Module 1 - Introduction to Political Theory

The word politics itself has its origin in the Greek word polis, which means the community or
populace or society. Greek thinkers like Plato and Aristotle saw politics as everything that is
concerned with 'the general issues affecting the whole community'. According to the Greek view
the participation of each and every citizen in the life of the community is necessary for the self-
realization of each human being. In fact Aristotle argued he who did not live in a polis is to be
considered 'either a God or a beast'. He also commented that basically man is a political
animal. It has to remembered that Greeks were organised into small city states or communities
where each and every male was a citizen and attended parliament styled meetings for deciding
the affairs of the community and so the distinctions that we make nowadays between what is
private for an individual and what is public in his necessary relationships with the state and
government organs were not quite what they are today. So much of the Greek view has to be
seen as emanating from those circumstances and sociological realities. Thus in the Greek view
all behaviour of a citizen was his political stance and nothing was private. The Greeks also
stressed that the purpose of politics is to enable men to live together in a community and also to
lead a high moral life. Or in other words the aim of Politics was also to foster the adoption and
following of ethical goals leading to spiritual self-realization. Thus the Greek concept of politics
included the study of man, society, state and ethics and the subject was treated as a
combination of religious and moral philosophy, metaphysics, a course for civic training of
citizens and a guide to power.

The View of Politics as Study of the State

With the decline of city-states of the Greek sort and the rise of large empires, beginning with the
Roman Empire, the notion of politics inevitably began to be more and more linked to the state.
The idea of the state became accepted as the principal mode of human organisation and
developed with the rise of nation states particularly since the close of the middle ages. Hence
subjects like international law also became a part of politics. The state would have monopoly of
coercive power and the right to enforce obedience using police and military force. The state in
practice meant the government because whatever was done in the name of the state was done
by the government and hence the study of government organs and institutions became a part of
the study of politics. Also different forms of government like monarchy, aristocracy, democracy,
federalism also became a part of the study of the state. In the twentieth century, the effects of
public opinion, political parties and bureaucracy on government institutions were also included.
Works like Modern Democracies (1909) by Herman Finer represented this trend.

Politics as a Dimension of the Social Process

It was realised over time that politics as a study of the state and institutions of the state like the
government bodies does not go deep enough into various aspects of the political life of a citizen.
The ordinary citizen and his political life is an interaction between him and the society and polity
of which he is a part. To understand politics therefore one has to understand the whole social
process and phenomenon.

To study politic as a social science and as a dimension of the social phenomenon and social
process however leads to divergent views. Different schools of thought view the social process
differently. Many people and thinkers at different times in history have propounded on the social
process of politics but the main schools of thought that have made an impact are as follows: (a)
The Liberal View (b) The Marxist View, (c) The Common Good View and (d) The Study of
Power View.

The Liberal View - Politics as a Conciliation of Interests - Politics is a part of the social
process to manage and provide conciliation in such conflicts and thus for providing law and
order, protection and security which according to the liberal view constitutes the fundamentals of
justice. They defined politics as an activity to create conditions of greater equality, social justice,
as a process of resolving conflicts without destroying the underlying competitive framework.

(b) The Marxist View - Politics as Class Struggle

Marx defined classes in terms of objective criteria, such as their access to resources. For Marx,
different classes have divergent interests, which is a source of social disruption and conflict.
Marx proposed that history should be studied in terms of such conflicts.

So, Marxian view of politics is based on the fundamental social relationship between the rich
and poorer working classes. Politics is an expression of the fundamental class conflict leading to
class struggle for overthrowing the control over society, economy, state and even religion by the
upper classes that control modes of production.

(c) The Common Good View - Politics as Common Good

There is a way of looking at politics, which views the purpose of politics to be the pursuit of the
common good. When individuals live together in a society their common life creates common
interests which constitute the common good. And the pursuit of these common interests is the
job of politics.

(d) The Study of Power View - Politics as the Study of Power

Politics is in many ways fundamentally a study of power. Basically there are only three forms of
power: Political, Economic and Ideological.

Political Power

The power of political coercion and political authority is referred to as political power. This power
is based on the power of force or muscle power ultimately - exerted by the state or potentially
capable of being exerted by the state. In fact Law is nothing but a set of rules according to
which the coercive physical power will be exercised by the state. It is this power which is used to
implement policies in democracies and punish those who disobey whatever the consequences
and hardship that it causes to the people on whom it is forced.

Economic Power

The holders of economic power can influence submission of others by offering rewards or
denying them and thus can be more powerful than political or legal power. Often, political power
is the concentrated expression of the economic power.

Ideological Power

Apart from political and economic power, there is another form of exerting power known as
ideological power. Developing and exerting of ideological power is a process where the
attitudes, values, symbols, traditions etc of the masses are gradually moulded and shaped by a
leadership according to their own plans and agendas and thereby a certain level of deference,
loyalty and obedience is established.

Political Theory .

The word theory refers to a body of logically collected and analysed body of knowledge. Political
Theory is a network of concepts and generalisations about political life involving ideas,
assumptions and statements about the nature, purpose and key features of government, state
and society, and about the political capabilities of human beings'.
What is Political Theory?

Political theory is a 'sub-field of political science which includes: political philosophy - a

moral theory of politics and a historical study of political ideas, a scientific criterion and
the discovery and systematic development of generalizations about political behaviour'.
It can be said that political theory is concerned basically with the study of the phenomenon of
the state both in philosophy as well as empirical terms. An attempt is made to provide
explanations, descriptions and prescriptions regarding the state and political institutions. Also of
course there is an underlying theme of studying the moral philosophical purpose. Political
theory is basically an activity, which involves posing questions, developing responses to
those questions and creating imaginative perspectives on the public life of human
beings. The questions that are asked are like what is the nature and purpose of the state
and why should we prefer one form of state over another; how do we judge the ends,
aims and methods of political organization; what is and should be the relationship
between the state and the individual. Throughout history political theory has been answering
these questions. It has been regarded as important because the fate of man is dependent on
the kind of system of rulers and the ruled that is achieved and whether it leads to united action
for the common good.

Political Theory and Political Thought

Political theory is sometimes synonymously regarded with political thought but it is important to
understand they don’t necessarily mean the same thing. Political thought is a generalized term
which comprises all thoughts, theories and values of a person or a group of persons or a
community on state and questions related to the state. Any person expressing his views
whether he is a professor, journalist, writer, novelist, poet etc and of course if he is a politician
that has a bearing on our lives and that is about the state and governance and related questions
then he is engaging in political thought. His thoughts may or may not comprise a theory if it is
not a systematic logical hypothesis advanced to explain historical and political phenomenon
related to political rule of the state and governance etc. Political thought thus is always of
persons or groups while political theory is a self-contained and self-standing explanation or
speculation or theory attempting to answer questions and explain history and the predict likely
events in the future. Of course this theory is always some individual thinker’s creation. Barker
had commented that while political thought is the immanent philosophy of a whole age, political
theory is the speculation of a particular thinker.
Political Theory and Political Philosophy

While political theory is a part of political philosophy mostly political philosophy is much wider
and need not necessarily be comprised of any theories.

Thus we can say political philosophy is the study of fundamental questions about the state,
government, politics, liberty, justice, property, rights, law and the enforcement of a legal code by
authority etc: what they are, why (or even if) they are needed, what makes a government
legitimate, what rights and freedoms it should protect and why, what form it should take and
why, what the law is, and what duties citizens owe to a legitimate government, if any, and when
it may be legitimately overthrown or not. We often refer “political philosophy" to mean a general
view, or specific ethic, belief or attitude, about politics that does not necessarily belong to the
whole technical discipline of philosophy.

Political philosophy is often not concerned with contemporary issues but with the more universal
issues in the political life of man. But a political theorist is looking at contemporary political life
mostly and while he is interested in explaining the nature and purpose of the state and describe
and understand the realities of political behavior, the actual relations between state and citizens,
and the role of power in the society.

Political Theory and Political Science

Political Science is a comprehensive subject or field of study of which political theory is only a
sub-field. Political Science includes everything: political thought, political theory, political
philosophy, political ideology, institutional or structural framework, comparative politics, public
administration, international law and organization etc. Some thinkers have stressed on the
science aspect of political science and they suggest when political science is studied as a
science with scientific methods. Political theory is a part of political philosophy and cannot be
regarded as political science because whereas there is no room for abstract intuitive
conclusions or speculations in political science, political philosophy relies on exactly those un-
exact methods. Some Basic Characteristic of Political Theory

1. A political theory is generally the creation on individual thinker based on his moral and
intellectual position and when propounding his theory he trying to explain the events,
phenomenon and the mysteries generally of mankind's political life. The theory may or may not
be accepted as true but it always can be regarded as one more theory. For E.g. Republic or A
Theory of Justice.
2. A political theory attempts to provide explanations on questions relating to mankind, the
societies he formed and history and historical events generally. It also suggests ways of
resolving conflicts and sometimes even advocates revolutions. There are also often predictions
made about the future.

3. Political theory thus is also sometimes not only providing explanations and predictions but
also sometimes actively influencing and participating in historical events particularly when they
propose political action of a particular kind and that line of action is widely adopted. The great
positive liberal thinker Harold Laski had commented that the task of political theorists is not
merely of description but also of prescription on what ought to be. For eg capitalism,
Nationalism- Trump

4. Political theory is also usually discipline based and though the subject of study remains the
same the theorist might be a philosopher, historian, economist, theologian or a sociologist etc.

5. Political theories are often also the basis for a whole ideology. The liberal theories became
the basis for liberalism and Marx's theory became the basis for Marxian socialist ideology. A
political theorist proposed by a thinker is usually always reflecting the political ideology of the
thinker too. That is also the reason why when there are conflicts between ideologies it leads to
debates about the theories underlying those ideologies.

Issues in Political Theory

The issues that have held prominence in political theory have changed over time. Classical and
early political theory was mainly concerned with the search for a morally perfect political order
and focused on questions like the nature and purpose of the state, the basis on which political
authority should be used and the problem of political disobedience. The rise of the modern
nation state and changes in the economic structure and the industrial revolution gave rise to
new priorities and the focus shifted to individualism and liberty of the individual and his
relationship to society and the state. Issues like rights, duties, liberty, equality, and property
became more important. Gradually it also became important to explain to the inter-relation
between one concept and the other such as liberty and equality or, justice and liberty or,
equality and property. After the Second World War a new kind of empirical political theory
emerged which studied the political behaviour of man and believed in making theoretical
conclusions on that basis. Also the behavioural scholars created new issues for study often
borrowed from other disciplines. Some of these issues are political culture and legitimacy,
political system, elites, groups, parties etc. In the last two decades a number of different issues
have emerged like identity, gender, environmentalism, ecology and community etc.

Relevance of Political Theory

We humans as social beings live together and societies where we share the resources, jobs
and rewards. We are also individuals needing some basic human rights. The process of
organizing state and society therefore becomes important to maximize harmony and prosperity
and to allow the circumstances for individual self-realization. So to facilitate the unity and
integrity of human societies or the collective needs of society political theory becomes important
it tries to study and find solutions to problems in this process. The relevance lies in evolving
various approaches regarding the nature and purpose of the state, the basis of political authority
and the best form of government to practice, relations between the state and the individual in
the context of his basic rights. Apart from this political theory also seeks to establish the moral
criterion for judging the ethical worth of a political state and to suggest alternative political
arrangements and practices. To sum up in brief the relevance of political theory lies in the
following:

(a) In providing an explanation and description of political phenomenon (b) helping select the
political goals and actions for a community and (c) helps in providing the basis for making moral
judgments.

Also it has to be remembered increasingly at least in contemporary times states face challenges
of poverty, corruption, over-population and ethnic and racial tensions, environment pollution etc.
This is not to mention international problems like conflicts etc. Political Theory seeks to study
the present and future problems of political life of the society and to suggest solutions for
dealing with those problems. David Held has commented that the task of the political theorist is
very great in its complexity because in the absence of systematic study, there is a danger that
politics will be left to the ignorant and self-seeking people who are in pursuit of power.

Thus if one has to systematically think about the nature and purpose of the state and the
problems of government while looking at the socio-political reality and keeping in mind the
ideals and political philosophy, then one has to take the route of theoretically studying the
problem. Thus political theory is relevant. Also studying political theory at an individual level
makes one aware of one's rights and duties and helps one understand and appreciate the
socio-political realities and problems like poverty, violence, corruption etc. Political theory is also
important because it can go forward basing itself on the theories and propose the means and
directions for changing society to establish an ideal society. Marxist theory for instance is an
example of a theory which not only proposes the direction but also goes so far as to advocate a
revolution for establishing an egalitarian state. If the political theory is sound and it can be
transmitted and communicated to people then it can become a very powerful force or the
advancement of society and mankind.

The Important Schools of Political Theory

1. Classical Political Theory

2. Liberal political Theory

3. Marxist Political Theory

4. Empirical Scientific Political Theory

5. Contemporary Political Theory

Classical Political Theory

Classical political theory was deeply dominated by philosophy and the whole focus was on
taking a holistic gaze searching for the most general of truths. So there was no clear distinction
between philosophical, theological and political issues and political science or thought was not
separately recognized as a discipline as such. Political theory was concerned with probing into
issues, asking important questions and serving as a sort of conscience keeper of politics. The
underlying quest was to arrive at the best possible form of government. The state and
government were also viewed as a tool for realizing the moral goals of man and society and for
promoting the good. Thus the state was to serve as some sort of promoter to foster high moral
standards among the members of the community. There had some debate about whether the
individual good should be the priority or the common good. The common good was required as
more complete than the private good of the individual. The classical tradition also sought to
search ways for an ideal state and a stable system. The main questions that the classical
tradition was asked was what is the best form of government? And who should rule and why?
Also how should conflict situations be resolved?

Liberal Political Theory

With the historical period referred to as Renaissance and Reformation in Europe which was
followed by the Industrial Revolution, the dominance of the classical tradition came to an end.
This new philosophical wave was led by thinkers like Hobbes, Locke, Thomas, Jefferson,
Thomas Paine, Jeremy Bentham, J.S. Mill, Herbert Spencer and a host of other writers. The
main thrust of the liberal tradition was the individual's rights and the state was merely regarded
as a contract between individuals to benefit from the conflict resolution mechanism that a
system of rule of law provides. The main aim of the state in the liberal tradition is to help
individuals realize their fundamental inalienable rights. In fact the liberal thinkers went so far as
to propose that when the basic contractual relationship between the individual and the state is
violated, the individuals have not only the right but the responsibility to revolt and establish a
new government. Social control is best secured by law. The new liberal theories also dismissed
the idea of common good and an organic community and instead advocated that the
government should govern as less as possible for individual rights to reign supreme and free
him from political, social and economic restraints as far as possible.

Marxist Political Theory

The fundamental changes that industrial revolution brought about caused inequality and a large
class of impoverished industrial workers emerged. The basic liberal position that supported total
economic freedom was challenged by Karl Marx and Engles and their followers who in the later
half of the nineteenth century proposed what they called 'scientific socialism'. Socialism
predated the theory of Marx but he gave it a strong theoretical foundation. Marx offered a new
way of looking at the history up to that time and suggested that the task of knowledge is not just
to understand the world but also to change the social life of mankind for the better. For that he
suggested a revolutionary path. Hence he wanted to create a society where "man shall not be
exploited by man" and where each individual will have the full opportunity to develop his or her
personality and potential. The most important themes of Marxist political theory are class
division, class struggle, property relations, modes of production, state as an instrument of class
domination and revolution by the proletariat. Marxism also suggests that rights, liberty, equality,
justice and democracy in a capitalist liberal democracy are really only enjoyed by the rich and
properties classes because the state is controlled by the upper classes who use the institutions
of the state as a tool for class exploitation. He believed real liberty and equality can only be
achieved in a classless and stateless society. Thus whereas Liberal theory provided the
theoretical basis for a capitalist free market system, Marxist political theory provided the basis
for the establishment of a socialist state through revolutionary action.
Empirical-Scientific Political Theory

In America a new kind of political theory was developed particularly in the post second world
war period that suggested relying on the scientific method (instead of philosophical) and base
theories upon facts (rather than on values). Political Scientists at the Chicago University (known
as the Chicago School) such as Charles Merrium, Harold Lasswell, Gosnell, David Easton,
Stuart Rice etc focused on studying politics in the context of behaviour of individual human
beings as members of a political community. The task of political theory according to this new
school of thought is to formulate and systematize the concept of science of political behaviour in
which emphasis is placed on empirical research than on political philosophy. The behavioural
scientists suggested a political theorist should clarify and criticize systems of concepts which
have empirical relevance to political behaviour.

Behavioural schools differed fundamentally from all the previous schools because they
suggested that the job of political theory is only to explain political phenomenon and conclude
from that and predict the future. It is not to make philosophical and moral judgments. It is not at
all to advocate revolutionary action. Thus political theory is not to question or propose who
rules, should rule and why but rather who does rule and how? Or in other words it should not
question the basis of the state but should be happy with his status quo, stability, equilibrium and
harmony in the society. It should focus attention on the study of political behaviour of man,
group and institutions irrespective of their good or bad character. Practical political theory is not
only concerned with the study of the state but also with the political process.

Contemporary Political Theory

Since 1970 the sole focus of the empiricists and behavioral scholars on science, value-free
politics and methods came under criticism and lost popularity because it failed to address
pressing political and social issues. So there has been a revival of interest in political theory in
USA, Europe and other parts of the world. Thinkers like John Rawls, Robert Nozick, Habermas
etc made noteworthy contributions and took up basic issues like liberty, equality, justice etc
again. Theory again regained the status of a legitimate form of knowledge and enquiry. Also on
the question of what exactly is science there emerged many views that challenged the old
notions. Further many scholars opined that social sciences throw up distinctive problems that
cannot be grasped by scientific models. This is because perceptions and resulting actions of
men vary and the same phenomenon can be viewed differently by different minds who may
interpret the social issues differently. Hence it is difficult to do an objective scientific analysis of
social issues and events with scientific rigor.

