Susanne Hoeber Rudolph

The modernity of tradition : political development in India

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 analyzed: social stratification, charismatic leadership, and law. The authors question whether objective historical conditions, such as advanced industrialization, urbanization, or literacy, are requisites for political modernization.

Transnational religion and fading states

* Preface: Religion, States, and Transnational Civil Society Susanne Hoeber Rudolph. Self-Organization: From Society And From Below * Trans-state Islam and Security Dale F. Eickelman * Muslim Missionaries and African States Ousmane Kane * Bridging the Gap Between Empowerment and Power in Latin America Daniel H. Levine and David Stoll * Faces of Catholic Transnationalism: In and Beyond France Danille Hervieu-Lger, translated by Roger Gleason Hierarchy: From A Center And From Above * Globalizing Catholicism and the Return to a Universal Church Jos Casanova * World Religions and National States: Competing Claims in East Asia Don Baker * Religious Resource Networks: Roman Catholic Philanthropy in Central and East Europe Ralph Della Cava * In Defense of Allahs Realm: Religion and Statecraft in Saudi Foreign Policy Strategy Cary Fraser Reflections * Dehomogenizing Religious Formations S. H. Rudolph

Authority and Power in Bureaucratic and Patrimonial Administration: A Revisionist Interpretation of Weber on Bureaucracy

Webers 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 reinterpretation and application. Our reading of historical change as it relates to bureaucracy leads us to question Webers interpretations. His conceptualization of bureaucracy in terms of rational-legal-authority and formal rationality fails to take account of the existence and use of power within and outside of organizations, and of the persistence of patrimonial features. The use of power produces conflict and pathologies. When these serve the legitimate values and interests of participants and actors in the organizational environment, they can have benign consequences. The persistence of patrimonial features, rather than signalling the survival of dysfunctional atavisms, can promote administrative effectiveness by mitigating conflict and promoting organizational loyalty, discipline, and efficiency.

The Imperialism of Categories: Situating Knowledge in a Globalizing World

In February 1957 Lloyd Rudolph and I set forth into the “heat and dust” villages of Thanjavur district, South India, with 10 Indian graduate students from Madras Christian College. Our objective was to conduct a survey on political consciousness. Six hundred urban and rural Tamils scattered across three districts constituted the random sample we had selected from the first electoral rolls of recently freed India. V. O. Key, that witty and groundbreaking doyen of electoral behavior analysis, had enticed us into survey research. Upon our return, the Michigan Survey Research Center provided a methodologically intense summer. Susanne Rudolph is the William Benton Distinguished Service Professor Emerita of Political Science at the University of Chicago and past president of the American Political Science Association (srudolph@midway.uchicago.edu). She studies comparative politics with special interest in the political economy and political sociology of South Asia, state formation, Max Weber, and the politics of category and culture. An earlier version of this address was presented at the annual meeting of the association on September 2, 2004.

Presidential Address: State Formation in Asia-Prolegomenon to a Comparative Study

The dictionary says that a prolegomenon is “a learned preface or preamble, … introductory or preliminary observations on the subject of a book.” And indeed, the remarks I am about to make are preliminary to a volume on state formation that Lloyd Rudolph and I hope to produce one of these years. Such a prolegomenon is also a commitment to a path of action, a justification, a polemic in favor of what one proposes to do. Today, I want to speak for the domain of comparison.

Barristers and Brahmans in India: Legal Cultures and Social Change

“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, predictability for uncertainty, and impartiality for whim and nepotism.

Federalism as State Formation in India: A Theory of Shared and Negotiated Sovereignty

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 early modern Europe. When, why and how were sovereignty concepts constructed and contested are questions that engage the politics of category formation. After historicizing the sovereignty concept, we turn to the study of federalism in India as state formation process rather than studying it constitutionally or comparatively.

Engaging Subjective Knowledge: How Amar Singh's Diary Narratives of and by the Self Explain Identity Formation

What should count as knowledge in political science? We have tried here to show that subjectivity is valid and useful, that firstperson accounts of experience—‘telling what I know,” narratives of and by the self, partial and contingent truths, and self-asother ethnography—contribute to knowledge. The move to subjective knowledge does not require the abandonment of objectivity. Self-consciousness and reflexivity simply make it possible to render the familiar unfamiliar, to gain a certain detachment, to achieve “objective subjectivity.” Subjective knowledge helps to explain identity and category formation and the politics of recognition. Accessibility to the politics of those taken to be outside the public sphere, those whose behavior is not easily observed or counted by objective political science—colonized persons, subalterns, and marginalized minorities—depends on their ability to articulate their identities, purposes, and interests. Such forms of identity politics have become of increasing interest to political scientists concerned with subaltern agency, multiculturalism, and ethnic conflict and peace.

Rajputana under British Paramountcy: The Failure of Indirect Rule

W HEN India became independent in 1947, nineteen princely states and three chiefships of Rajputana were amalgamated into a single political unit, Rajasthan, that became a state within the Indian union. The special form of indirect rule, paramountcy, which Britain exercised in the princely states had not prepared Rajputana for independence. Princely rule and legitimacy, based on birth, was abruptly replaced by parliamentary government and

A Bureaucratic Lineage in Princely India: Elite Formation and Conflict in a Patrimonial System

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 lineages historical ascendency, a century spanning four generations, is sufficiently long to capture processes of conflict and change as well as more visible and easily accessible features of integration and stability.