R.J. Rummel, Citizen Scholar: An Interview on the Occasion of His Retirement

Rudy Rummel’s motivating passion—his lifelong aversion to conflict and violence—was eclipsed only by the fierce independence born of his experience as a homeless youth from a broken family. His scholarship was characterized by his exceptionally rigorous and open-minded quest to test theoretical explanations with empirical data while explicating the associated assumptions and normative implications. His legacy, however, lives on in his example of a citizen scholar, whose commitment to take intellectual discussions beyond the academy into practice as he sought in everything he did to realize freedom and dignity with peace.