Approaches of political theory:

Traditional approaches:
Traditional approaches are value based. These approaches put emphasis on values more that
facts. Advocates of these approaches believe that the study of political science cannot and should
not be purely scientific. They stated that in social science such as Political Science facts and
values are closely related with each other. In politics, emphasis should not be on the facts but on
the moral quality of political event. There is huge number of traditional approaches such as
philosophical, institutional, legal, and historical approaches (D. K. Sarmah, 2007).

Characteristics of Traditional approaches:

1. Traditional approaches are largely normative and stresses on the values of politics.
2. Emphasis is on the study of different political structures.
3. These approaches believe that since facts and values are closely interlinked, studies in
Political Science can never be scientific.
Different types of traditional approaches:
1. Philosophical Approach: This approach is considered as the oldest approach in the arena of
Political Science. The development of this approach can be traced back to the times of the Greek
philosophers like Plato and Aristotle. The aim of this approach is to evolve the standard of right
and wrong, for the purpose of critical evaluation of existing institutions, laws and polices
(Gauba, 2009).

This approach is based on the theoretical principle that the values cannot be separated from the
study of politics. Therefore, its main concern is to judge what is good or bad in any political
society. It is mainly an ethical and normative study of politics and, thus, idealistic. It addresses
the problems of the nature and functions of the state, citizenship, rights and duties etc. The
supporters of this approach consider that political philosophy is strongly associated with the
political beliefs. Therefore, they are of the opinion that a political scientist must have the
knowledge of good life and good society. Political philosophy supports in establishing a good
political order.
Historical Approach: Theorists who developed this political approach focused on the historical
factors like the age, place and the situation in which it is evolved are taken into consideration.
This approach is related to history and it emphasizes on the study of history of every political
reality to analyze any situation. Political thinkers such as Machiavelli, Sabine and Dunning
considered that politics and history are closely related and the study of politics always should
have a historical standpoint. Sabine stated that Political Science should include all those subjects
which have been discussed in the writings of different political thinkers from the time of Plato.
This approach strongly maintains the belief that the thinking every political thinker is formed by
the surrounding environment. Furthermore, history provides details of the past as well as it also
links it with the present events. History gives the chronological order of every political event and
thereby helps in future estimation of events also. Therefore, without studying the past political
events, institutions and political environment it would be erroneous to analyze the present
political events. But critics of historical approach designated that it is not possible to understand
the idea of the past ages in terms of contemporary ideas and concepts.

Institutional Approach: This is traditional and significant approach in studying Political

Science. This approach primarily deals with the formal features of government and politics
accentuates the study of the political institutions and structures. Therefore, the institutional
approach is concerned with the study of the formal structures like legislature, executive,
judiciary, political parties, and interest groups. The supporters of this approach include both
ancient and modern political philosophers. Among the ancient thinkers, Aristotle had significant
role in shaping this approach while the modern thinkers include James Bryce, Bentley, Walter
Bagehot, Harold Laski contributed to develop this approach.

Legal Approach: This approach concerns that the state is the fundamental organization for the
formation and enforcement of laws. Therefore, this approach is concerned with the legal process,
legal bodies or institutions, justice and independence of judiciary. The supporters of this
approach are Cicero, Jean Bodin, Thomas Hobbes, Jeremy Bentham, John Austin, Dicey and Sir
Henry Maine.

The various traditional approaches to the study of Political Science have been disapproved for
being normative. These approaches were principled also as their concern went beyond how and
why political events happen to what ought to happen. In the later period, the modern approaches
have made an attempt to make the study of Political Science more scientific and, therefore,
emphasize pragmatism.

Modern approaches:
After studying politics with the help of traditional approaches, the political thinkers of the later
stage felt the necessity to study politics from a new perspective. Thus, to minimize the
deficiencies of the traditional approaches, various new approaches have been advocated by the
new political thinkers. These new approaches are regarded as the “modern approaches” to the
study of Political Science. Modern approaches are fact based approaches. They lay emphasis on
factual study of political events and try to arrive at scientific and definite conclusion. The aim of
modern approaches is to replace normative with empirical. Therefore modern approaches are
marked by empirical investigation of relevant data.

Characteristics of Modern Approaches:

1. These approaches try to draw conclusion from empirical data.
2. These approaches go beyond the study of political structures and its historical analysis.
3. Modern Approaches believe in inter-disciplinary study.
4. They emphasize scientific methods of study and attempt to draw scientific conclusions in
Political Science.
Modern approaches include sociological approach, psychological approach, economic approach,
quantitative approach, simulation approach, system approach, behavioural approach and Marxian
approach

Behavioural approach:
Among the modern empirical approach, the behavioural approach, to study political science
grabbed notable place. Most eminent exponents of this approach are David Etson, Robert, A.
Dahl, E. M. Kirkpatrick, and Heinz Eulau. Behavioural approach to political theory is the result
of increasing attention given to behaviour of ordinary man. Theorist, Kirkpatrick stated that
traditional approaches accepted institution as the basic unit of research but behavioural approach
considers the behaviour of individual in political situation as the basis (K. Sarmah, 2007).

Salient Features of Behaviouralism:

David Easton has pointed out certain salient features of Behaviouralism which are regarded as its
intellectual foundations. These are:
Regularities: This approach believes that there are certain uniformities in political behaviour
which can be expressed in generalizations or theories in order to explain and predict political
phenomena. In a particular situation the Political behaviour of individuals may be more or less
similar. Such regularities of behaviour may help the researcher to analyze a political situation as
well as to predict the future political phenomena. Study of such regularities makes Political
Science more scientific with some predictive value.

Verification: The behaviouralists do not want to accept everything as granted. Therefore, they
emphasize testing and verifying everything. According to them, what cannot be verified is not
scientific.

Techniques: The behaviouralists put emphasis on the use of those research tools and methods
which generate valid, reliable and comparative data. A researcher must make use of sophisticated
tools like sample surveys, mathematical models, simulation etc.

Quantification: After collecting data, the researcher should measure and quantify those data.

Values: The behaviouralists have put heavy emphasis on separation of facts from values. They
believe that to do objective research one has to be value free. It means that the researcher should
not have any pre-conceived notion or a biased view.

Systematization: According to the behaviouralists, research in Political Science must be

systematic. Theory and research should go together.

Pure Science: Another characteristic of Behaviouralism has been its aim to make Political
Science a “pure science”. It believes that the study of Political Science should be verified by
evidence.

Integration: According to the behaviouralists, Political Science should not be separated from
various other social sciences like history, sociology and economics etc. This approach believes
that political events are shaped by various other factors in the society and therefore, it would be
wrong to separate Political Science from other disciplines.

It is recognized by theorists that with the development of Behaviouralism, a new thinking and
new technique of study were evolved in the field of Political Science.
Benefits of behavioural approach are as follows:

1. This approach makes Political Science more scientific and brings it closer to the day to
day life of the individuals.
2. Behaviouralism has first explained human behaviour into the field of Political Science
and thus makes the study more relevant to the society.
3. This approach helps in predicting future political events.
4. The behavioural approach has been supported by different political thinkers as it is
scientific approach and predictable nature of political events.
Despite of merits, the Behavioural approach has been criticized for its fascination for scienticism
also. The main criticisms leveled against this approach are mentioned below:

1. This has been disparaged for its dependence on practices and methods ignoring the
subject matter.
2. The supporters of this approach were wrong when they said that human beings behave in
similar ways in similar circumstances.
3. This approach focus on human behaviour but it is a difficult task to study human
behaviour and to get a definite result.
4. Most of the political phenomena are indeterminate. Therefore it is always difficult to use
scientific methods in the study of Political Science.
5. Furthermore, the scholar being a human being is not always value neutral as believed by
the behaviouralists.
Post behaviour approach:
In the mid of 1960s, Post-Behaviouralism gained a dominant position in the methodology of
political science. Relevance and action were the main slogans of post Behaviouralism. In modern
social science, Post Behavioural approach has shown increasing concern with problem solving of
the prevailing problems of society.

Distinction between behavioural and post behavioural approaches

The Issue Behavioural Approach Post-Behavioural Approach

Nature of Search for pure knowledge Search for applied knowledge and practice
inquiry and theory

Purpose of Knowledge for knowledge Relevance of knowledge to satisfy social

inquiry sake; not interested in action needs and action for problem solving

Focus of study - Micro level analysis, focus Macro level analysis; focus on role of big
on small units units
- Process of decision making Content of the decision

Attitude towards Value Neutral Interested in the choice of values

Values

Attitude towards Interested in status quo, not Interested in social change for solving
social change interested in social change social problems

System approach developed by David Easton

The political system operates within an environment. The environment creates demands from
different parts of the society such as demand for reservation in the matter of employment for
certain groups, demand for better working conditions or minimum wages, demand for better
transportation facilities, demand for better health facilities. Different demands have different
levels of support. Easton stated that 'demands' and 'supports' establish 'inputs.' The political
system receives theses inputs from the environment. After taking various factors into
consideration, the government decides to take action on some of these demands while others are
not acted upon. Through the conversion process, the inputs are converted into 'outputs' by the
decision makers in the form of policies, decisions, rules, regulations and laws. The ‘outputs’ flow
back into the environment through a 'feedback' mechanism, giving rise to fresh 'demands.'
Consequently, it is a cyclical process.

Structural functional approach: According to this approach, society is considered as a single

inter related system where each part of the system has a certain and dissimilar role. The
structural-functional approach may be considered as an outgrowth of the system analysis. These
approaches accentuate the structures and functions. Gabriel Almond is a follower of this
approach. He explained political systems as a special system of interaction that exists in all
societies performing certain functions. His theory revealed that the main characteristics of a
political system are comprehensiveness, inter-dependence and existence of boundaries. Like
Easton, Almond also considered that all political systems perform input and output functions.
The Input functions of political systems are political socialization and recruitment, interest-
articulation, interest-aggression and political communication. Almond made three-fold
classifications of governmental output functions relating to policy making and implementation.
These output functions are rule making, rule application and rule adjudication. Thus, Almond
affirmed that a stable and efficient political system converts inputs into outputs.

Communication theory approach: This approach explores the process by which one segment
of a system affects another by sending messages or information. Robert Weiner had evolved this
approach. Afterwards Karl Deutsch developed it and applied it in Political Science. Deutsch
stated that the political system is a network of communication channels and it is self-regulative.
Additionally, he emphasized that the government is responsible for administering different
communication channels. This approach treats the government as the decision making system.
Deutsch described that there are four factors of analysis in communication theory which include
lead, lag, gain and load.

Decision making approach:

This political approach discovers the features of decision makers as well as the type of influence
the individuals have on the decision makers. Numerous scholars such as Richard Synder and
Charles Lindblom have developed this approach. A political decision which is taken by a few
actors influences a larger society and such a decision is generally shaped by a specific situation.
Therefore, it takes into account psychological and social aspects of decision makers also.

Broadly speaking, several approaches to political science have been advocated from time to time,
and these are broadly divided into two categories that include the empirical-analytical or the
scientific-behavioural approach and the legal-historical or the normative-philosophical approach.

Empirical Theory:
In Simple form, empirical political theory explains 'what is' through observation. In this
approach, scholars seek to generate a hypothesis, which is a proposed explanation for some
phenomena that can be tested empirically. After formulating a hypothesis, a study will be
designed to test the hypothesis.

Normative Theory:
Normative political theory is related to concepts such as justice, equality, and rights. Historical
political theory involves political philosophers from the past (e.g. Thucyides and Plato) to the
present (e.g. Wendy Brown and Seyla Benahabib), and may focus on how particular
philosophers engaged political problems that continue to be relevant today. While the focus has
traditionally been on Western traditions, that is beginning to change in this field.

Broadly speaking, empirical approach seeks to discover and describe facts whereas normative
approach seeks to determine and prescribe value (Gauba, 2009).

Difference between empirical and normative approaches of political theory (Source: Gauba,
2009):

It is demonstrated in theoretical literature that the traditional empirical approach to political

science is what makes it a "positive" science. The study of what is, as opposed to what ought to
be, lends a certain respectability to political science that is not attached to opinion-writing or
political theorists. While Plato and Aristotle sought to recognise the characteristics of a good
polity, most modern political scientists seek to identify the characteristics of polities, their causes
and effects, leaving aside moral judgments about their goodness or badness.

To summarize, Political Theory is a separate area within the discipline of political science.
Political theory is an outline of what the political order is about. It is symbolic representation
about the word ‘political’. It is a formal, logical and systematic analysis of the processes and
consequences of political activity. It is analytical, expository and descriptive. It seeks to give
order, coherence, and meaning to what is described as ‘political’. Political theorists concentrate
more on theoretical claims instead of empirical claims about the nature of the politics. There are
different approaches which explains the political system which includes modern and traditional
approaches. In behaviour approach, scientific method is emphasized because behaviours of
several actors in political situation is capable of scientific study. Normative approach is linked to
philosophical method because norms and values can be determined philosophically. Another
classification of political approach is empirical analysis of political events.
 Module 2 – State, Nation and Civil Society

What is State?

Initially political science was almost exclusively concerned with studying and understanding the
nature of the state. In fact the political thinker Garner had commented 'Political Science begins
and ends with the state'. The fact of the existence of the state is very old and in some ways it
has always been seen as an authority for imposing law and order and guarantee protection of
society. However the notion of state has constantly evolved and changed over time. The Greek
city-states used the word polis while the Romans used the word res publica. Later there were
terms used like Christian Commonwealth etc. Also the emphasis in the idea of the state
changed over time. Initially the focus was on the authority of the state which later changed to
the duty of the people. The nineteenth century onwards, owing largely to the influence of jurists,
the emphasis got changed to internal sovereignty and the external independence of the state.

In the twentieth century the legal and juristic aspects of the state were challenged. Liberal
thinkers like Laski, MacIver, Merrium, Lasswell, David Easton, Oppenheimer etc all argued this
concept of state does not bring out the entire whole of political life that state represents. Also
there were pre-state societies that a too legal authoritarian notion of state would not cover.
Generally in terms of the history of changes in the notion of state there have been three types of
notions: (a) the idealist notions (b) the liberal notions and (c) the socialist notions.

The idealist notions of the state start with the Greek notion of polis expounded by Plato and
Aristotle who considered the state as a natural, necessary and ethical institution. The state or
polis was there to enable a high level of moral and good life. Later Christians argued the state
derived its authority from God and the king was the agent of God. So obedience to the King was
made both a political and religious duty. Later the philosopher Hagel revived the idealistic notion
of the state with his idea of 'state as an organism'. He argued just as an organism the state also
has three characteristics: (a) there is a relationship between the parts and the whole - man is a
part of society and state is organised society, (b) like the individual man the state also develops
from within and, (c) just as the end of the organism exists within itself, the state is also has an
end in itself.

The liberal notion of the state evolved with the decline of the Roman Empire and the
Reformation and the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution. The state became a more
secular entity, which wields legal and military authority and power over a territorial area. So the
idea of a state was now more of a nation state with sovereignty.

Even this notion of state changed later in the 17th and 18th centuries when a legal notion of
state developed. Now state was primarily a law-making body, a group of persons organised for
the promotion and maintenance of order and prosperity and happiness via law making. Thus we
saw the beginning of what we know as a constitutional state in modern times. Here the notion of
the state also combined a free market lassez faire economy model with a minimal role for the
state. Again in the early decades of the twentieth century the notion of state again was changed
to mean a more activist and responsible notion of the state that acts in public welfare. Or in
other words the notion of the liberal welfare state.

Socialists and Marxists put forward a totally different notion of the state. They saw the state as
nothing but an instrument for the rich ruling classes to rule and exploit the non-ruling poorer
classes. The state was seen y them an a coercive entity. Thus they saw a class struggle
ensuing leading to a revolution that would overthrow the exploitative grip of the upper classes
and create a class less society.

Modern concepts of the state are dominated by the Liberal and Marxist theories of the state.
The various major perspectives that have held influence are as follows:

1. Liberal-Individualistic

2. Social Democratic Welfare

3. Libertarian

4. Classical Marxist

5. Contemporary Marxist

The Liberal-Individualistic State

The early notions of the state in the liberal tradition were based around the individualistic liberty
of the individual. The whole focus was on the individual. The goal was to free the individual
from every arbitrary and capricious authority, particularly, the authority of the state. The rights to
life, liberty and property were held as the most basic and natural inalienable rights of man. The
state should be there only to protect the free and unfettered enjoyment of these rights. In fact
the liberty of the individual and the authority of the state were therefore seen as fundamentally
antithetical by the liberal philosophers. They were not concerned with or appreciative of any
possible contradiction between the liberty of the individual and the interests of society.

In fact the liberal thinkers were even willing to see the state as a machine for securing the rights
of the individual. Locke had commented 'the state is a machine which we create for our good
and run for our purpose'. They argued since the state is created by man it cannot be greater
than the creator. It is something which exists for man and not vice-versa. The sole justification of
the state was that it is necessary to protect the rights and liberty of the individual with the legal
and police-military might of the state. The state thus is an artificial entity where the member
individuals are as a consequence of a contract agreed to live together so that a mechanism can
be followed for settling disputes and safeguarding rights. Thus the state they argued is a result
of consent and contract of the governed. So if the state violated the contract the individuals
have a right and a duty to resist it. So if the state tried to take action that it argues is in the public
interest but which is harmful to individual rights, then the individual has to defend his right to
property and liberty on the ground that the state is violating contract.

