Over the past 50 years, APSA President Susanne Rudolph's research has helped transform the study of politics both within the discipline of political science and across disciplinary boundaries in the social sciences and humanities. Her work has addressed some of the foundational questions of political science that cut across the study of political economy, culture, history, and social and political thought. How does culture shape the trajectories of modernization and economic development? How can an understanding of the modern nationstate and the relationship between state and civil society be advanced through a comparative and transnational perspective? How can the specificities of context and the discontinuities of history be made compatible with the development of universal theoretical models and ideal types? In providing nuanced answers to such questions, Susanne Rudolph's scholarship has continually broken new ground in political science by rethinking existing paradigms.

A central theme underlying Rudolph's work is her concern with the epistemological and political nature of category construction. Anticipating what have now become established areas of analysis in the social sciences, Rudolph interrogated the boundaries and the presumed opposition between categories such as modernity and tradition, culture and political economy, and interpretive meaning and objective reality. The boldness of her scholarship is embodied in her ability to rethink paradigms through unlikely comparisons and by broadening conventional definitions of politics. She has engaged with figures as varied as Weber, Gandhi, and Foucault and moves effortlessly from rethinking macrolevel questions of security and transnationalism to textured interpretations that unravel the linkages between politics, identity, and history.

Rudolph grounds broad questions of comparative analysis in area-based analysis, drawing on a long engagement with the politics of South Asia. Her approach challenges models of political science that create a dichotomy between generalization and theory-building on the one hand, and the qualitative knowledge associated with area studies and single cases on the other. Instead, she uses interpretations of contemporary politics in India to challenge and rethink some of the central concepts of political science.

Rudolph calls for particular attention to the role of culture in shaping political behavior as well as categories of political thought. Her scholarship contests rational choice approaches that explain political behavior through fixed definitions of self-interest as well as variants of Marxian analysis that explain historical and political change in terms of economic modes of production. She instead makes a compelling case for “situated knowledge,” informed by attention to contingency and context. However, her research also challenges intellectual approaches that have drifted towards cultural relativism or that have eschewed theoretical generalization in the name of localized, static forms of cultural difference, particularly between the “West” and the “Third World.”

Rudolph uses the distinctiveness of Indian politics to further the development of a generalizable science of politics in two ways. She indicts the “imperialism of categories” implicit in universal theories that draw on the specificities of Western contexts. Second, she uses the Indian context to develop and refine theoretical categories that can incorporate non-Western political and social forms. The result is the creation of an alternative perspective that moves beyond the sometimes polarized debates on area studies, methodology, and theory-building. The impact of Rudolph's work and approach to the study of politics is farreaching; she has shaped debates in ways that have inspired generations of political scientists. As a renowned South Asianist, she has also trained and influenced area-specialists both in the United States and internationally and is one of the most influential American scholars of South Asia in India.

Rudolph's commitment to the study of South Asia began while she was pursuing her graduate studies at Harvard University/Radcliffe College. Her Ph.D. dissertation, which she completed in 1955, is a study of democratization and party politics based on the Indian National Congress, India's leading political party which was at the forefront of the Indian nationalist movement. The dissertation argued that the party's ability to attract a broad popular base under conditions of pervasive illiteracy was due to Gandhi's creation, in the nationalist era, of an organizational structure grounded in India's many diverse linguistic cultural regions and using regional languages. At the same time, the party's central bodies developed conventions of coordinating centre and region that gave the diversity cohesion and prevented fragmentation.

The academy of the 1950's and 1960's was male territory. As a woman breaking into the top ranks of the intellectual arena, she crossed significant gender boundaries, a trajectory that would continue when she joined the political science department of the University of Chicago. Susanne Rudolph and Hanna Gray, later president of the University of Chicago, were two of the first women tutors in the all male Harvard houses. When she and Lloyd Rudolph were appointed associate professors at the University of Chicago in 1964, the double-appointment was a rare anomaly.

Meanwhile, her focus on newly independent India, a relatively unknown nation in the context of American political science, represented a bold choice. Her decision was underlined by her astute foresight when she decried that skeptics who wrongly predicted that a new nation and political democracy with the size and diversity of a continent would disintegrate into smaller states.

