly during the past three or four years. The titles under review will be valuable not only to India specialists but also to comparative scholars because of the intriguing mix of conditions found in India. Mor...

The pursuit of Lakshmi, the fickle goddess of prosperity and good fortune, is a metaphor for the aspirations of the state and people of independent India. In the latest of their distinguished contributions to South Asian studies, scholars Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph focus on this modern-day pursuit by offering a comprehensive analys...

The bifurcation of political science into American and comparative politics impoverishes both. The division parochializes them by encapsulating the study of politics within national boundaries. The result is to deprive each of the theoretical contributions generated by the other and to cut them off from the institutional and policy alternatives eac...

The Rudolphs' analysis reveals that Gandhi's charisma was deeply rooted in the aspects of Indian tradition that he interpreted for his time. They key to his political influence was his ability to realize in both his daily life and his public actions, cultural ideals that many Indians honored but could not enact themselves—ideals such as the tradi...

Weber's understanding of bureaucracy, despite substantial qualification and revision, remains the dominant paradigm for the study of administration and formal organizations. We continue the process of revision by accepting his ideal-typical concepts of bureaucratic and patrimonial administration, but subject them to theoretical and historical reint...

Patrimonial politics and administration in princely India from the middle of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century are the subjects of this essay. The bureaucratic lineage, exemplified here by three related families, is our unit of analysis for understanding elite formation and conflict. The period of the lineage's historical ascend...

In 1956 Susanne Rudolph and I arrived in India for the first of many research years there. We were among the second batch of Ford Foundation Foreign Area Training Fellows. As area scholars we were committed to using ethnographic methods. We used political ethnography to explore India’s associational life. Our research led us to understand that cast...

Political economy has a career; after its invention in the eighteenth century it kept changing. The intellectual history of its theory and practice reveals contestation more than certainty. We will try to capture changing discourse about political economy by "reading" paradigms (theoretical schools) in pre-modern, modern and postmodern settings. En...

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Gandhi, with his loincloth and walking stick, seems an unlikely advocate of postmodernism. But in Postmodern Gandhi, Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph portray him as just that in eight thought-provoking essays that aim to correct the common association of Gandhi with traditionalism. Combining core sections of their influential book Gandhi: The Traditional...

Stressing the variations in meaning of modernity and tradition, this work shows how in India traditional structures and norms have been adapted or transformed to serve the needs of a modernizing society. The persistence of traditional features within modernity, it suggests, answers a need of the human condition. Three areas of Indian life are analy...

Marx's century-old socio-political analysis of peasant nations and of India's traditional village and caste society, because it captures so much of contemporary social and political analysis, provides a convenient framework for critical discussion and evaluation of the relationship between traditional society and modern politics in India. Peasant n...

“You have given India,” Secretary of State Sir Samuel Hoare once told his officers, “justice such as the East has never known before.” For most Englishmen, having established therule of law” on the Indian subcontinent was probably the proudest achievement of the British raj. They believed that they had substituted legal security for disorder, predi...

The Indian Municipal Elections of 1959 raised in compelling form the question of the relationship between urban life and political radicalism; radical parties of both the left and the right gained ground in Bombay, Delhi, and Madras. In Calcutta, radicalism already had a long history. The Madras results, when put in the context of the state's polit...