The liberal thinkers believed social control, security and freedom can be best protected via a
legal system and laws. Law should command the respect of everyone or made to command the
respect and government should be too 'under the law'. The idea of state as a law-making body
was put forward by Hobbes and Bodin and refined by Bentham and Austin who presented the
state as a law making body. Law was fundamentally seen as a restraint on liberty but was seen
as necessary because it was the best guarantee of life and liberty. Since it is the command of
the sovereign the liberal held it is only when such an authority is habitually obeyed that a civil
society exists. It is only the legal state that can be a sovereign state the liberals argued and the
state acts through laws made by parliament. Rights, liberty, equality, democracy are all legal in
character. It is this view that became the basis for a constitutional state. The liberals argued that
every state must draw a constitution which should define the power and functions of various
branches of government and their inter-relations as well as the rights of the citizens.

So liberalism in its early phase mainly saw the state as a necessary evil to protect the
individual's enjoyment of his rights. That is the reason in the liberal scheme of things in this
phase historically the role of the state was very minimal. In fact Adam Smith the father of market
economics restricted the role of the state only to the following: (a) protect the society from
violence and invasion (b) protect every member of society from injustice and oppression of
every other member, and (c) erect and maintain certain public works and certain public
institutions in which the individual may not be interested because it is unprofitable.

The liberal perspective of the state also is a believer in what we call today more popularly as a
free market economy. Adam Smith is credited with giving the first theoretical basis for this belief.
He described his theory in his book Wealth of Nations which was later supported and advanced
by later liberal thinkers. The fundamental principle is that right to property is a fundamental and
sacred right of all individuals which also is good for the society. The process of demand and
supply and buying and selling creates the best allocation of resources and maximises human
happiness or utility like no other conceivable system according to Adam Smith. The liberal
model of a capitalist economy was based on the assumption that economics and politics are
mutually independent. Adam Smith had written: 'No two characteristics seem more inconsistent
than those of trader and sovereign'. The liberal model saw any restraint on profit, interest, rent,
wages, salary etc as hindrances to economic progress.

The liberal-individualistic perspective of the state is highly individualistic in focus and gives
priority only the right, liberty and interests of individuals and is not bothered with total societal
well being. Any restraint on the individual in the interest of the society or state as a whole is
harmful in the eyes of liberals of this school of thought. So the state as conceived by them only
had a negative function of imposing laws and regulations meant to protect the rights of
individuals.

The Social Democratic Welfare State

The liberal-individualistic perspective of the state as proposed by the early classical liberal
thinkers began to be challenged by the middle of the nineteenth century as a consequence of
historical circumstances. The policy of a state that would only facilitate economic activity and
exists just to enforce laws and fight international wars led to the concentration of capital in a few
hands, monopolistic control of trade and emergence of very rich and large business families on
the one hand and a majority exploited working class population on the other who had very poor
lives of squalor. The gap between the rich and the poor became larger constantly. It became
clear that the individualist view of the state of the early liberals cannot fulfil economic, social and
political goals.
The social democratic welfare perspective of the state emerged out of the re-examination of the
nature and functions of the state by thinkers like J.S. Mill, T.H. Green, Hobson, Laski, Keynes
etc. The new liberal thinkers also eventually known as the positive liberals rethought the
concepts of the nature of liberty, relations between the state and the economy and the
contradiction between liberty and authority. Also there arose a new feeling of the need for
'equality of opportunity' among liberal thinkers. In many ways the problem was reconciling
individual and social interests and goals and also reconciling socialism and capitalism and the
new positive liberal thinkers achieved this by altering and expanding the concept of liberty and
also by advocating a totally new active role for the state. The state was now seen as a
necessary agent for the promotion of the social good. The new liberals did not see state control
and activity as a threat to individual liberty but instead argued that it was the only effective way
to make liberty a real and meaningful reality for society as a whole and not only the rich
minority. The main characteristics of the social democratic welfare state notion of state are as
follows:

(a) Unlike the liberal-individualistic perspective the social democratic perspective of the state
sees a need for reconciling the individual and social good and does not necessarily equate
individual good with the social good. In this process they see a role for the state.

(b) Social democratic perspective agrees that all restraints on the freedom of the individual are
not evil. In fact they would argue it can help in guaranteeing liberty better.

(c) The social democratic perspective sees a very active positive role for the state. The state
has to play a role in ensuring that the basic minimum standard of living is available to all in
society. The state needs to set minimum wage standards for instance and specify working
conditions or create facilities for the upbringing of children or for prevention of destitution or
conservation and proper utilisation of natural resources, educational resources etc.

(d) The social democratic perspective advocates a democratic and responsible state with a
written constitution, representative government, universal adult franchise, civil and political
liberties, political parties etc. They argue a state that is for welfare but is not democratic cannot
be regarded as liberal. So they are opposed to the socialist and Marxist prescriptions.

(e) The social democratic perspective is very wary of the abuses and bad consequences of a
market economy with unfettered trade and business freedom but unlike Marxists don't want to
abolish the market all together. They want the state to intervene in the market economy without
disturbing the system. Rather the way for the state is to engage in economic and social reforms
to improve the working conditions etc, and take measures to contain poverty, illiteracy,
unemployment etc. The social democratic prescription is to rectify the ills of capitalism through a
mixed economy model. The role of the state is not to be under the grip of any particular class
but intervene positively for social change.

Classical Marxist Perspective of the State

The Marxist view of the state is fundamentally and radically different from that of all liberal
thoughts that either preceded or succeeded Karl Marx. This stems from the fundamental view of
capitalist society as a class divided society where the interests of the rich and poor classes are
fundamentally different and opposed to each other ultimately. Marxism views the state in a
capitalist society as tool of the upper classes to maintain their privileged positions. In a state
based upon private ownership of means of production according to Marx, the state is always an
instrument of exploitation, a dictatorship of a special kind for the suppression of the exploited
masses. Marx held that in a capitalist society inevitably class divides lead to a class struggle
and to a revolution ultimately. This revolution, which Marx both predicted and advocated,
creates a classless society and a new economic order in which private property stands
abolished after the proletariat takes over.

Engels whose contribution to Marxist thought is substantial had argued the state had not always
naturally existed. In fact according to him the state arose historically only when society got
divided into propertied and non-propertied classes to help the properties maintain their
privileged position and protect their interests and keep conflicts arising out of property in check.
Engels argued the state was different from other forms of social organisation in three ways: (a) it
divided its subjects according to territory (b) the state has an establishment for exercising
coercive power like a police and jails and (c) to maintain public order the state levies taxes and
raises revenue. Analysing history Engels showed that the state had assumed many forms such
as monarchy, aristocracy, democracy etc but it has always remained a tool of the ruling classes
for oppressing the property less classes.

Marxism also argues even when the state engages in welfare functions in areas like health and
education for instance the basic character of a state in a class divided society is always the
same - a tool for maintaining upper class privileges. The so called law and order is only for the
poor. While the state may pretend to be free from class struggle, the order it maintains and the
order it serves is the order of the capitalist classes. He argues, in a capitalist society, the state
treats all profits as legitimate and keeps out of all economic decisions. But the ideological
functions are not performed by the state and are instead performed by the institutions of
religion, education, family, legal system, trade unions, media, culture, literature etc. The state
serves as the ultimate sanctioning agency for the activities of these institutions and their
purpose is to maintain the unity of the capitalist system. The functions of the stare, helps in the
perpetuation of class division, class struggle and class domination.

NATIONS AND NATIONALISM

A nation is not any casual collection of people. At the same time it is also different from other
groups or communities found in human society. It is different from the family which is based on
face-to-face relationships with each member having direct personal knowledge of the identity
and character of others. It is also different from tribes and clans and other kinship groups in
which ties of marriage and descent link members to each other so that even if we do not
personally know all the members we can, if need be, trace the links that bind them to us. But as a
member of a nation we may never come face to face with most of our fellow nationals nor need
we share ties of descent with them. Yet nations exist, are lived in and valued by their members.
It is commonly believed that nations are constituted by a group who share certain features such
as descent, or language, or religion or ethnicity. But there is in fact no common set of
characteristics which is present in all nations. Many nations do not have a common language,
Canada is an example here. Canada includes English speaking as well as French speaking
peoples. India also has a large number of languages which are spoken in different regions and by
different communities. Nor do many nations have a common religion to unite them. The same
could be said of other characteristics such as race or descent.

What then constitutes a nation?

A nation is to a great extent an ‘imagined’ community, held together by the collective beliefs,
aspirations and imaginations of its members. It is based on certain assumptions which people
make about the collective whole with which they identify. Let us identify and understand some
of the assumptions which people make about the nation.
Shared Beliefs
First, a nation is constituted by belief. Nations are not like mountains, rivers or buildings which
we can see and feel. They are not things which exist independent of the beliefs that people have
about them. To speak of a people as a nation is not to make a comment about their physical
characteristics or behaviour. Rather, it is to refer to the collective identity and vision for the
future of a group which aspires to have an independent political existence. To this extent, nations
can be compared with a team. When we speak of a team, we mean a set of people who work or
play together and, more importantly, conceive of themselves as a collective group. If they did not
think of themselves in this way they would cease to be a team and be simply different individuals
playing a game or undertaking a task. A nation exists when its members believe that they belong
together.
History
Second, people who see themselves as a nation also embody a sense of continuing historical
identity. That is, nations perceive themselves as stretching back into the past as well as reaching
into the future. They articulate for themselves a sense of their own history by drawing on
collective memories, legends, and historical records, to outline the continuing identity of the
nation. Thus nationalists in India invoked its ancient civilization and cultural heritage and other
achievements to claim that India has had a long and continuing history as a civilization and that
this civilization continuity and unity is the basis of the Indian nation. Jawaharlal Nehru, for
instance, wrote in his book The Discovery of India, “Though outwardly there was diversity and
infinite variety among the people, everywhere there was that tremendous impress of oneness,
which held all of us together in ages past, whatever political fate or misfortune had befallen us”.
Territory
Third, nations identify with a particular territory. Sharing a common past and living together on a
particular territory over a long period of time gives people a sense of their collective identity. It
helps them to imagine themselves as one people. It is therefore not surprising that people who
see themselves as a nation speak of a homeland. The territory they occupied and the land on
which they have lived has a special significance for them, and they claim it as their own. Nations
however characterize the homeland in different ways, for instance as motherland, or fatherland,
or holy land. The Jewish people for instance, in spite of being dispersed and scattered in different
parts of the world always claimed that their original homeland was in Palestine, the ‘promised
land’. The Indian nation identifies with the rivers, mountains and regions of the Indian
subcontinent. However, since more than one set of people may lay claim to the same territory,
the aspiration for a homeland has been a major cause of conflict in the world.
Shared Political Ideals
Fourth, while territory and shared historical identity play an important role in creating a sense of
oneness, it is a shared vision of the future and the collective aspiration to have an independent
political existence that distinguishes groups from nations. Members of a nation share a vision of
the kind of state they want to build. They affirm among other things a set of values and
principles such as democracy, secularism and liberalism. These ideals represent the terms under
which they come together and are willing to live together. It represents, in other words, their
political identity as a nation. In a democracy, it is shared commitment to a set of political values
and ideals that is the most desirable basis of a political community or a nation-state. Within it,
members of political community are bound by a set of obligations. These obligations arise from
the recognition of the rights of each other as citizens. A nation is strengthened when its people
acknowledge and accept their obligations to their fellow members. We might even say that
recognition of this framework of obligations is the strongest test of loyalty to the nation.
Common Political Identity
Many people believe that a shared political vision about the state and society we wish to create is
not enough to bind individuals together as a nation. They seek instead a shared cultural identity,
such as a common language, or common descent. There is no doubt that speaking the same
language makes it easier for us to communicate with each other and sharing the same religion
gives us a set of common beliefs and social practices. Observing the same festivals, seeking the
same holidays, and holding the same symbols valuable can bring people together, but it can also
pose a threat to the values that we cherish in a democracy. There are two reasons for this. One,
all major religions in the world are internally diverse. They have survived and evolved through a
dialogue within the community. As a result there exist within each religion a number of sects
who differ significantly in their interpretation of the religious texts and norms. If we ignore these
differences and forge an identity on the basis of a common religion we are likely to create a
highly authoritative and oppressive society.
Two, most societies are culturally diverse. They have people belonging to different religions and
languages living together in the same territory. To impose a single religious or linguistic identity
as a condition of belonging to a particular state would necessarily exclude some groups. It might
restrict the religious liberty of the excluded group or disadvantage those who do not speak the
national language. Either way, the ideal that we cherish most in democracy – namely, equal
treatment and liberty for all – would be severely limited. For both these reasons it is desirable to
imagine the nation in political rather than cultural terms. That is, democracies need to emphasize
and expect loyalty to a set of values that may be enshrined in the Constitution of the country
rather than adherence to a particular religion, race or language.
NATIONAL SELF-DETERMINATION
Nations, unlike other social groups, seek the right to govern themselves and determine their
future development. They seek, in other words, the right to self-determination. In making this
claim a nation seeks recognition and acceptance by the international community of its status as a
distinct political entity or state. Most often these claims come from people who have lived
together on a given land for a long period of time and who have a sense of common identity. In
some cases such claims to self-determination are linked also to the desire to form a state in which
the culture of the group is protected if not privileged.
Claims of the latter kind were frequently made in the nineteenth century in Europe. The notion of
one culture - one state began to gain acceptability at the time. Subsequently, the idea of one
culture one state was employed while reordering state boundaries after World War I. The Treaty
of Versailles established a number of small, newly independent states, but it proved virtually
impossible to satisfy all the demands for self determination which were made at the time.
Besides, re-organization of state boundaries to satisfy the demands of one culture - one state, led
to mass migration of population across state boundaries. Millions of people as a consequence
were displaced from their homes and expelled from the land which had been their home for
generations. Many others became victims of communal violence. Humanity paid a heavy price
for re-organizing boundaries in a way that culturally distinct communities could form separate
nation-states. Besides, even in this effort it was not possible to ensure that the newly created
states contained only one ethnic community. Indeed most states had more than one ethnic and
cultural community living within its boundaries. These communities, which were often small in
number and constituted a minority within the state were often disadvantaged. Hence, the problem
of accommodating minorities as equal citizens remained. The only positive aspect of these
developments was that it granted political recognition to various groups who saw themselves as
distinct nations and wanted the opportunity to govern themselves and determined their own
future. The right to national self-determination has also asserted by national liberation
movements in Asia and Africa when they were struggling against colonial domination.
Nationalist movements maintained that political independence would provide dignity and
recognition to the colonized people and also help them to protect the collective interests of their
people. Most national liberation movements were inspired by the goal of bringing justice and
rights and prosperity to the nation. However, here also, it proved almost impossible to ensure that
each cultural group, some of whom claimed to be distinct nations, could achieve political
independence and statehood. As a result, migration of populations, border wars, and violence
have continued to plague many countries in the region. Thus we have the paradoxical situation of
nation-states which themselves had achieved independence through struggle now acting against
minorities within their own territories who claim the right to national self- determination.
Virtually every state in the world today faces the dilemma of how to deal with movements for
self-determination and this has raised questions about the right to national self-determination.
More and more people are beginning to realize that the solution does not lie in creating new
states but in making existing states more democratic and equal. That is, in ensuring that people
with different cultural and ethnic identities live and co-exist as partners and equal citizens within
the country. This may be essential not only for resolving problems arising from new claims for
self-determination but also for building a strong and united state. After all, a nation-state which
does not respect the rights and cultural identity of minorities within the state would find it
difficult to gain the loyalty of its members.
INTRODUCING NATIONALISM