It was also at Harvard where she met and married fellow political science graduate student Lloyd Rudolph. This would provide the basis of what has become a lifetime of personal and intellectual collaboration: seven books, three children. Lloyd's dissertation addressed the shift from the politics of status to the politics of opinion in 18th century England and America. Susanne's thesis focused on the origin of party in a “new nation.” Drawing on the theoretical formulation of both theses, the two proposed an investigation into associational and party life in India. Thus, in 1956 they began research for their first book on India, by driving over land from London to India in a Land Rover. The six-week journey which led them from Europe to the Khyber pass, where they crossed over from Afghanistan to Pakistan and finally into India, marked their first entry into a country that would become their primary research site as well as a second intellectual and personal home. Rudolph has habitually, since 1956, taught three years and then traveled the fourth to India with her family for a year's research. She has spent 12 of her scholarly years keeping up with the political spirit and behavior of a continent more varied and complex than Europe, and more cohesive. She and Lloyd Rudolph are familiar to scholars and policy makers, among whom they move as teachers, colleagues, and friends. The Universities of Rajasthan and Jawaharial Nehru have honored them for their contributions to knowledge about India.

The result has been a collaboration on books and articles dealing with issues as wide ranging as U.S. foreign policy, Max Weber, politics and education, agrarian politics, economic liberalization, electoral politics, and questions of secularism and multiculturalism. This dynamic intellectual collaboration with Lloyd Rudolph has been a central feature of Susanne Rudolph's career, one that transformed the Rudolphs into a veritable intellectual institution at the University of Chicago where they began teaching in 1964 and remained for almost 40 years.

Political scientists and policymakers in the 1950s and 1960s were concerned with the political and economic directions of the emerging nation-states of what was then classified as the “Third World.” Many of these nations were casting off long historical legacies of European colonialism and attempting to consolidate newly independent governments and rapidly develop their economies. How these nations could develop and modernize their societies and economies thus emerged as one of the most central debates preoccupying scholars of comparative politics. In this context, Rudolph's first book, The Modernity of Tradition: Political Development in India (1967, co-authored with Lloyd Rudolph) made a critical intervention that questioned some of the answers given by scholars of development and modernization theory. An implicit assumption of both proponents of modernization theory as well as Marxist scholars of development was that the cultural traditions of newly emerging nation-states were either outdated forms of behavior that would naturally disappear with time or obstacles that needed to be overcome in the path to modernity. In other words, development (whether of the capitalist or socialist variety) required a process of modernization that would rid itself of traditional attitudes, beliefs, and organizations. The Modernity of Tradition fundamentally challenged this conventional wisdom of the time by arguing that tradition was adaptable, susceptible to redefinition that would support rather than obstruct change. Modernization did not have to take a predetermined path recapitulating the Western model but could be continuous with the indigenous cultural traditions of a nation-state.

The book was based on a study of three traditional sites of cultural politics caste associations, the thought and activities of Gandhi, and the realm of legal culture. Through grounded empirical analysis Rudolph demonstrated that each of these sites provided the basis for the emergence of distinctive trajectories of modernization and democratization that did not follow models derived from Western empirical cases. For instance, she argued that “caste is anti-caste,” that the emergence of caste associations provided the basis for political mobilization and upward mobility for particular castes in ways that became attached to institutions of political democracy; social groups such as peasants could use such traditional forms of mobilization to stake claims for self-rule through the democratic process. Similarly, Rudolph argued that Gandhi's use of Indian cultural traditions including traditional ideals such as non-violence (satyagraha) contributed to Indian modernization by developing a form of public ethic that transcended narrower obligations of family and kinship. The book posed a significant challenge to stereotypical notions of culture and caste as fixed essences or static systems of hierarchy that necessarily posed an obstacle to modernization in India. The argument thus challenged scholars to move away from a polarized conceptual understanding of the categories of modernity and tradition.