If we were to take a quick poll of what people commonly understand by the term nationalism we
are likely to get responses which talk about patriotism, national flags, sacrificing for the country,
and the like. The Republic Day parade in Delhi is a striking symbol of Indian nationalism and it
brings out the sense of power, strength, as well as diversity which many associate with the Indian
nation. But if we try to go deeper we will find that it is difficult to arrive at a precise and widely
accepted definition of the term nationalism. This need not mean that we should abandon the
effort. Nationalism needs to be studied because it plays such an important role in world affairs.
During the last two centuries or more, nationalism has emerged as one of the most compelling of
political creeds which has helped to shape history. It has inspired intense loyalties as well as
deep hatreds.
It has united people as well as divided them, helped to liberate them from oppressive rule as well
as been the cause of conflict and bitterness and wars. It has been a factor in the breakup of
empires and states. Nationalist struggles have contributed to the drawing and redrawing of the
boundaries of states and empires. At present a large part of the world is divided into different
nation-states although the process of re-ordering of state boundaries has not come to an end and
separatist struggles within existing states are common.
Nationalism has passed through many phases. For instance, in the nineteenth century Europe, it
led to the unification of a number of small kingdoms into larger nation-states. The present day
German and Italian states were formed through such a process of unification and consolidation.
A large number of new states were also founded in Latin America. Along with the consolidation
of state boundaries, local dialects and local loyalties were also gradually consolidated into state
loyalties and common languages. The people of the new states acquired a new political identity
which was based on membership of the nation-state. We have seen a similar process of
consolidation taking place in our own country in the last century or more. But nationalism also
accompanied and contributed to the breakup of large empires such as the Austro-Hungarian and
Russian empires in the early twentieth century in Europe as well as the breakup of the British,
French, Dutch and Portuguese empires in Asia and Africa. The struggle for freedom from
colonial rule by India and other former colonies were nationalist struggles, inspired by the desire
to establish nation-states which would be independent of foreign control.
The process of redrawing state boundaries continues to take place. Since 1960, even apparently
stable nation-states have been confronted by nationalist demands put forward by groups or
regions and these may include demands for separate statehood. Today, in many parts of the
world we witness nationalist struggles that threaten to divide existing states. Such separatist
movements have developed among the Quebecois in Canada, the Basques in northern Spain, the
Kurds in Turkey and Iraq, and the Tamils in Sri Lanka, among others. The language of
nationalism is also used by some groups in India. Arab nationalism today may hope to unite
Arab countries in a pan Arab union but separatist movements like the Basques or Kurds struggle
to divide existing states. We may all agree that nationalism is a powerful force in the world even
today. But it is more difficult to arrive at agreement regarding the definition of terms like nation
or nationalism. What is a nation? Why do people form nations and to what do nations aspire?
Why are people ready to sacrifice and even die for their nation? Why, and in what way, are
claims to nationhood linked to claims to statehood? Do nations have a right to statehood or
national self-determination? Or can the claims of nationalism be met without conceding separate
statehood? In this chapter we will explore some of these issues.
NATIONALISM AND PLURALISM
Once we abandon the idea of one-culture-one-state, it becomes necessary to consider ways by
which different cultures and communities can survive and flourish within a country. It is in
pursuit of this goal that many democratic societies today have introduced measures for
recognizing and protecting the identity of cultural minority communities living within their
territory. The Indian constitution has an elaborate set of provisions for the protection of religious,
linguistic and cultural minorities.
The kinds of group rights which have been granted in different countries include constitutional
protection for the language, cultures and religion, of minority groups and their members. In some
cases identified communities also have the right to representation as a group in legislative bodies
and other state institutions.
Such rights may be justified on the grounds that they provide equal treatment and protection of
the law for members of these groups as well as protection for the cultural identity of the group.
Different groups need to be granted recognition as a part of the national community. This means
that the national identity has to be defined in an inclusive manner which can recognize the
importance and unique contribution of all the cultural communities within the state.
Although it is hoped that granting groups recognition and protection would satisfy their
aspirations, some groups may continue to demand separate statehood. This may seem
paradoxical when globalization is also spreading in the world but nationalist aspirations continue
to motivate many groups and communities. Considerable generosity and skill is needed for
countries to be able to deal with such demands in a democratic manner.
To sum up, the right to national self-determination was often understood to include the right to
independent statehood for nationalities. But not only would it be impossible to grant independent
statehood to every group that sees itself as a distinct cultural group, or nation, it would probably
also be undesirable. It might lead to the formation of a number of states too small to be
economically and politically viable and it could multiply the problems of minorities. The right
has now been reinterpreted to mean granting certain democratic rights for a nationality within a
state. The world we live in is one that is deeply conscious of the importance of giving
recognition to identities. Today we witness many struggles for the recognition of group
identities, many of which employ the language of nationalism. While we need to acknowledge
the claims of identity we should be careful not to allow identity claims to be lead to divisions and
violence in the society. We need to remember that each person has many identities. For instance,
a person may have identities based on gender, caste group, religion, language, or region, and may
be proud of all of them. So long as each person feels that he/she can freely express the different
dimensions of his/her personality, they may not feel the need to make claims on the state for
political recognition and concessions for any one identity. In a democracy the political identity of
citizen should encompass the different identities which people may have. It would be dangerous
if intolerant and homogenizing forms of identity and nationalism are allowed to develop.
WHAT IS IDENTITY?
In the past few decades even as democracy has consolidated as a concept it has also been
seen that there has been a rise of conflicts on the lines of ethnicity, caste etc. As a result
political thinkers have increasingly focussed on identity as an important concept and there has
emerged various theories around identity as a political concept. The most important proposition
of identity theorists has been that oppressed identity groups should have a special voice in a
democratic state to make their claims and voice their grievances. Very often the identity groups
are those that have seen their distinctive claims being ignored in a majority rule based
democratic set up or have suffered historical wrongs that in a democratic state have failed to be
compensated for. For instance lower castes in India need support by way of affirmative actions
like reservations in educational institutions but if all other castes unite against such measures
and vote together their majority domination will mean caste oppressions of thousands of years
will stay unheeded and un-compensated for and to that extent they will find democracy
meaningless.

Identity has thus become a very important concept in the modern ways of understanding politics
and it is argued both the Liberal tool of self-interest and the Marxist tool of class have proved
ineffective in analysing many political phenomenons which can only be explained in terms of
identity politics.

First we need to reflect on what does identity mean. When we commonly inform others as to our
identity while chatting with newly met strangers for instance we tend to say after we have told
our names, what we do for a living, what regional and/or caste community we are from and also
sometimes what commitments and relations we have with other individuals (like through
marriage) and groups. Identity it can be said has three elements: competence, community and
commitment. Competence is expressed by proving our abilities matched with the corresponding
social recognition. When we talk of our community links we are really trying to place ourselves
in the social scene that we hail from. It involves such aspects like which region of the country we
are from, what religion affiliations we have and what are our caste backgrounds.

When individuals, groups, associations and classes are bale to distinguish themselves from
others and are able to convey their distinctive character in words, gestures or practices to
reassure themselves and others as to their identity, they are in a position to give a political
context or sense to their sense of identity. In the twentieth century the search for identity has
been a major preoccupation of different nationalities and ethnic groups worldwide. Groups that
have engaged in identity politics have included those organised around race, ethnicity,
nationality, religion, disability, gender, environment etc.

While it may sound not promoting of democracy at first but proponents of identity politics argue
a shared identity and experience of a group is a natural and rational basis for existence and only
those who belong to the group appreciate their particular needs and problems and the
oppressions they face. Hence the identity groups should strive for self-determination and
demand rights as a legitimate political constituency.

It is a fact of history that distinct identities are destroyed on a continuing basis by many
societies. For instance in India when society moves into deep jungles or remote areas in search
of mineral wealth for example and sets up modern industries, the ways of life of tribals residing
there are overturned. They are encouraged and subtly forced to take to educational, cultural,
social and economic ways of life that are not their own but are imposed upon them by the
people who have come to their habitats from the cities. Also they can sometimes feel that what
is happening to them is unjust. They can also feel that they are seen as an inferior lower people.
It is now accepted that the process of a gradual demeaning and environment lack of respect for
various identity groups through racism, linguistic and cultural domination, imposition of dominant
culture through the process of destruction of identities or their assimilation can be unjust and
unfair and it is this that leads to political movements of identity.

Identity related political movements have been generally found to have the following
characteristics:

(a) Often the demands of identity groups are overlapping because while they are diverse and
heterogonous they are mostly not separate minorities, cultures or nations. For example,
women's rights and feminists groups raise demands often that are also raised by other groups.
For instance feminist groups raising the demands of tribal women also find that dalit and adivasi
groups are also raising the demands of dalit and tribal women as dalits. The diversity of identity
politics does not mean that they neutralise each other. Often the diversity and insecurity of
identity related differences fuel the demand for their political recognition and protection.

(b) The nature of an identity is also not constant always and the way an identity is articulated,
the forms of recognition and accommodation undergoes changes over time by the bearers of
that identity.

(c) Identity is not a theoretical concept but is one's practical experience of self-awareness and
self-formation in relation to and with others. When citizens from diverse identities in a society
co-ordinate their activities and co-operate with each other they do so under some form of mutual
recognition and accommodation. Clashes and conflicts over identity problems start when a
system of mutual recognition is questioned and becomes the focus of struggle and negotiations
over its justice and freedom.

Almost every civilisation, society, nation and state has within its fold diverse identities and
politically diverse people from diverse identities have not been treated equally and the state has
worked for the dominant groups rather than for the common good. That is the reason historically
the seeds of identity formation has lied in the revolts against discriminations, oppressions and
chauvinisms practiced by the dominant groups and elites. Sometimes politicians and political
parties have also made use of diversities and by constantly claiming a superiority of the majority
groups and the inferiority or imagined oppressions of minority groups have sought to win over
the majority groups for grabbing political power.

The anti-colonial struggles of the twentieth century and the struggles for democracy worldwide
had given a major push to identity related movements since they were based upon the notions
of freedom and social/civil rights to begin with and upon an extension of those rationales identity
related causes naturally developed as well. The various identity movements whether they have
been national movements or movements based on specific issues such as women's rights or
gay rights, the main purpose of the movements have been to reject and attack imposed
identities on them and justify and demand the recognition of an identity related difference.

In identity politics again and again the issue crops up as to who decides which identities are
unjustly imposed on others and which are worthy of recognition and need to be accommodated
by the community at large or by other members of the community. The answer to this question
that has emerged is that identities that deserve recognition should be raised and formulated by
the members of the affected groups themselves by a process of consultations, negotiations and
agreements. The people affected must experience that an alien identity has been imposed on
them which they find unjust and they should articulate their own identity and demand its
recognition. They must try to gain mutual recognition, respect and support of others who do not
share that identity because an identity that a group is seeking to assert can only establish itself
when others who are not members of that identity affirm that identity. If the recognition of an
identity leads to some people being affected by it then they should be allowed to defend the
status quo, raise doubts and give alternative counter proposals.

THE IDEA OF CIVIL SOCIETY

The idea of civil society is actually quite old but it has become fashionable again in the last
decade because of the developments in political evolution worldwide particularly after the fall of
the former communist countries in Eastern Europe. Also in recent years non-state actors
particularly non-governmental organisations and movements have become very influential in
shaping public policy and in supplementing in its implementation. Generally in fact by civil
society is meant various kinds of social and political forces that are outside the direct control of
the state. These can be from the economic sphere, cultural sphere and from environmental
groups etc. In fact it can be said there are three main sources of civil society - economy, society
and culture. In Western thought the following views have been most influential on civil society:
(a) the views of John Locke, (b) the ideas of the Scottish theorists of commercial society, and (c)
Hegel's views on civil society. Other significant views are Karl Marx's critique of civil society and
its refinement by Marxist thinker Gramsci.

John Locke - Civil and Natural Society

Proceeding from the idea of social contract John Locke saw ordered political society as civil
society. He argued in a situation where individuals have natural rights there would not be three
things: (a) there would be no authority to make laws, (b) to execute them and (c) to award
punishment to wrong doers. But when individuals surrender these natural rights to a community
or state so that they have a guarantee from that society for protection of their basic rights of life,
liberty and property it can be said they have formed a civil society. This civil society had the role
of making laws, executing them and awarding punishment to wrong doers who violate these
laws. Thus according to him a civil society is in contrast to a state of nature because they are
ordered communities with standing laws, judges and effective power of enforcement. He argued
it is necessary for a civil society to exist, that human beings are civilised and follow discipline.
Also that some minimum conditions such as representative government, right to property and
toleration of religious rights are needed. But Locke states very clearly that civil society and state
are different. He argued that the state depends upon the trust of the civil society. He argued if
the state started acting tyrannically or irresponsibly and tried to curtail the rights of individuals
then the civil society must act to check the transgressions. He thus talks of two contracts - one
between the members of the civil society and the other for the formation of the government. The
dissolution of one contract - that for the state - does not necessarily thus leads to the dissolution
of the other - the one of the civil society. In fact Locke suggested two measures to limit the
power of the state: (a) the state should not have the material resources to repress all other
sections of the society and (b) the constitutional laying down of certain moral principles which
lay down the functions of the state and other social bodies. Other social bodies are necessary
because social life requires numerous activities and the state is not the proper association for all
ends of human beings. The state thus should exist along with other social bodies and
associations and it is this space of other groups that constitutes the civil society. These civil
society groups have the role of keeping a check on the state so that it does not encroach upon
the sphere of the individual.

The Scottish Theorists of Commercial Society

In the eighteenth century thinkers like Hutcheson, Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith who are
known as the Scottish theorists gave their own view of civil society to justify and explain the new
capitalism that was developing in Europe and England. They argued the pursuit of profit, wealth
and money was a reasonable and rational thing or goal which should be unrestricted and
without the least interference from the state by way of legal jurisdiction. They argued a civil
society that focuses on commercial activity is a superior one and is a higher form of civilisation.
This is because it does not focus on military conquest that only leads to destruction and also
helps in cultivating the arts and sciences. Further it helped in furthering production of material
goods which helped people lead more fulfilling lives and also necessarily implies an ordered
society based on restraint and gentle behaviour. They saw civil society as co-terminus with the
state but also as a 'civilised society'.

They went further than merely arguing that people in a commercial set up acting in self-interest
maximise utility. They argued in fact that commercial behaviour is morally superior and the
community's benefit is actually an unintended consequence of how people behave. Social
practices and institutions according to them were not just utility maximising cold blooded
calculated actions but also part of the sentimental social and friendly responses of people. The
market system just allowed private social relations on a mature basis for mutual interest.
Hence according to the commercial theorists civil society was co-terminus not necessarily with
any state but with rather state system that has a rule of law, limited government, laissez faire,
commercial activities, markets and freedom and protection for commercial contracts.

Hegels' Ideas of Family, Civil Society and the State

Until the German thinker Hegel in Western thought there was a distinction made between civil
society and the state. Hegel extended this and made a distinction between three aspects of
society - the family, the civil society and the state. He called the family the private domain and
the civil society and the state as the public domain. He termed the family as thesis, the civil
society as anti-thesis and the state as the synthesis and saw the civil society as a step in the
general direction of supreme ethical realisation for man and society, which he was of the view is
only possible through the state.

Marxist Thoughts on Civil Society

Marx started with Hegel's idea of civil society to build his analysis of history, society and the
state. He fundamentally differed in his view of the state from Hegel in that he argued the state is
a function of and subject to the conflicting forces of civil society and is not a an all-inclusive
political community created as a result of synthesis. The civil society according to him was
nothing but the system of economic arrangements for production and exchange in the market
system of capitalist society with division of labour and the existence of division in society into
classes. He argued the history of man is but the history of civil society and civil society is
nothing but the structure of economic relations and the state is relatively unimportant. Marx did
accept the view that civil society had risen from the separation of the state from private
economic production in the post-feudal era. In fact Marx went so far as to say civil society ' only
develops with the bourgeois'. He argued in the free market capitalist set up the civil society is
basically a non-social dehumanised set up because it constitutes nothing but a competition and
conflict between economic classes. Thus the civil society in a capitalist set up was just a
situation for the exploitation of man by man - of the poor working classes by the rich business
men or bourgeois. He argued the resolution of the conflict is achieved only when a class
struggle begins and the proletariat in a revolution overthrow the state controlled by the
bourgeois to establish a classless and stateless nation less community of free co-operative
producers.
Thus Marx viewed civil society in a capitalist society as a part of the commercial and industrial
life, which makes human beings acquisitive and egotistic and creates a tendency in them to
relate to each other only on the basis of money relations.

The Liberal Individualistic Perspective of Civil Society

In the Liberal tradition in western thought civil society came to be regarded eventually
essentially as a condition for the smooth functioning of democracy. The thinker Alexis De
Tocqueville argued that the state should not be seen necessarily as a governor of civil society.
Indeed, he argued, without the participation of the people in civil associations and egalitarian
institutions and political organisations, it is impossible to preserve the democratic character of
social and political institutions for a pluralistic and self-governing civil society independent of the
state is a fundamental condition of democracy. Civil society associations in the liberal scheme
can be anything from neighbourhood resident welfare associations to cultural associations and
trade unions etc where people participate out of a sense of responsibility and out of free choice
and exercising personal freedom. The state in its role uses coercive authority but in contrasts
the civil society functions without coercion and while giving freedom to the individual to shape
his own destiny. Since in the liberal tradition there is a commitment to maximising freedom this
is also the reason why classical liberals preferred civil society to the state and tried to minimise
the power of public authority.

Functions of Civil Society

Freely formed and functioning civil society associations serve as an important counter weight to
any possibilities of totalitarianism because they are in the space that is between the state and
the individual. When individuals become self focussed and withdraw into their private shells they
in fact become easy prey of any attempted totalitarianism.

The civil society is crucial for the successful implementation of public policy. Individual people
alone are mostly voiceless but when they combine they can help shape policy and play a crucial
role in successful implementation of public policy with their active participation. So the state and
civil society can and needs to have a partnership to carry out successful implementation of
public policy.

Even if particular civil society organisations are against the values of democratic liberalism then
even they should be encouraged and given an opportunity to participate because they provide a
crucial vent to anti-liberal sentiments to play out rather than explode.
In a nutshell

Civil Society performs the following functions to consolidate liberal democracy:

(a) In acting as a neutralising force against state power.

(b) Stimulates political participation and promotes democratic skills among the population
and a democratic political culture.

(c) Helps in providing representation to different interests many of which may not get
adequate representation via mainstream political parties.

(d) Helps in establishing cross connections among a diverse array of interests and groups
thereby reducing the possibility of polarity in society.

(e) Helps in providing a training ground for future politicians.

(f) Helps in dissemination of information about policy measures and serves as a

monitoring group in implementation of public policy.

(g) Helps in conflict resolution and mediation.

Module 3 – Power, Authority and Legitimacy

Definition of Power:
Power and authority are perhaps the most vital aspects of all organizations in general and
political organizations in particular. Power is related to taking of decisions and for the
implementation of those decisions. No organization, whatever may its nature be, can do its duty
or achieve objectives without power.
Robert Dahl in many of his works has defined power and analyzed its various aspects. In his A
Preface to Democratic Theory Dahl calls power a type of relationship in respect of capability and
control. Take a very simple example. There are two men—A and B. If A possesses the
capability to control B then it will be assumed that A has the power. So power involves a
successful attempt to do something which he could not do otherwise.
In any society there are diverse interests and all are alike. When there are conflicts among them
one interest proceeds to dominate over the other and the interest which prevails upon the other
the former may be called powerful interest.
Karl Deutsch says that power means the ability to be involved in conflict, to resolve it and to
remove the obstacles. Though Deutsch defines the concept in the background of international
politics, its relevance to national politics is, however, undeniable. In domestic politics or
pluralistic societies there are many competing groups and all struggle to capture power or to
influence. The group which succeeds finally will be called powerful.
D. D. Raphael (Problems of Political Philosophy) has analyzed power from various aspects. He
believes that generally power means the ability. Raphael says that in French there is a word
“Pouvoir”. In Latin “Potestas” is commonly used. Both these words (these are verbs) mean “to
be able”.
Raphael is of opinion that the English word power is derived from these two words and naturally
power may be used to mean ability and hence his definition of power is specific kind of ability.
Why specific kind? Let us quote him: “The ability to make other people do what one wants them
to do”.
Some political scientists want to mean that there is a special type of power which may be
designated as political power. For example, Alan Ball feels that power may generally be used in
political sense. Hence political power may broadly be defined as the capacity to affect another’s
behaviour by some form of sanction. Leslie Lipson (The Great Issues of Politics) thinks that
power is nothing but the ability to achieve results through concerted action. Thus, power means
the capacity to make decisions binding and ability to discharge responsibilities and perform
certain functions.

Nature of Power:
Power is used in relational sense. When there is only one actor or element the issue of power
does not arise. It is because power implies ability to influence or control others or to get things
done by others. Naturally power relates to the relationship or interaction between two or among
more than two elements or actors. So power is always viewed in the background of relationship.
Power is shared and bartered by numerous groups spread throughout society and representing
diverse interests. In any pluralist society there are numerous groups and they all compete
among themselves at various levels to capture political power or to influence the agencies who
exercise their influence. Power is not concentrated at any particular centre. Again, all the
centres of power do claim to have equal or almost equal amount of power. In other words, there
is an unequal distribution of power like an unequal distribution of wealth.
In a class-society there are diverse interests and each power centre represents a particular
interest. This point may further be explained. In any capitalist society there are several classes,
both major and minor, and each class strives for the realization of its own interests which are
generally economic.
Power is a conditional concept. Power is an ability to command service from others. But this
ability depends in some measure upon certain conditions and if the conditions are not fulfilled
properly power cannot function. Power is not something which is permanently fixed. It is subject
to change. If the source of power dries up power generation or enhancement will stop. Again,
mere existence of sources cannot cause the rise of power. The holder of power must have the
ability to use or utilize the sources of power. All these conditions establish the fact that power is
conditional.
Power (used in political science) is a very complex notion. How it is used, what consequences it
produces, how it is to be achieved-all are in real sense complex. No simple analysis can unearth
the various aspects of power. Different people use different terms to denote power. For
example, Dahl uses the term ‘influence’ to mean power.
Difference between Power and Force:

Force is manifest power- Force means the reduction or limitation or closure or even total
elimination of alternatives to the social action of one person or group by another person or
group. The actual manifestation of power is force or we can say that force is power in action or
force is power exercised.
Difference between Political Power and Military Power:

There is a lot of difference between political power and military power. The basis of political
power is psychological influence, leadership and its will power. Political power also includes the
power of money, arms and ammunition, material and influence regarding votes. In democratic
countries the power is gained through elections in which the money and various other methods
are frequently used.

In the political power the military power plays a secondary role because the military authorities
have to obey the President and Prime Minister. However, when one country attacks another
country, then the military of both the sides comes into action and military power or force is used.

Importance of the concepts of Power and influence:

power, influence and authority are very much important concepts of Political Science.

Power is associated with coercion and coercion with painful sanctions. The length of Coercion
Sectors will vary from culture to culture depending on the range of penalties considered to be
coercive in quality. The value of sanctions will vary from man to man and society to society.
Another category of political influence is that where the sanctions used are so weak relatively as
not to be considered coercive.

A person may be affected in his action by the introduction of well presented new evidence,
though the only consequence of ignoring it may be to appear unreasonable. If the evidence is
accepted, the outcome will be affected and the person who introduced it has exerted political
influence.

Influence:

Political influence is the suitable outcome of possessions-Wealth, health education, charm and
other things and the skill with which they are made use of. We have also seen that power is the
ability of an individual or groups to influence another individuals or group. In this way influence
is a relationship.

It is a relationship between individuals or groups which can make another to act in a way that he
may not do otherwise. We can distinguish between power and influence by saying that those
who have got power, they can influence the conduct of others more easily than those who do
not possess any power. It is admitted on all hands that power and influence are co-related terms
but influence turns into power when sanctions enter. Suppose A is an officer and asks B
(another subordinate official) to obey his orders, then if B refuses and A suspends him, then A
has used his powers.

So it is a process of sanctions which differentiates power from influence in general. Anyhow,

power and influence are supplementary. For example, India has no power over the non-aligned
countries out India exercised considerable influence over these countries, when she was the
President.

Types of Power:
Max Weber (1958) believed that there are three (not one) independent and equally important
orders of power as under.

Economic power:
For Marx, economic power is the basis of all power, including political power. It is based upon
an objective relationship to the modes of production, a group’s condition in the labour market,
and its chances. Economic power refers to the measurement of the ability to control events by
virtue of material advantage.

Social power:
It is based upon informal community opinion, family position, honour, prestige and patterns of
consumption and lifestyles. Weber placed special emphasis on the importance of social power,
which often takes priority over economic interests. Contemporary sociologists have also given
importance to social status so much so that they sometimes seem to have underestimated the
importance of political power.

Political power:
It is based upon the relationships to the legal structure, party affiliation and extensive
bureaucracy. Political power is institutionalized in the form of large-scale government
bureaucracies. One of the persistent ideas has been that they are controlled by elites, that is,
small, select, privileged groups.
Political power concerns the activities of the states which is not confined to national boundaries.
The networks of political power can stretch across countries and across the globe. Political
power involves the power to tax and power to distribute resources to the citizens.
Besides, Weber’s types of power, there are a few other types also which are as under:
Knowledge power:
Power and knowledge produce one another. He saw knowledge as a means of ‘keeping tabs’
on people and controlling them.

Military power:
It involves the use of physical coercion. Warfare has always played a major role in politics.
Modem mass military systems developed into bureaucratic organizations and significantly
changed the nature of organizing and fighting wars. According to Weber, few groups in society
base their power purely on force or military might.

Ideological power:
It involves power over ideas and beliefs, for example, are communism, fascism and some
varieties of nationalism. These types of ideologies are frequently in opposition to dominant
institutions and play an important role in the organization of devotees into sects and parties.
According to Michael Mann (1986), there are two types of power, viz., distributional and
collective.

Distributional power:
It is a power over others. It is the ability of individuals to get others to help them pursue their
own goals. It is held by individuals.

Collective power:
It is exercised by social groups. It may be exercised by one social group over another.

Sources of Power:
There are three basic sources of power: force, influence and authority.
These are explained below:

Force:
As defined earlier, force is the actual (physical force) or threatened (latent force) use of coercion
to impose one’s will on others. When leaders imprison or even execute political dissidents, they
thus apply force. Often, however, sheer force accomplishes little. Although people can be
physically restrained, they cannot be made to perform complicated tasks by force alone.

Influence:
It refers to the exercise of power through the process of persuasion. It is the ability to affect the
decisions and actions of others. A citizen may change his or her position after listening a stirring
speech at a rally by a political leader. This is an example of influence that how the efforts to
persuade people can help in changing one’s opinion.

Authority:
It refers to power that has been institutionalized and is recognized by the people over whom it is
exercised (Schaefer and Lamm, 1992). It is established to make decisions and order the actions
of others. It is a form of legitimate power. Legitimacy means that those subject to a
government’s authority consent to it

Definitions and Nature of Authority:

“The right or the capacity or both to have proposals or prescriptions or instructions accepted
without recourse to persuasion, bargaining or force”. Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics-
defines the term in the following words: the power or right to give orders and enforce obedience,
the power to influence others based on recognised knowledge or expertise.
“Authority can most simply be defined as legitimate power…….. Authority is, therefore, based
on an acknowledged duty to obey rather than on any form of coercion or manipulation. In this
sense authority is power cloaked in legitimacy or rightfulness”.
In the opinion of Maclver “By authority we mean the established right within any social order to
determine policies, to pronounce judgments or relevant issues and to settle controversies or,
more broadly, to act as leader or guide to other men” (The Web of Government).
“Authority is the right to rule. It exists when subordinates acknowledge the right of superiors to
give orders. Authority is more than voluntary compliance”.
D. D. Raphael offers a very precise definition of authority. He says: “To have authority to do
something is to have the right to do it”. Authority is, therefore, a kind of right to do something.
But Raphael explains the term right in the following manner. Here the word right carries a lot of
significance and that is why he elaborates it. In his opinion the right has two meanings.
An authority or a man has right implies that he may do something or he is permitted to do
something. It may be that the person has been licensed to do the job or take an action. Here the
term right is used in the sense of freedom. According to Raphael right has another meaning.
This meaning proposes that right means to receive something. Right also means the claim to
something. Let us explain it. An individual can claim to have something from another person or
source.
Hence we find that authority is used in both senses. An individual can do something and when
he is challenged by others he will meet the challenge by saying that he has the authority to do
the work. He receives this authority either from the established law or from the consent of the
people. This consent may be unanimous in character or majority opinion. Here authority is
cloaked by legitimacy.

Power and Authority:

Power, in its broadest sense, is the ability to achieve desired results. Power also means the
ability to do something.
These are the common interpretations of power. But this ability may not be legitimate. An
individual or a military general may by physical force seize political’ power but behind that there
may not be sanction of law or constitution. In that case, the person’s ability to force others to do
something is also not authorized by law. So it is held that power is not legitimate, the authority is
always legitimate. Behind every act or decision of the authority there shall be approval of law.
Law and constitution always stand behind an authority.
A person having power may demand obligation from other persons. But if they refuse to act
accordingly the holder of power legally or constitutionally cannot force him to show obligation.
Behind power there lies coercion or application of coercive measures or physical force. But
people show obligation to the authority on the ground that it is legally entitled to claim obligation.
In explaining authority we have seen that the holder of authority is empowered to do something
or claim something. It means that authority, whatever may its nature be, is always based on law
or legitimacy. So it is said that the authority is not only legal but authorities claim is based on
right. In other words, authority has full freedom to demand something. We can say that authority
has freedom.
But this conception is not applicable to power. This relation between power and authority has
been stated by Leslie Lipson in the following words. “What demarcates authority from power is
that the former is power recognized as rightful. Authority is government that all accept as valid.
Its exercise is, therefore, sectioned by those who approve the particular act or agent and is
tolerated by those who disapprove. … Authority is power clothed in the garments of legitimacy”.
The relationship between the two can be explained still from another angle. Raphael observes
that authority can exist without power. This may be illustrated in the following way. A man may
be invested with authority of an office in accordance with law or formal rules. Naturally he can
take any decision. But he fails to exercise his authority on the ground that majority men do not
support or recognize him.
This may be due to the popular mass upsurge. On the other hand, power can exist without
authority. This frequently happens in many countries. The military rulers demand obligation from
citizens though he has not that authority. But people, out of tear, obey the order of the person
who holds and exercises power. This is a very common feature of many Third World states.

Weber’s Classification of Authority:

Max Weber, the doyen of sociology, has classified authority on the basis of legitimacy
Authority’s claim to do something and to demand allegiance from the citizens are based on
arguments which Weber calls legitimacy. Needless to say that Weber uses the term legitimacy
in the light of greater and wider perspective.
There are three types of authority. The first is traditional authority. Second is charismatic
authority and the third is legal-rational authority. This classification, though not fool proof one, is
still recognised and accepted by majority people.
The above mentioned types of authority are explained below:

1. Traditional Authority:
The first type of authority is called traditional authority because authority is based on customs
and traditions which are long established. That is, people of a community show respect to a
particular authority on the ground that their forefathers did the same and naturally they cannot
violate the tradition.
In earlier epochs authority existed and received obedience from the citizens. The tradition
continues. The authority, in this way is sanctioned by the tradition. An aspect of the traditional
authority is that there is no legal sanction behind such authority. Simple customs, traditions and
conventions have made the authority legitimate.
The records of the activities of the traditional authority are to be found in the pages of history.
Weber says that in ancient time and even in middle Ages in many political systems the
traditional authority existed. There was also traditional authority in tribal societies of all
countries. This was due to the fact that political system in its present form did not develop in the
tribal societies. But this did not adversely affect the functioning or management of tribal
societies or political systems of earlier epochs.
In hereditary social and political systems the traditional authority exists. In many countries of
Africa (or West Asia) there are hereditary systems or dynastic rulers. The son or daughter of a
ruler becomes ruler. The rulers of the hereditary system have built up the tradition and that
tradition continues.
The governing system of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Morocco provide the examples of traditional
authority and hereditary system. In some industrialised countries the hereditary systems still
prevail. These states are Britain, Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands. Britain has no written
constitution, but there is a constitutional system or framework based on tradition, customs,
convention etc. and British people obey them and give them legal sanction. The British
parliament also obeys these customs and conventions. In some countries, customs,
conventions and written laws and constitution all are mixed together.

2. Charismatic Authority:
Charismatic authority is Weber’s second type of legitimate authority. People obey the authority
or show allegiance mainly due to the charisma possessed by the authority. An individual creates
tremendous impact upon the mind of the people by dint of his personality or charisma. Not all
individuals or men holding power possess such type of personality or charisma. If we open the
pages of history we shall find that few leaders such as Hitler, Mussolini, Nepoleon, Ayatoallah
Khomeini, and Fidel Castro possessed he charismatic power.
The charisma is so powerful that people do not go into the legal aspects of the power. With the
help of charisma the authority exercises power and people accept it. Charismatic authority is not
always supported by law. Charisma is a special quality or gift of God. Sometimes charisma and
legality are to be find a single person. For example, de Gaulle of France, Margaret Thatcher of
Britain had exceptional qualities to influence people.
Nehru of India had the same qualities. But all these persons came to power through legal and
constitutional means. Not in reality it is not always clear who is simply a charismatic authority
and legal or constitutional authority. This is specially correct if we consider the regimes of Hitler
and Mussolini. Hitler, Mussolini and even to some extent de Gaulle forcefully seized political
power and they remained in power with the help of charisma.

3. Legal-Rational Authority:
Weber’s final classification is legal-rational authority. In almost all the modern states this type of
authority is generally found. It is legal because the formal authority is supported by existing laws
of the constitution. It is rational on the ground that the posts and positions are clearly defined by
law. Power and duty are also clearly stated Rational-legal authority is the explicit form of a right
to give orders and to have been obeyed.
The core idea of the legal-rational authority is the holder of the authority has the right to issue
orders or to take decisions and also the authority (sanctioned by law) to implement them. When
the authority is challenged by rebellion or recalcitrant elements the authority has the
power/ability to take legal action. Everything is cloaked with legality.
An important aspect of legal-rational authority is—it cannot do anything or take any decision on
its own accord. Whatever the authority wants to do it must have legal sanction. Legal-rational
authority can be called a type of limited form of government. John Locke contemplated such
type of government. Later on legal- rational authority laid the foundation of liberal form of
government.
The government cannot whimsically interfere with the freedom of citizens. The central theme of
the legal-rational authority is law and rationality is the vital points. There is no place of whims
and the rationality in such authority.
The Authority is effective because of legitimacy:

The Authority can be easily distinguished from the coercion, power and force on one hand, and
leadership and influence on the other hand on the basis of legitimacy. Everybody knows that it
is the right of the superiors to issue orders and the obligation of the subordinates to offer willing
obedience but this is generally applicable to the family.

In the political field the authority has to be legitimate in order to command willing obedience.
This is so in a democracy but not in a military dictatorship. In dictatorship of such a type, the
General seizes power by means of force and makes others obey with the help of military.

Military dictatorship is not based on the consent of the governed but solely on force. Such an
authority is not legitimate. So any power which is backed by law is authority. If it is not backed
by law, it is illegitimate power.

Regarding it, Robert A. Dahl observes, "A commands B and B feels A has perfect right to do so
and which he has a complete obligation to obey. Power of this kind is often said to be legitimate.
But when B feels A has absolutely no right to ask him to obey, which he has no obligation to
obey, and which perhaps, he actually has an obligation to resist. Power of this kind is often said
to be illegitimate. Legitimate power is often called Authority".

So we can conclude by saying that the Authority will be transformed into power if it is not
legitimatized. Therefore, the Authority has to be legitimate under all circumstances.

Authority and Legitimacy are inseparable twins. There cannot be authority without legitimacy
i.e. recognition on the part of the people upon whom the authority is exercised. The people
recognize that the power being used, decisions or commands being enforced by the authority-
holder is just and beneficial for them.
Legitimacy transforms power into authority. Legitimacy without authority only remains a wishful
thinking. It only exists as the idea of rightfulness and justness or a moral or rational principle.
It is only when it gets combined with authority that it leads to decisions, commands and actions
which are held to be rightful and just decisions capable of securing the welfare and development
of those upon whom these are implemented and enforced.
Authority without legitimacy is power. Power is a legal power or capacity. It may or may not
enjoy a popular recognition and acceptance as a just and rightful power. Legitimacy alone can
secure and guarantee the acceptance and obedience of power as authority.
Only legitimate exercise of power i.e. exercise of power as authority can lead to a real and
productive use of the power of the government for securing desired and productive results.
The power of a dictator or an authoritarian ruler of state is devoid of legitimacy and is backed by
force and coercion of the power-holder. As against it, the power of a democratically elected
power-holder is a recognized and legitimate power i.e. authority. Legitimacy ensures a
successful use of authority.
Weak legitimacy is a source of weakness for the authority. Absence of legitimacy reduces
authority to power. Legitimacy ensures acceptance, obedience and respect of authority and
makes it productive of desired results.
The people willingly obey the laws, policies, decisions and plans formulated and enforced by the
power-holders of a democratic state because these enjoy a strong legitimacy.
As against it, in a dictator ruled state like Pakistan, the power of the rulers is legal does not
enjoy legitimacy. Even the attempts made by a dictator to secure legitimacy by getting elected
to the highest office of the state, is viewed with distrust by the people. His authority continues to
lack legitimacy.
The people obey his laws and commands out of fear of force and coercion. The weak legitimacy
of the ‘ruler’ also always adversely affects political obligation. The dictator exercises power and
not really authority, as neither his title to authority is legitimate nor his decisions and actions
enjoy legitimacy.