The implications of the book were not limited to the particulars of the Indian case. It made a larger claim in relation to comparative analysis. Rudolph argued that the drive for comparison had suffered from a lack of knowledge of particular non-Western nations. Given that the impetus for comparative politics had come from scholars working with Western history and society, the categories of analysis were developed with the empirical biases and particularities of these contexts. Comparison, the book suggested, then became a normative process of measurement as non-Western societies were assessed through these implicitly biased categories. The book raised critical questions of concept formation that went to the heart of comparative politics. It opened crucial lines of inquiry that cut across the boundaries of epistemology and comparative method and laid important groundwork for what are now familiar debates on social construction and the politics of categories across the social sciences. The Modernity of Tradition laid out the terrain of Rudolph's intellectual agenda, combining a focus on the big questions of comparative politics and political science with a strong commitment to the empirical complexity and depth of area studies research.

Rudolph's grounding in area-based research continued with the publication of In Pursuit of Lakshmi: The Political Economy of the Indian State (1987, coauthored with Lloyd Rudolph), a landmark book on the political economy of India. The book represented an ambitious analysis of Indian political economy, with a sense of empirical breadth and depth that had not previously been attempted by political scientists studying contemporary India. The book sought to explain major national trends in state formation, electoral politics, and the economy in the post-independence period. It placed the Indian state in the context of world models, assimilating its social formations to American exceptionalism than to the European class state. Given the scope of regional variation in India, the book attempted a daunting intellectual task and became a foundational and much-debated text. Rudolph sought to demonstrate that the state represented a central, self-determining actor in the Indian economy, overshadowing the role of both labor and capital. She also explicated some of the paradoxes of state formation when she described a “weak-strong” state that oscillated between a form of strong autonomy, commanding the direction of resource allocation and redistribution on the one hand, and a form of capitulation to the “demand politics” of varied interest groups, on the other.

A key aspect of Rudolph's argument was that the strength of the Indian state and the nature of its intervention in politics and the economy rested in large part on the marginality of class politics in post-independent India. The book posed a significant challenge to Marxist analyses of Indian political economy by arguing that this marginality of class politics and a corresponding centrist nature of politics was a distinctive characteristic of the Indian case. Pointing to the small size of the organized sector capable of generating a class conscious working class, the huge size of the agricultural sector, and its dominance by class resistant small and middle sized agricultural land holders, the book presented an original analysis and explanation of Indian exceptionalism that paralleled similar debates on American exceptionalism and the marginality of class politics in the United States. Meanwhile, in focusing on the politics of class and the state, Rudolph departed from existing scholarly concerns of both dependency theorists who at the time focused on the international level, as well as rational choice approaches that focused on selfinterest and individual behavior. While more recent trends, since the 1990s, involving the rise of Hindu nationalism have called into question the solidity of Indian centrism. Rudolph argues that the eradition of brandname planks from the election manifestoes of the coalition led by the Hindu nationalist BJP suggests that extreme confessional politics continue to be partly constrained by centralism. In any case, these debates have not dislodged the significance of Rudolph's analysis of the nature and paradoxes of Indian state formation. The book remains a classic text for scholars of Indian politics and political economy.

Rudolph's focus on the political economy of India has remained a central area of intellectual inquiry. Her current writings address India's policies of economic liberalization initiated since the early 1990s. Most recently, in an article entitled “The Iconization of Chandrababu: Sharing Sovereignty in India's Federal Market Economy” (2001, co-authored with Lloyd Rudolph), she intervened in debates on the relationship between states and market economies by examining the central role that state chief ministers played as local entrepreneurs in initiating and implementing India's economic reforms. The essay argues that the shift from a command economy (delineated in In Pursuit of Lakshmi) to a federal market economy is due as much to changes in the party system, including the growth of regionalism and a strengthening of the federal nature of the political system, as it is to shifts in economic ideology and practice. This has furthered her intellectual project of explaining economic change in India in relation to political shifts such as those embodied in changes in the nature of the state and party system. More broadly, her analysis of the Indian case points scholars in a different direction from comparative studies that have associated economic transitions to a market economy with a retreat of the state. Rather, the study points to a shift in the orientation and location of state power. The central state is transformed from an interventionist to a regulatory state. Local state governments in the federal system have gained more economic and political sovereignty in contrast to the centralization in the earlier command model of the state.