Hegemony
Hegemony is the dominance of one group over another, often supported by legitimating norms
and ideas. The term hegemony is today often used as shorthand to describe the relatively
dominant position of a particular set of ideas and their associated tendency to become
commonsensical and intuitive, thereby inhibiting the dissemination or even the articulation of
alternative ideas. The associated term hegemon is used to identify the actor, group, class, or state
that exercises hegemonic power or that is responsible for the dissemination of hegemonic ideas.
Hegemony derives from a Greek term that translates simply as “dominance over” and that was
used to describe relations between city-states. Its use in political analysis was somewhat limited
until its intensive discussion by the Italian politician and philosopher Antonio Gramsci.
Gramsci’s discussion of hegemony followed from his attempts to understand the survival of the
capitalist state in the most-advanced Western countries. As a follower of Karl Marx, Gramsci
understood the predominant mode of rule as class rule and was interested in explaining the ways
in which concrete institutional forms and material relations of production came to prominence.
The supremacy of a class and thus the reproduction of its associated mode of production could be
obtained by brute domination or coercion. Yet, Gramsci’s key observation was that in advanced
capitalist societies the perpetuation of class rule was achieved through largely consensual means
—through intellectual and moral leadership. Gramsci’s analysis of hegemony thus involves an
analysis of the ways in which such capitalist ideas are disseminated and accepted as rational and
normal. A hegemonic class is one that is able to attain the consent of other social forces, and the
retention of this consent is an ongoing project. To secure this consent requires a group to
understand its own interests in relation to the mode of production, as well as the motivations,
aspirations, and interests of other groups. Under capitalism, Gramsci observed the relentless
contribution of civil society institutions to the shaping of mass cognitions. Via his concept of the
national-popular, he also showed how hegemony required the articulation and distribution of
popular ideas beyond narrow class interests.

Module 4 : Concept of Law and Political Obligation

Law: Meaning, Features, Sources and Types of Law

State is sovereign. Sovereignty is its exclusive and most important element. It is the supreme
power of the state over all its people and territories. The State exercises its sovereign power
through its laws. The Government of the State is basically machinery for making and enforcing
laws.
Each law is a formulated will of the state. It is backed by the sovereign power of the State. It is a
command of the State (sovereign) backed by its coercive power. Every violation of law is
punished by the State. It is through its laws that he State carries out its all functions.

I. Law: Meaning and Definition:

The word ‘Law’ has been derived from the Teutonic word ‘Lag, which means ‘definite’. On this
basis Law can be defined as a definite rule of conduct and human relations. It also means a
uniform rule of conduct which is applicable equally to all the people of the State. Law prescribes
and regulates general conditions of human activity in the state.
1. “Law is the command of the sovereign.” “It is the command of the superior to an inferior and
force is the sanction behind Law.” —Austin
2. “A Law is a general rule of external behaviour enforced by a sovereign political authority.” -
Holland
In simple words, Law is a definite rule of behaviour which is backed by the sovereign power of
the State. It is a general rule of human conduct in society which is made and enforced by the
government’ Each Law is a binding and authoritative rule or value or decision. Its every violation
is punished by the state.

II. Nature/Features of Law:

1. Law is a general rule of human behaviour in the state. It applies to all people of the state. All
are equally subject to the laws of their State. Aliens living in the territory of the State are also
bound by the laws of the state.
2. Law is definite and it is the formulated will of the State. It is a rule made and implemented by
the state.
3. State always acts through Law. Laws are made and enforced by the government of the State.
4. Law creates binding and authoritative values or decisions or rules for all the people of state.
5. Sovereignty of State is the basis of law and its binding character.
6. Law is backed by the coercive power of the State. Violations of laws are always punished.
7. Punishments are also prescribed by Law.
8. The courts settle all disputes among the people on the basis of law.
9. In each State, there is only one body of Law.
10. Legally, Law is a command of the sovereign. In contemporary times laws are made by the
representatives of the people who constitute the legislature of the State. Laws are backed by on
public opinion and public needs.
11. The purpose of Law is to provide peace, protection, and security to the people and to ensure
conditions for their all round development. Law also provides protection to the rights and
freedoms of the people.
12. All disputes among the people are settled by the courts on the basis of an interpretation and
application of the laws of the State.
13. Rule of law, equality before law and equal protection of law for all without any discrimination,
are recognised as the salient features of a modern legal system and liberal democratic state.

III. Sources of Law:

1. Custom:
Custom has been one of the oldest sources of law. In ancient times, social relations gave rise to
several usages, traditions and customs. These were used to settle and decide disputes among
the people. Customs were practiced habitually and violations of customs were disapproved and
punished by the society. Initially social institutions began working on the basis of several
accepted customs.
Gradually, the State emerged as the organised political institution of the people having the
responsibility to maintain peace, law and order; naturally, it also began acting by making and
enforcing rules based upon customs and traditions. In fact, most of the laws had their birth when
the State began converting the customs into authoritative and binding rules. Custom has been
indeed a rich source of Law.
2. Religion and Morality:
Religion and religious codes appeared naturally in every society when human beings began
observing, enjoying and fearing natural forces. These were accepted as superior heavenly
forces (Gods and Goddesses) and worshiped.
Religion then started regulating the behaviour of people and began invoking “Godly sanction”,
“fear of hell”, and “possible fruits of heaven”, for enforcing the religious codes. It compelled the
people to accept and obey religious codes. Several religions came forward to formulate and
prescribe definite codes of conduct. The rules of morality also appeared in society. These
defined what was good & what was bad, what was right and what was wrong.
The religious and moral codes of a society provided to the State the necessary material for
regulating the actions of the people. The State converted several moral and religious rules into
its laws. Hence Religion and Morality have also been important sources of Law.
3. Legislation:
Since the emergence of legislatures in 13th century, legislation has emerged as the chief source
of Law. Traditionally, the State depended upon customs and the decrees or orders of the King
for regulating the behaviour of the people. Later on, the legislature emerged as an organ of the
government. It began transforming the customary rules of behaviour into definite and enacted
rules of behaviour of the people.
The King, as the sovereign, started giving these his approval. Soon legislation emerged as the
chief source of law and the legislature got recognition as the Legal Sovereign i.e. law-making
organ of the State. In contemporary times, legislation has come to be the most potent, prolific
and direct source of law. It has come to be recognized as the chief means for the formulation of
the will of the State into binding rules.
4. Delegated Legislation:
Because of several pressing reasons like paucity of time, lack of expertise and increased
demand for law-making, the legislature of a State finds it essential to delegate some of its law-
making powers to the executive. The executive then makes laws/rules under this system. It is
known as Delegated Legislation. Currently, Delegated Legislation has come to be a big source
of Law. However, Delegated Legislation always works under the superior law-making power of
the Legislature.
4. Judicial Decisions:
In contemporary times, Judicial Decision has come to be an important source of Law. It is the
responsibility of the courts to interpret and apply laws to specific cases. The courts settle the
disputes of the people in cases that come before them. The decisions of the courts – the judicial
decisions, are binding on the parties to the case. These also get accepted as laws for future
cases. But not all judicial decisions are laws.
Only the judicial decisions given by the apex court or the courts which stand recognized as the
Courts of Record, (like the Supreme Court and High Courts of India) are recognized and used
as laws proper. Lower Courts can settle their cases on the basis of such judicial decisions.
5. Equity:
Equity means fairness and sense of justice. It is also a source of Law. For deciding cases, the
judges interpret and apply laws to the specific cases. But laws cannot fully fit in each case and
these can be silent in some respects. In all such cases, the judges depend on equity and act in
accordance with their sense of fair play and justice. Equity is used to provide relief to the
aggrieved parties and such decisions perform the function of laying down rules for the future. As
such equity acts as a source of law.
6. Scientific Commentaries:
The works of eminent jurists always include scientific commentaries on the Constitution and the
laws of each state. These are used by the courts for determining the meaning of law. It helps
the courts to interpret and apply laws.
The jurists not only discuss and explain the existing law but also suggest the future possible
rules of behaviour. They also highlight the weaknesses of the existing laws as well as the ways
to overcome these. Interpretations given by them help the judges to interpret and apply Laws to
specific cases.
The works of jurists like, Blackstone, Dicey, Wade, Phillips, Seeravai, B.Pi. Rau, D.D. Basu and
others have been always held in high esteem by the judges in India. Scientific commentaries
jurists always help the development and evolution of law. Hence these also constitute a source
of law. Thus, Law has several sources. However, in contemporary times law-making by the
legislature constitutes the chief source of Law.

IV. Types of Law:

Broadly speaking there are two main kinds of Law:
(i) National Law i.e. the body of rules which regulates the actions of the people in society and it
is backed by the coercive power of the State.
(ii) International Law i.e. the body of rules which guides and directs the behaviour of the states
in international relations. It is backed by their willingness and consent that the states obey rules
of International Law. It is a law among nations and is not backed by any coercive power.
National Law is the law by which the people are governed by the state. It stands
classified into several kinds:
1. Constitutional Law
2. Ordinary Law:
It is stands classified into two sub types:
2 (a) Private Law
2(b) Public Law:
It stands again sub-divided into two parts:
2(b) (i) General Public Law
2(b) (ii) Administrative Law
1. Constitutional Law:
Constitutional Law is the supreme law of the country. It stands written in the Constitution of the
State. The Constitutional Law lays down the organisation, powers, functions and inter-
relationship of the three organs of government. It also lays down the relationship between the
people and the government as well as the rights, freedoms (fundamental rights) and duties of
the citizens. It can be called the Law of the laws in the sense all law-making in the State is done
on the basis of powers granted by the Constitutional Law i.e. the Constitution.
2. Statute Law or Ordinary Law:
It is also called the national law or the municipal law. It is made by the government (legislature)
and it determines and regulates the conduct and behaviour of the people. It lays down the
relations among the people and their associations, organisations, groups and institutions. The
legislature makes laws, the executive implements these and judiciary interprets and applies
these to specific cases.
Ordinary Law is classified into two parts:
2 (a) Private Law and
2 (b) Public Law.
2 (a) Private Law:
Private Law regulates the relations among individuals. It lays down rules regarding the conduct
of the individual in society and his relations with other persons. It guarantees the enjoyment of
his rights. It is through this law that the State acts as the arbiter of disputes between any two
individuals or their groups.
2 (b) Public Law:
The law which regulates the relations between the individual and the State is Public Law. It is
made and enforced by the State on behalf of the community.
Public Law stands sub divided into two categories:
2(b)(i) General Law, and
2(b)(ii) Administrative Law.
2(b) (i) General Law:
It lays down the relations between the private citizens (Non-officials or who are not members of
the civil service) and the State. General Public Law applies to all the citizens in their relations
with the State.
2(b) (ii) Administrative Law:
It lays down the rules governing the exercise of the constitutional authority which stands
delegated by the Constitution of the State to all the organs of government. It also governs the
relations between the civil servants and the public and lays down the relations between the civil
servants and the State. In some States like France, Administrative Law is administered by
Administrative Courts and General Law is administered by ordinary courts. However in countries
like India, Britain and the USA the same courts administer both the General Law and
Administrative Law.
Clarifying the distinction between Public law and Private law, Holland writes: “In Private Law the
parties concerned are private individuals alone and between whom stands the State as an
impartial arbiter. In Public Law also the State is present as an arbiter although it is at the same
time one of the parties interested.”
POLITICAL OBLIGATION
To have a political obligation is to have a moral duty to obey the laws of one's country or state.
On that point there is almost complete agreement among political philosophers. But how does
one acquire such an obligation, and how many people have really done what is necessary to
acquire it? Or is political obligation more a matter of being than of doing — that is, of simply
being a member of the country or state in question? To those questions many answers have
been given, and none now commands widespread assent. Indeed, a number of contemporary
political philosophers deny that a satisfactory theory of political obligation either has been or can
be devised. Others, however, continue to believe that there is a solution to what is commonly
called “the problem of political obligation,” and they are presently engaged in lively debate not
only with the skeptics but also with one another on the question of which theory, if any, provides
the solution to the problem.

Whether political obligation is the central or fundamental problem of political philosophy, as

some have maintained (e.g., McPherson), may well be doubted. There is no doubt, however,
that the history of political thought is replete with attempts to provide a satisfactory account of
political obligation, from the time of Socrates to the present. These attempts have become
increasingly sophisticated in recent years, but they have brought us no closer to agreement on a
solution to the problem of political obligation than the efforts of, say, Thomas Hobbes and John
Locke in the seventeenth century. Nor have these sophisticated attempts made it unnecessary
to look back to earlier efforts to resolve the problem. On the contrary, an appreciation of the
troublesome nature of political obligation seems to require some attention to its place in the
history of political thought.

Divine Command

Throughout history, the belief that political society and its rules are divinely ordained has been
so strong as to keep many people, and probably most, from considering the possibility that
disobeying those rules might ever be justified. With the advent of Christianity, however, that
possibility had to be taken seriously. For the Christian, the distinction Jesus draws (Matthew
22:15–22) between the tribute owed to Caesar and that owed to God makes it clear that what
the rulers command may be at odds with what God wants done. That point became even
clearer when the rulers tried to suppress Christianity. Nevertheless, Christian doctrine held that
there is an obligation to obey the law grounded in divine command, with the most important text
being Paul's Epistle to the Romans (13:1–2): “For there is no authority except from God, and
those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore he who resists the authorities resists
what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.”

As a theory of political obligation, divine command faces two general problems. First, it
presupposes the existence of divinity of some sort; and second, the commands of the divine
being(s) are not always clear. It is one thing to know that we should give to Caesar what is
Caesar's and to God what is God's, for example, and quite another to know what exactly is
Caesar's due. For Christians, however, the main challenge was to reconcile Paul's text with the
uncomfortable fact that rulers were often hostile to Christianity — or, with the rise of
Protestantism in the sixteenth century, hostile to what one took to be true Christianity. To this
challenge, one response was simply to hold that hostile or vicious rulers must be endured, for
God must have given them power as a sign of His displeasure with a wicked people. Other
responses, though, made room for disobedience.

One such response was to distinguish the divinely ordained office from the officer who occupied
it. That is, God ordains that political authority must exist, because the condition of human life
since the fall from grace requires such authority; but God does not ordain that this or that
particular person hold a position of authority, and He certainly does not want rulers to abuse
their authority by ruling tyrannically. This distinction, employed as early as the fourth century by
St. John Chrysostom, was invoked throughout the middle ages (McIlwain, pp. 152–53). A
second response to the problem Romans 13 posed was to distinguish disobedience from
resistance. According to Martin Luther and others who drew this distinction, Christians may not
actively resist their rulers, but they must disobey them when the rulers' commands are contrary
to God's. Yet a third response was to note the possibility of conflict between two or more of
one's rulers. In other words, if more than one person holds political authority over you, and if
they issue conflicting commands, then you may satisfy Paul's injunction by obeying the authority
whose commands are more congenial to your understanding of true Christianity, even when
such obedience entails resisting the commands of others in authority.

These last two responses played an especially important part in the political disputes that
accompanied the Protestant Reformation. Under the pressure of those disputes, however,
another theory of political obligation became increasingly prominent, as Protestants came to rely
on the belief that political authority derives from the consent of the governed (Skinner, vol. 2,
chaps. 7–9).

1.3 The Social Contract

Although the idea of the social contract long antedates the modern era (Gough 1967), its full
development occurred in the seventeenth century, when Thomas Hobbes and John Locke used
the theory to rather different ends. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and other
philosophers have also relied on social contract theory, but the classic expressions of the
contract theory of political obligation remain Hobbes's Leviathan (1651) and Locke's Second
Treatise of Government (1690).

For Hobbes, social contract theory established the authority of anyone who was able to wield
and hold power. If we imagine ourselves in a state of nature, he argued, with no government
and no law to guide us but the law of nature, we will recognize that everyone is naturally equal
and independent. But we should also recognize that this state of nature will also be a state of
war, for the “restlesse desire for Power after power” that drives all of us will lead to “a warre of
every man against every man” (Hobbes, chaps. 11, 13). To escape so dreadful a condition,
people surrender their independence by entering into a covenant to obey a sovereign power
that will have the authority to make, enforce, and interpret laws. This form of the social contract
Hobbes called “sovereignty by institution.” But he also insisted that conquerors acquire authority
over those they subject to their rule — “sovereignty by acquisition” — when they allow those
subjects to go about their business. In either case, Hobbes said, the subjects consent to obey
those who have effective power over them, whether the subject has a choice in who holds
power or not. Because they consent, they therefore have an obligation to obey the sovereign,
whether sovereignty be instituted or acquired.

Exactly how much Locke differs from Hobbes in his conclusions is a matter of scholarly dispute,
but there is no doubt that he puts the same concepts to work for what seem to be more limited
ends. According to Locke, the free and equal individuals in the state of nature establish
government as a way of overcoming the “inconveniencies” of that state. Moreover, Locke's
social contract appears to have two stages. In the first stage the naturally free and equal
individuals agree to form themselves into a political society, under law, and in the second they
establish the government. This move allows Locke to argue, contrary to Hobbes, for a right of
revolution on the ground that overthrowing the government will not immediately return the
people to the state of nature. Nor does he hold, with Hobbes, that mere submission to a
conqueror constitutes a form of consent to the conqueror's rule.

Locke does agree with Hobbes, of course, in deriving obligations to obey the law from the
consent of the governed. In developing his argument, however, he reveals three problems that
have bedeviled social contract theory. One problem has to do with the nature of the contract: is
it historical or hypothetical? If the former, then the problem is to show that most people truly
have entered into such a contract. If the contract is meant to be a device that illustrates how
people would have given their consent, on the other hand, then the difficulty is that a
hypothetical contract “is no contract at all” (Dworkin, 1977, p. 151). The second problem has to
do with the way Hobbes and Locke rely on tacit consent. If only express or explicit statements of
agreement or commitment count as genuine consent, then it appears that relatively few people
have consented to obey the laws of their country; but if tacit or implied consent is allowed, the
concept of consent may be stretched too far. Hobbes does this when he counts submission to a
conqueror as consent, but Locke also runs this risk when he states, in §119 of the Second
Treatise, that the “very being of anyone within the territories” of a government amounts to tacit
consent. Finally, it is not clear that consent is really the key to political obligation in these
theories. The upshot of Hobbes's theory seems to be that we have an obligation to obey anyone
who can maintain order, and in Locke's it seems that there are some things to which we cannot
consent. In particular, we cannot consent to place ourselves under an absolute ruler, for doing
so would defeat the very purposes for which we enter the social contract — to protect our lives,
liberty, and property (Pitkin 1965).

One of the first to find fault with the argument from consent or contract was David Hume. In “Of
the Original Contract,” published in 1752, Hume takes particular exception to the appeal to tacit
consent. To say, he protests, that most people have given their consent to obey the laws simply
by remaining in their country of birth is tantamount to saying that someone tacitly consents to
obey a ship's captain “though he was carried on board while asleep and must leap into the
ocean and perish the moment he leaves her” (1953, p. 51). For Hume, it seems, the obligation
to obey the law derives not from consent or contract but from the straightforward utility of a
system of laws that enables people to pursue their interests peacefully and conveniently.

1.4 Utility and Obligation

For all its influence in other areas of legal, moral, and political philosophy, utilitarianism has
found few adherents among those who believe that there is a general obligation to obey the
laws of one's country. Part of the reason for this situation may be the fact that Jeremy Bentham,
John Stuart Mill, and others who followed Hume's path had little to say about political obligation.
A more powerful reason, though, is that utilitarians have trouble accounting for obligations of
any kind. If one's guiding principle is always to act to maximize expected utility, or promote the
greatest happiness of the greatest number, then obligations seem to have little or no binding
force. After all, if I can do more good by giving the money in my possession to charity than by
paying my debts, then that is what I should do, notwithstanding my obligations to my creditors.
By the same reasoning, whether I should obey or disobey the law is a matter to be settled by
considering which will do more good, not by determining whether I have an obligation to obey.

Some utilitarian philosophers have struggled to overcome this problem, either by pointing to
reasons to believe that respecting obligations serves to promote utility or by restricting
calculations of utility to rules or norms rather than to individual acts (see the entry on
“consequentialism” for details). Whether their efforts have been successful remains a matter of
debate. There seems to be a consensus, however, that the most sophisticated attempts to
provide a utilitarian grounding for political obligation, such as those of Rolf Sartorius (1975,
chaps. 5 and 6) and R. M. Hare (1976), have proved unsuccessful (e.g., Simmons 1979, pp.
45–54; Horton 2010, pp. 60–69). As a result, utilitarianism seldom figures in the debates of
those contemporary political philosophers who continue to believe that there is, in some political
societies, a general obligation to obey the law.

1.5 Kant on Legitimacy and Obligation

In contrast to utilitarianism, the practical philosophy of an eighteenth-century German

philosopher, Immanuel Kant, does play a major part in contemporary debates about political
obligation. The proper direction of his influence, however, is not altogether settled. On the one
hand, a leading “philosophical anarchist,” Robert Paul Wolff, claims Kantian inspiration for his a
priori rejection of the possibility of political obligation (see §3.1, below); on the other hand,
important exponents of the “natural duty” approach to the obligation to obey the law also claim
to derive their arguments from Kant (see §4.5, below). Kant may bear some responsibility for
fostering such divergent responses, but it is safe to say that he himself was no anarchist, not
even of the “philosophical” sort. Indeed, he seems to insist on an unqualified obligation to obey
the law that goes well beyond what any political philosopher nowadays will countenance.

Kant's theory employs the same basic concepts as Hobbes's and Locke's — natural (or innate)
rights, the state of nature, and the social contract — but he puts them to different use. In
contrast to Hobbes, Kant looks upon the coercive force of the law not as a limitation on freedom
but as the means of securing and extending it. In the state of nature, as he conceives of it,
individuals may enjoy “wild, lawless freedom,” but the threats and constraints imposed by others
prevent them from freely acting on their choices (1991[1797], p. 127). Justified coercion under
law provides a remedy by impeding those who would interfere with one's actions, thereby
hindering the hindrances to freedom (Ripstein, pp. 54–55 et passim). Moreover, unlike Locke's
justification of the social contract as the way to secure one's property and escape the
“inconveniencies” of the state of nature, Kant takes the “civil condition” produced by the social
contract to be the foundation that property rights and justice in general presuppose. The social
contract is thus not a matter of collective consent but a moral imperative: “When you cannot
avoid living side by side with all others, you ought to leave the state of nature and proceed with
them into a rightful condition, that is a condition of distributive justice” (1991, pp. 121–22).
“Properly speaking,” Kant declares, the original contract is not an expression of consent to be
governed; it is “the idea of this act, in terms of which alone we can think of the legitimacy of a
state” (1991, p. 127).

The upshot, as noted above, is that everyone seems to have an absolute obligation to obey the
laws of whoever is in authority; for even if the ruler “proceeds contrary to law … subjects may
indeed oppose this injustice by complaints … but not by resistance” (1991, p. 130, emphasis in
original; also pp. 176–77). Kant's comments on this point are not unqualified, though. Among
other things, he states that “the spirit of the original contract … involves an obligation on the part
of the constituting authority to make the kind of government suited to the idea of the original
contract”; and he immediately adds that “the only constitution that accords with right” is “that of a
pure republic” —that is, “the constitution in which law itself rules and depends on no particular
person” (1991, p. 148, emphases in original; for further discussion, see Ripstein, chap. 11). In
any case, it is not so much Kant's conclusions as the foundations of his theory that have proved
so important to contemporary discussions of political obligation.

2. Conceptual Matters

In the twentieth century political philosophers devoted themselves at least as much to the
analysis of the problem of political obligation, and to the concepts it involves, as to full-scale
attempts to devise theories of the obligation to obey the law. Some even argued that the
existence of political obligations could be established by conceptual analysis alone — a point
we return to in §3. More often philosophers working in this vein sought to clarify what was at
issue in the assertion or denial of political obligations, or duties to obey the law.
2.1 Obligation and Duty

As the previous sentence suggests, obligations are also duties. That is true, at any rate, when
the obligation in question is political obligation. To be sure, some philosophers have uncovered
differences between obligations and duties, the most important of which is that obligations must
be voluntarily undertaken or incurred, but duties need not be (e.g., Brandt 1964; Hart 1958). The
obligation to keep a promise or fulfill a contract, for example, arises only when one has done
something that generates the obligation — made a promise or signed a contract — but the
duties of charity and truth telling supposedly fall on us regardless of what, if anything, we
voluntarily commit to do. John Rawls relies on this distinction when he argues that most citizens
of a reasonably just political society have no general obligation to obey its laws, even though
they do have a “natural duty” to support just institutions — a duty that has the general effect of
requiring them to obey (Rawls 1999, p. 97). For the most part, however, the distinction between
obligation and duty has played no significant role in the debates over the supposed moral
responsibility to obey the law. To invoke the distinction here would run counter to the tendency
in both ordinary language and philosophical discussion to use the terms interchangeably, as
when we speak of the “duty” to keep a promise or an “obligation” to tell the truth. This essay will
proceed, then, like almost everything written on either side of the question, on the
understanding that a political obligation, if it exists, is a moral duty to obey the law (but note the
elaboration of this point in §2.3, below).

2.2 Obligation: Political, Civil, and Legal

One question that immediately arises from this conception of political obligation is whether
“political” is the appropriate modifer. If the obligation in question is a duty to obey the law,
ceteris paribus, then why not call it a legal obligation? Or why not conclude, with Bhikhu Parekh
(1993, p. 240), that the question of whether we have a duty to obey the law is really a matter of
civil obligation — that is, “the obligation to respect and uphold the legitimately constituted civil
authority” — that entails legal obligations “to obey the laws enacted by the civil authority” rather
than political obligation? “Political” is the broader term, according to Parekh, and someone who
has a truly political obligation will owe her polity more than mere obedience to its laws (see also
Raz 2006, p. 1004). Such a person will have a positive duty to take steps to secure the safety
and advance the interests of her country. Following Parekh's distinction, then, we may say that
someone who pays taxes discharges a legal obligation, no matter how grudgingly she pays
them, but someone who pays taxes and contributes voluntarily to public projects fulfills a truly
political obligation.
Other philosophers also distinguish political from legal obligations, but not in the far-reaching
way that Parekh does. Indeed, it seems that we already have a term, “civic duty,” that does the
work he wants to assign to “political obligation.” Exhortations to do our civic duty typically urge
us to do more than merely obey the law. These exhortations would have us vote in elections
and be well-informed voters; buy government bonds; limit our use of water and other scarce
resources; donate blood, service, or money (beyond what we owe in taxes) in times of crisis;
and generally contribute in an active way to the common good. Whether we really have a civic
duty to do any or all of these things may be a matter of dispute, but appeals to civic duty are
certainly quite common, and it is hardly clear that there is something to be gained by
reclassifying them as appeals to political obligation.

Rather than political obligation or Parekh's “civil obligation,” why not call the duty to obey the law
a legal obligation? The answer seems to be that “legal obligation” has a different kind of work to
do. For many legal philosophers, the claim that a person has a legal obligation to do X is merely
a descriptive claim, a statement of social fact. The fact that a person has a legal obligation to do
X provides him with a moral reason to do X only if he has a moral duty to obey the law — that is,
a political obligation. The value of this distinction is that it allows one to hold that a person may
be subject to a legal obligation even though she has no political obligation to obey the laws of
the regime in power. Suppose that the regime is tyrannical, inept, or simply so unjust that only a
Hobbesian would maintain that those subject to its commands have a moral obligation to obey.
Nevertheless, most theorists will agree that people in this unhappy country have legal
obligations to pay taxes, refrain from certain types of conduct when driving, and do whatever the
legal system that enjoys de facto jurisdiction over them requires; that is, claims to this effect are
true descriptions of the world. But such descriptions are compatible with the belief that the
people of unhappy countries have no moral duty to act as the law directs simply because the
law so directs.

A closely related question is whether we should distinguish the concept of political obligation
from that of a duty to obey the law. The answer may depend on whether we understand the
term “political” to refer to the status in virtue of which a person has the obligation or to the entity
or agent to whom she owes it. In the former case, political obligation refers to those obligations
a person has as a member or citizen of a particular polity. So understood, a theory of political
obligation will tell us nothing about the authority a state enjoys over non-members; for example,
whether and why short-term visitors residing on its territory have a duty to obey its laws. That
need not render it defective as an account of political obligation, but it does entail that we should
not take the phrase “political obligation” to be synonymous with the phrase “a duty to obey the
law simpliciter,” but only with the phrase “a citizen's (or member's) duty to obey the law.” In
contrast, if “political” refers to the agent or entity to whom a person owes the obligation, then a
theory of political obligation will be synonymous with a theory of the duty to obey the law, since
it will aspire to explain why those who are subject to a particular state's jurisdiction, be they
citizens or foreigners, have a moral duty to act as it directs them to act. Arguably, certain
solutions to the problem of political obligation fare better when “political” refers to the status in
virtue of which a person has the obligation than when it refers to the entity to which she owes it,
or vice versa. For example, membership (or associative) approaches to political obligation may
have a leg up in justifying citizens' duties to obey the law but face a significant challenge in
accounting for the obligation of foreigners to do so (see §4.4). Conversely, natural duty theories
may be able to explain why anyone, citizen or not, has a duty to obey the law (i.e., the laws of
one or another legal system) but struggle to explain why anyone has a duty to obey the laws of
the particular state of which she is a member (see the discussion of particularity at the end of
§2.3; see also §4.5). Attention to the ambiguity in the referent of the term “political” may also
support a pluralistic or multi–principle solution to the problem of political obligation; e.g., a
membership justification for the duty of citizens to obey the law, and a consent justification for
the duty of foreigners to do so (see §5).

2.3 Obligation, Morality, and Practical Reason

As in the five historically significant theories surveyed in the previous section, the presumption
that the answer to the problem of political obligation must be stated in moral terms has
continued to prevail. When T. H. Green set out in 1879 “to discover the true ground or
justification for obedience to law,” for example, he was looking for more than prudence alone
can provide. “You ought to obey the law because you will suffer if you do not” may be a powerful
reason for obedience, but it is not a reason that speaks to Green's concern with “the moral
function or object served by law …” (1986, p. 13). For Green, and for almost everyone else who
has pondered it, the problem of political obligation is a moral problem, and the obligation in
question is a kind of moral obligation. To have a political obligation, then, is to have a moral duty
to obey the law.

Margaret Gilbert has recently challenged this moralized characterization of political obligation
(Gilbert 2006; Gilbert 2013). She maintains that a political obligation is a genuine obligation, by
which she means that it provides a person subject to it with a sufficient, though not necessarily
conclusive, reason for action that trumps considerations of inclination or self-interest. However,
Gilbert distinguishes between two kinds of genuine obligations, or two senses of the term
“obligation,” the first synonymous with being the subject of a moral requirement and the second
with “owing” something to another (2013, pp. 391–92). Obligation in this second sense
describes a normative relationship between two or more parties, one that can be created via a
suitable act of will; for example, by what Gilbert calls an exercise of joint commitment. It is the
second sense of obligation that Gilbert maintains we ought to employ in our analysis of the
problem of political obligation, understood here as the challenge of accounting for the
obligations people owe one another as co-members of a given polity. That does not preclude
the development of a theory concerning when moral requirements outweigh or defeat people's
political obligations, of course. As she sees it, though, the theory of political obligation itself
ought to be de-moralized.

One upshot of Gilbert's account is that it entirely separates the existence of political obligations
from the justice or injustice of the political society's institutions and laws. On her account,
individuals can acquire genuine obligations in the sense of owing something to another even
when their suitable act of willing is coerced or the content of what they agree to owe another is
immoral. With respect to political obligations, then, neither state coercion (i.e., the absence of
voluntary consent) nor the injustice of a state's laws or institutions precludes its citizens'
acquisition of a genuine obligation to obey its laws. But why think that a promise extracted at
gunpoint generates any reason to do that which one promised, or that a voluntary agreement to
torture babies generates a genuine (albeit not conclusive) obligation to do so? Or, if coerced or
immoral owing-obligations are genuine but always defeated or trumped by moral-requirement-
obligations, one might wonder why we should posit their separate existence at all. One
possibility is that doing so is necessary to render intelligible the response of the promisee when
the coerced promisor reneges on her promise; we can understand why the promisee feels
betrayed even if we do not think he is justified in feeling that way. This response, however,
treats Gilbert's account of political obligation as an explanatory theory, not a justificatory one
(Lefkowitz 2007; for a response, see Gilbert 2013, pp. 406–07).

Gilbert aside, theorists of political obligation characterize it as a moral duty to obey the law. As
such, it provides a person with a categorical reason for action, one that does not depend on her
inclinations or self-interest. Political obligation is also typically understood to be content-
independent; that is, to be a duty to obey the law as such, or simply because it is the law (Hart
1982, pp. 254–55). Where a person has a duty to obey the law, the judgment that the law
requires her to X suffices to provide her with a reason to X, independent of any judgment she
may make regarding the merits of performing X. The problem of political obligation, then, is not
simply the question of whether a person has a reason to do that which the law would have her
do. Often a person will have prudential reasons to do so, and she may have moral obligations to
perform or not perform specific acts independent of their being legally required or proscribed, as
in the case of forbearing from murder. Rather, the question concerns the conditions, if any, in
which the fact that the law requires a person to act thus-and-so imposes a moral obligation on
her to act as the law directs. The content-independence of political obligation reflects the fact
that what stands in need of justification is the polity's right to its subjects' obedience — to their
acting as it directs because it so directs them.

How can the state's mere willing that a person be required to perform a certain act create a
moral obligation to do so? Though a few theorists have attempted to address this challenge
head on, Gilbert being the most recent, most construe claims to authority not as the creation of
moral obligations ex nihilo but as a moral obligation to defer to the state's judgment regarding
what they have independent reason to do (but compare Klosko 2011). The characterization of
this deference within a person's deliberation is a matter of some dispute. H. L. A. Hart and
Joseph Raz, for example, argue that law is preemptive; law does not merely offer a
consideration for or against a potential course of action, to be weighed against any and all other
relevant considerations. Rather, law aims to exclude from an agent's deliberation at least some
of the considerations favoring or opposing the conduct at issue, considerations that in the
absence of the law it would be permissible to take into account (Raz 1979, chaps. 1 and 2).
Rival views of the manner in which political obligation functions in a person's deliberation reject
the exclusionary element of Raz's account of the duty to obey the law, arguing that political
obligations are simply weighty moral reasons that are balanced against all of the other reasons
a person has to perform or not perform a given act (Perry 1989). On neither account, though, is
a person's political obligation taken to provide her with an absolute duty to obey the law. Raz,
for example, notes that law need not exclude all of the first–order reasons a person might have
for performing a given act (Raz 1986, p. 46). Nor does he claim that the first-order reason the
law provides for not performing a given act will always outweigh or defeat non-excluded first-
order reasons a person has to perform that act. In other words, the duty to obey the law is a
prima facie or pro tanto reason for action, from which it follows that the bearer of a political
obligation may not always have a conclusive or all-things-considered reason to act as the law
demands.
Theorists of political obligation typically ascribe two further features to the moral duty they seek
to defend. First, the duty to obey the law is general both in the sense that it is a duty to obey the
entire body of law in a given jurisdiction and in the sense that the duty is borne by all those living
within that jurisdiction. Note that a general moral duty to obey the law is consistent with variation
in the legal obligations different subjects bear. For example, a given state may impose on all
and only its male citizens a duty to register for a military draft, in which case the full set of legal
obligations borne by men in this state will differ from the full set borne by women. Nevertheless,
citizens of both sexes may be subject to a general political obligation, meaning that they have a
moral duty to fulfill all of their legal obligations. Raz, however, denies that the subjects of any
existing state or indeed anything remotely like it have a general duty to obey the law; rather,
law's authority is piecemeal, both with respect to who has a moral duty to obey a particular law
and with respect to the number of laws within a given legal system that enjoy authority over
anyone.