The association of Rudolph's scholarship with the study of India extends beyond her publications to a long record of institution building and intellectual leadership in South Asian area studies. At the University of Chicago, nationally prominent in the field of South Asian studies, she served as director of the South Asia Language and Area Center for 11 years and also set up a Rockefeller-funded program, the Institute for Culture and Consciousness in South Asia, which she directed for four years. She played a critical leadership role at the national level in a variety of capacities, including serving as vice president and president of the Association for Asian Studies; chair of the Policy Committee of the Social Science Research Council; member of the Board of Foreign Scholarships; member of the Board of the Asia Society; and occasional consultant at the State Department, the NSC, and large number of federal and private granting agencies. In these capacities, she helped shape the intellectual orientation of area studies, often pushing area specialists to address broader comparative questions while defending the significance of area studies to critics of the field. This intellectual project continues with her current conceptualization of area studies as an intellectual project that can situate local knowledge in the context of broader processes of globalization.

Rudolph's simultaneous focus on theory and comparison have led to intellectual interventions in an eclectic range of fields. One of her central areas of scholarly writing and teaching is her longstanding engagement with the work of Max Weber. Early evidence of this appeared in her analysis of Gandhi as a case demonstrating the traditional roots of charismatic leadership (1967; 1983). The analysis both applied and revised the Weberian concept of charisma by demonstrating that, in contrast to Weber's assumption, this charismatic form of traditional authority could lead to the rational transformation of society in a non-Western context. Her modification of Weberian thought formed the basis for a significant theoretical revision of his conceptions of bureaucracy and authority. Rudolph developed this theoretical intervention in her article “Authority and Power in Bureaucratic and Patrimonial Administration” (World Politics, 1979, co-authored with Lloyd Rudolph), based on a paper which was awarded the Franklin L. Burdette Pi Sigma Alpha Award for the best paper delivered at the American Political Science Association annual meeting (1974). The article engaged in a theoretical and historical reconceptualization of Weber's ideal typical categories of bureaucratic and patrimonial administration. She argued that Weber's understanding of bureaucracy in terms of rational-legal authority and formal rationality missed both the existence of power and of patrimonial features within formal, bureaucratic organizations. Furthermore, she argued that the persistence of such patrimonial features was not a sign of dysfunctional aberration or deviation but often a necessary means for managing conflict and enhancing features such as organizational discipline and efficiency. The article developed a theoretical reinterpretation of Weber's work and grounded this interpretation in an indepth historical discussion of bureaucratic administration in Europe and the United States. Given the centrality of the Weberian paradigm in scholarly studies of bureaucracy, the article made a significant contribution to both political theory and comparative politics. It also provided an extended theoretical discussion of the epistemological and methodological implications that the construction of ideal types held for the production of knowledge and explanation.

Rudolph has continued this theoretical project with discussions of the ways in which such a reworking of Weber can provide a foundation for the role of theory in the field of comparative politics as well as engage with the insights of postmodern thinkers such as Foucault. In a more recent intervention, “From Weber to Weber via Foucault” (1995) she has used a Foucaultian understanding of the discontinuous nature of history to rework and emphasize the contingent approach to knowledge that she has sought to draw out of Weber's writings. Characteristic of Rudolph's work, such an approach has been aimed at deepening rather than discarding comparison, generalization, and explanation. Her approach to the field of comparative politics points scholars to the need to expand the conceptual space that may be foreclosed by what she has called the “allencompassing formats” (1995) that suppress the contradictory and contested nature of reality.

Rudolph specifically asks political scientists to consider the ways in which questions of culture and meaning necessitate a rethinking of central disciplinary paradigms. For instance, in her work as a member of the Committee on International Peace and Security at the Social Science Research Council from 1989–1997, she was at the forefront of intellectual endeavors aimed at rethinking the conventional boundaries of security. Based on this work, she emphasizes the necessity for political scientists to address and explain new forms of transnational associations and networks that emerge from the politicization of cultural identities, a project that culminated in the volume, Transnational Religion and Fading States (1997, co-edited with James Piscatori). In her introduction and concluding essay, Rudolph laid important conceptual groundwork for such an intellectual project, pointing to the limits of state-centric definitions of security and elaborating on the concept of transnational civil society as a political realm that has begun to challenge the primacy and sovereignty of nation-states. In her analysis, which now has new and heightened significance in the “post-9/11” world, she pointed to the ways in which the emergence of such transnational religious forms could have both benign and malign outcomes. However, her approach to transnational civil society also specifically sought to move scholars away from a Huntingtonian view of clashing civilizations.

In line with her challenges to conventional definitions of security, Rudolph has used such a focus on the politics of culture to inform and denaturalize the boundaries of numerous debates and concepts. Some of her most recent writings have taken this project to intellectual terrain as varied as legal reform and economic liberalization. In an article published in Political Quarterly, “Living with Difference in India” (2000, co-authored with Lloyd Rudolph), she examines debates on legal models that have attempted to manage the highly politicized religious differences that influence contemporary Indian politics. The article develops an alternative to polarized debates that have pitted the need for a uniform civil code with the existing legal model in India which has recognized personal laws in order to protect the rights of minority religious communities, in particular the Muslim community. The issue has been a particularly contentious issue as the rising Hindu nationalist movement has sought to politicize the need for a uniform civil code in ways that have been perceived as an attack on the minority political and cultural rights of the Muslim community. Navigating this terrain, the article highlights an alternative view in which models of “legal universalism” and “legal pluralism” can coexist in conjunction with each other, enabling both the protection of legal uniformity as well as the protection of minority rights. While the article addresses empirical materials on India, it holds larger theoretical implications for similar debates that place universal claims in contention with the “particular” rights of social groups such as women and racial minorities in the United States and in comparative contexts. In this endeavor, she demonstrates the ways in which an understanding of models of legality as culturally and historically constructed entities can move debates away from polarization between universality and difference.

In recasting existing debates in substantive ways, Rudolph's focus on culture has directed political scientists to look beyond conventional sites of analysis in order to fully understand and explain broader outcomes. In this endeavor, she has helped transform the parameters of what counts as politics and knowledge within the discipline of political science, often adapting and reworking cross-disciplinary intellectual influences such as the Geertzian interpretive approach to culture and a humanistic emphasis on the role of the imagination in social and political life. This is an orientation that has continually shaped her intellectual career and that is present in her recently published book, Reversing the Gaze: Amar Singh's Diary, A Colonial Subject's Narrative of Imperial India (2002, coauthored and co-edited with Lloyd Rudolph and Mohen Singh Kanoto). The book presents a border-crossing interdisciplinary project that cuts across the study of politics, history, ethnography, and literature. At one level, the book reconstructs an original historical document by publishing selections of the diary of Amar Singh, a nobleman and officer of the Indian army in colonial India. This textual reconstruction captures what Rudolph describes as the “liminal” nature of Amar Singh's negotiation between the Indian world he is from and the colonial British domain to which he is loyal and of which he is critical. The questions of identity formation in multicultural contexts and the role of subjective knowledge in the creation and authentication of identity, are central to this account. The book provides a unique example of the ways in which the production of knowledge often rests in liminal culture spaces between categories such as the public and private, colonizer and colonial subject, and, most broadly, of Western and non-Western worlds. The richness of such insights are present in the book's detailed analysis and commentary and in related publications, as Rudolph treats the diary not simply as a primary historical document but as an instance of self-reflexive ethnography where Singh is both an ethnographer and an object of knowledge. She thus uses this historical document to intervene in debates addressing the politics of historical and ethnographic representation and the need to conceptualize culture in ways that transcend the rigidity of territorial borders.

Rudolph's intellectual career is characterized by a unique combination of intellectual depth and breadth. Few scholars have been able to integrate empirical richness and theoretical innovation with the remarkable range in her fields of inquiry and expertise. Her intellectual influence has thus naturally reached an equally diverse set of audiences. This has reached far beyond the academy to public- and policy-related audiences in the United States and in India. Her influence on such diverse audiences has also extended beyond her publications in a strong commitment to teaching. This is evident not just in the generations of graduate students she has mentored, but also in her excellence in undergraduate teaching, recognized by a Quantrell Teaching Award at the University of Chicago, where she was named William Benton Distinguished Service Professor in Political Science.

Susanne Rudolph has shaped the study of politics with a distinctive sense of intellectual leadership, opening up new arenas of analysis while recasting some of the most foundational understandings of comparison, explanation, and theoretical generalization. Her achievement has been one of transforming the boundaries of political science in ways that spark debate, learning, and the intellectual imagination.

In The Modernity of Tradition Rudolph challenged scholars to move away from a polarized conceptual understanding of the categories of modernity and tradition.