The second feature commonly ascribed to political obligations is that they are owed only to the
particular political/legal society that claims primary or exclusive jurisdiction over a person.
Following John Simmons's influential analysis, this has come to be known as “the particularity
requirement.” Political obligation, Simmons maintains, carries an implicit connection to
citizenship, which means that those who are engaged in the political obligation debate “are only
interested in those moral requirements [including obligations and duties] which bind an
individual to one particular political community, set of institutions, etc.” (1979, p. 31, emphasis in
original; but cf. Edmundson 2004, p. 232, and Walton 2013). As indicated below, in §4.5, the
main objection to natural duty theories of political obligation is that they cannot account for this
particularity.

Contemporary Theories of Political Obligation

Although the lines that separate one theory from another are not always distinct, philosophical
justifications of political obligation nowadays usually take the form of arguments from consent,
gratitude, fair play, membership, or natural duty. Some philosophers advance a hybrid of two or
more of these approaches, and others hold, as the concluding section shows, that a pluralistic
theory is necessary. For the most part, though, attempts to justify a general obligation to obey the
law will rely on one of these five lines of argument.

4.1 Consent
Most people who believe they have an obligation to obey the law probably think that this
putative obligation is grounded in their consent. Political philosophers are less inclined to think
this way, however, in light of the withering criticism to which Hume and more recent writers —
notably Simmons (1979, chaps. 3 and 4) — have subjected consent theory. The critics' claim is
not that consent cannot be a source of obligations, for they typically believe it can. Their claim,
instead, is that too few people have either expressly or tacitly given the kind of actual consent
that can ground a general obligation to obey the law, and hypothetical consent cannot supply the
defect, for reasons already noted.

Nevertheless, consent theory still has its adherents among political philosophers. Their versions
of consent theory vary considerably, however, with two main approaches emerging in response
to the criticisms. One, advanced by Harry Beran ( 1987), accepts the claim that only express
consent can generate a political obligation, but calls for political societies to establish formal
procedures for evoking such consent. That is, states should require their members openly to
undertake an obligation to obey the law or to refuse to do so. Those who decline the obligation
will then have the options of leaving the state, seceding to form a new state with like-minded
people, or taking residence in a territory within the state reserved for dissenters. In the absence of
such procedures, it seems that Beran's position is roughly the same as that of the a posteriori
philosophical anarchist. Were these procedures in place, though, it is far from clear that the
options available to the members will make their “consent” truly voluntary (Horton 2010, pp.
34–36; Klosko 2005, pp. 123–29).

The second line of response to criticisms of consent theory is to argue in one way or another that
the critics construe “consent” too narrowly. Thus John Plamenatz (1968, Postscript) and Peter
Steinberger (2004, p. 218) have maintained that voting or otherwise participating in elections
should count as consent; and Steinberger produces a lengthy list of fairly ordinary activities —
calling the police or fire department for help, sending children to a public school, using a public
library, and more — that constitute “active participation in the institutions of the state” (2004,
pp. 219–20). Mark Murphy and Margaret Gilbert have sounded variations on this theme by
arguing, in Murphy's case, that “surrender of judgment is a kind of consent” (in Edmundson
1999, p. 320), or, in Gilbert's, that “joint commitment” is an important source of obligations,
including political obligations (1993, 2006, 2013). For Murphy, surrender of judgment is consent
in the usual sense of voluntary agreement or acceptance. As he says, “One consents to another in
a certain sphere of conduct in the acceptance sense of consent when one allows the other's
practical judgments to take the place of his or her own with regard to that sphere of conduct.
(This consent may be either to a person or to a set of rules: both of these can be authoritative)”
(1999, p. 330). As the earlier discussion of her views indicates §2.3, Gilbert differs from
Murphy, and others, in taking a joint commitment to be something that need not arise
voluntarily. According to her theory, “an understanding of joint commitment and a readiness to
be jointly committed are necessary if one is to accrue political obligations, as is common
knowledge of these in the population in question. One can, however, fulfill these conditions
without prior deliberation or decision, and if one has deliberated, one may have had little choice
but to incur them” (2006, p. 290). Indeed, membership in a “plural subject” formed through
nonvoluntary joint commitments plays such a large part in Gilbert's theory that it may be better
to place her with those who advocate an associative or membership theory of political obligation
than with the adherents of consent theory.

David Estlund (2008, pp. 117–58) has recently offered a new twist on consent theory. Most
theorists, he observes, maintain that putative acts of consent are void if it would be wrong to
consent to someone's authority. For example, consent to be another person's slave generates no
obligation even if it genuinely expresses a person's will. Estlund argues on grounds of symmetry
that we ought to draw the same conclusion in cases where it would be wrong not to consent to
another person's authority. Such failures are void, and so a person who morally ought to have
consented to another's authority has a duty to obey her. If subjects of a given state ought to
consent to obey its laws, say because the state performs morally necessary tasks, then their
failure to do so is void and no barrier to concluding that they are under a political obligation to
that state. Estlund's defense of what he labels normative consent is subtle and sophisticated in
ways we cannot indicate here. Still, in cases where non-consent is void, one might wonder
whether the duty to submit to another's authority follows directly from the consideration in virtue
of which it is wrong for someone not to consent (see Sreenivasan 2009). It is also unclear
whether there is enough of a connection between the agent's will and her coming to be subject to
another's authority to warrant classifying Estlund's account as an example of consent theory (for
responses to both concerns, see Estlund 2008, pp. 127–31; 2009).
At this time there is little reason to believe that the critics of consent theory will be won over by
these attempts to revive the theory by broadening our understanding of what counts as consent.
There is even less reason, however, to believe that appeals to consent will simply wither away, at
least among those who continue to believe in the existence of a general obligation to obey the
law.

4.2 Gratitude

Appeals to gratitude in debates about political obligation are as old as Plato's Crito, as we have
seen, and they remain popular today. They are rarely, though, the sole or even primary basis for
an attempt to justify the obligation to obey the law. Plato's account of Socrates' reasoning is
typical in this regard, with gratitude being but one of at least four considerations Socrates relies
on in explaining why he will not disobey the ruling of the jury that sentenced him to death. (For
more recent examples, see Simmons 1979, pp. 162–63.) When Simmons included a chapter on
the weakness of gratitude as a foundation for political obligation in his influential Moral
Principles and Political Obligations (1979), in fact, there was no gratitude theory on which to
concentrate his criticism.

That situation changed within a decade when A. D. M. Walker sketched such a theory in
“Political Obligation and the Argument from Gratitude.” Walker's argument takes the following
form (1988, p. 205):

1. The person who benefits from X has an obligation of gratitude not to act contrary to X's
interests.
2. Every citizen has received benefits from the state.
3. Every citizen has an obligation of gratitude not to act in ways that are contrary to the
state's interests.
4. Noncompliance with the law is contrary to the state's interests.
5. Every citizen has an obligation of gratitude to comply with the law.

Whether this argument does indeed provide the basis for a satisfactory theory of political
obligation seems to turn on two points. First, are obligations of gratitude at all pertinent where
politicalinstitutions are concerned? Walker holds that one may have an obligation of gratitude
not only to other persons but also to institutions, including the state or polity; but critics such as
Simmons disagree (1979, pp. 187–88; 2005, pp. 119–20). Gratitude is owed only to those who
intentionally and at significant cost to themselves provide us with benefits, according to
Simmons, and institutions cannot satisfy these conditions. The second point concerns the
strength of obligations of gratitude. That is, one may grant that we can have obligations to
institutions, including the state, yet hold that these obligations are “too weak to function as prima
facie political obligations in the usual sense,” for they “would be overridden frequently, not just
in unusual circumstances” (Klosko 1989, p. 355). Walker, in response, points to Socrates as
someone who obviously thought his obligation of gratitude was very strong indeed, and
concludes that we “can afford to acknowledge that the extent of our indebtedness to the state is
less than his, while still insisting that it grounds a strong, though not absolute, obligation of
gratitude to comply with the law” (1989, p. 364; see also McConnell 1993, pp. 180–208, and,
more critically, Wellman 1999).

4.3 Fair Play

Although earlier philosophers, including Socrates, appealed to something resembling the

principle of fairness (or fair play), the classic formulation of the principle is the one H. L. A. Hart
gave it in “Are There Any Natural Rights?” As Hart there says, “when a number of persons
conduct any joint enterprise according to rules and thus restrict their liberty, those who have
submitted to these restrictions when required have a right to a similar submission from those who
have benefited by their submission” (1955, p. 185). John Rawls subsequently adopted this
principle in an influential essay of his own, referring to the duty derived from the principle as the
“duty of fair play” (1964). What the principle of fair play holds, then, is that everyone who
participates in a reasonably just, mutually beneficial cooperative practice — Hart's “joint
enterprise according to rules” — has an obligation to bear a fair share of the burdens of the
practice. This obligation is owed to the others who cooperate in the enterprise, for cooperation is
what makes it possible for any individual to enjoy the benefits of the practice. Anyone who acts
as a free rider is acting wrongly, then, even if his or her shirking does not directly threaten the
existence or success of the endeavor. Those who participate in the practice thus have rights
against as well as obligations to one another: a right to require others to bear their share of the
burdens and an obligation to bear one's share in turn.
The principle of fair play applies to a political society only if its members can reasonably regard
it as a cooperative enterprise. If they can, the members have an obligation of fair play to do their
part in maintaining the enterprise. Because the rule of law is necessary to the maintenance of
such a polity — and perhaps even constitutive of it — the principal form of cooperation is
abiding by the law. In the absence of overriding considerations, then, the members of the polity
qua cooperative practice must honor their obligation to one another to obey the laws. In this way
the principle of fair play provides the grounding for a general obligation to obey the law, at least
on the part of those whose polity they can reasonably regard as a cooperative enterprise.

The argument from fair play has met with serious criticism, however, including that of Rawls,
who abandoned fair play as an account of political obligation for citizens generally in A Theory
of Justice (p. 97, p. 308). The most sweeping criticism is that of Robert Nozick, who objects that
the principle of fair play would allow others to place us under an obligation to them simply by
conferring benefits on us (1974, pp. 90–95). To make his point, Nozick imagines a group of
neighbors creating a public entertainment system and assigning every adult in the neighborhood
a day on which he or she is responsible for planning and broadcasting the program. As a resident
of the neighborhood, you occasionally hear and enjoy the programs, but you never consent to
take part in this scheme. When your assigned day arrives, are you obligated to take a turn? The
principle of fair play says yes, according to Nozick, but the correct answer is “surely not.”

A second objection, raised by M. B. E. Smith, is that “the obligation of fair play governs a man's
actions only when some benefit or harm turns on whether he obeys” (in Edmundson 1999, p. 81).
This implies that the principle of fair play will generate an obligation to cooperate only when the
cooperative enterprise is small enough that any participant's failure to obey the rules could
reasonably be expected to damage the enterprise. Political societies are not small, cooperative
enterprises, however, and we can readily think of cases in which someone's disobedience neither
deprives anyone of any benefits nor harms the polity in any noticeable way. It follows, then, that
the principle of fair play cannot ground a general obligation to obey the law, however useful it
may be in other circumstances.

According to a third objection, fair play considerations apply only to cooperative schemes that
produce benefits one may refuse. If it produces nonexcludable goods, which everyone receives
regardless of whether she contributed to their production or even wants them, then there can be
no fair-play obligation to bear a share of the burdens of the enterprise. But this is typically the
case in political societies, which produce goods such as public order and national defense that
one cannot meaningfully refuse to accept. As Simmons puts it (1979, p. 129), there is a
difference between receiving and accepting benefits, and merely receiving them is not enough to
place someone under an obligation. If there is a political obligation, therefore, it does not follow
directly from the existence of the kind of nonexcludable goods that states provide. To be sure,
Simmons does acknowledge that some people may acquire fair-play obligations by enjoying
nonexcludable benefits that they take to be “worth the price [they] pay for them” if they do so in
full awareness that “the benefits are provided by a cooperative scheme” (1979, p. 132, emphasis
in original). But he also maintains that few people will satisfy both of these conditions, with the
second proving especially troublesome for advocates of fair–play theory; for “even in democratic
political communities, these benefits are commonly regarded as purchased (with taxes) from a
central authority rather than as accepted from the cooperative efforts of our fellow citizens”
(1979, p. 139).

As one might expect, advocates of the fair-play account have not remained silent in the face of
these criticisms. The leading advocate, George Klosko, has written two books elaborating and
defending the principle of fairness as the foundation of political obligation (2004 [1992], 2005),
and it sometimes seems that every fresh attack on fair play provokes a swift response (e.g., Carr
2002 and Lefkowitz 2004). And the attacks have certainly continued (e.g., Simmons 2001, chap.
2; McDermott 2004), as we shall indicate shortly. First, though, it is necessary to see how fair-
play advocates have responded to the three criticisms sketched above.

With regard to Nozick's objection, the response is usually to hold that his example of the
neighborhood entertainment system is beside the point (Bell 1978). That is, Nozick is probably
right to say that one would have no obligation to operate the system on his or her assigned day,
but he is wrong to think fair play would require one to do so. There is no fair play obligation in
cases such as this, either because the passive receipt of benefits is not enough to show that one is
a participant in a cooperative practice (Dagger 1997, pp. 69–70) or because the benefits are “of
relatively little value” (Klosko 2004, pp. 38–39). To Smith's objection, the response is that
fairness is not a consideration only when harm or benefit to some person or practice is involved.
To fail to do one's part in a cooperative enterprise is to wrong those who cooperate even when it
does not clearly harm either them or the enterprise as such (Dagger 1997, p. 71).

Responses to Simmons' objection have taken two directions. One is to say that Simmons has
drawn too sharp a distinction between the acceptance and receipt of benefits. Between the person
who passively receives the benefits of a cooperative practice and the one who knowingly and
willingly accepts them is the person — very many people, in fact — who actively participates in
the practice without being fully aware, in the ordinary course of life, that he or she is undertaking
an obligation to do his or her part by participating in a cooperative practice (Dagger 1997, pp.
73–78; Besson 2005, pp. 487–89). Like Michael Hardimon and other proponents of the
associative theory of political obligation (see §4.4, below), in other words, those who take this
position believe that there is no straightforward dichotomy between what is fully voluntary and
what is altogether involuntary. In the middle ground, they hold, there is room for the voluntary
— but not deliberate or completely conscious — acceptance of obligations. Others respond to
Simmons' criticism by denying that fair-play obligations must be incurred voluntarily (Arneson
1982; Klosko 2004, 39–57). What matters is not that one accepts the benefits of the practice,
according to Klosko's influential account, but that three conditions are met: “Goods supplied
must be (i) worth the recipients' effort in providing them; (ii) ‘presumptively beneficial’; and (iii)
have benefits and burdens that are fairly distributed” (2004, p. 39). If, in sum, a state qualifies as
a cooperative enterprise, and if it provides its members with goods that are presumptively
beneficial — or “indispensable for satisfactory lives” (Klosko 2005, p. 6) — then its members
have an obligation grounded in fairness to obey its laws.

Whether these responses have swayed philosophical opinion in the direction of fair–play theory
is difficult to say, but they clearly have not settled the debate in its favor. Simmons, for one,
continues to hold that modern political societies are too large and impersonal to count as
cooperative enterprises (2001, pp. 38–42). He also contends that Klosko's theory is “not really a
fairness theory at all,” but a “disguised Natural Duty theory, resting on an unstated moral duty to
help supply essential goods locally …” (2005, p. 190, emphasis in original; also 2007, pp. 22–
23). Others complain that fair-play theory is not suitably sensitive to the possible alternatives
there may have been to the cooperative practices that have emerged. We may admit, on this
view, that people receive benefits from a cooperative practice, and even net benefits, but we
should also notice that they might have benefited more from the establishment of a different
practice. To say, in these circumstances, that those who are engaged in a cooperative practice
have an obligation to do their part is to accept the principle of fairness as “a powerfully
conservative principle” (Normore 2010, p. 231). In the political context, according to another
critic, the proper comparison is between a state of affairs in which benefits follow from other
people's obeying the laws in the sense of mere compliance, on the one hand, and a situation in
which benefits follow from others' obeying specifically “because the law says to do it” (Durning
2003, p. 255). If the benefits are the same in both cases, then there is no reason to think that true
cooperation, rather than mere compliance, is producing the benefits, and hence no reason to think
that those who receive the benefits have a fair-play obligation to obey the laws.

Arguments such as these seem more likely to prolong than to settle the debate over the principle
of fair play. For conservatives, in fact, the claim that fair play is “a powerfully conservative
principle” is hardly a reason to reject the principle. Others may note that having a fair–play
obligation to the members of an ongoing enterprise does not bar anyone from trying to transform
that enterprise, perhaps even by means of civil disobedience. As for the argument that
compliance rather than cooperation is all that is necessary to provide the benefits ordinarily
associated with political societies, it seems likely to do no more than renew controversies about
the nature of such societies and the viability of philosophical anarchism. The question, in other
words, is whether we can expect a polity to survive if its “members” regard one another not as
cooperators in a common enterprise but exclusively as purchasers of governmental services who
comply with the law under the threat of coercion. For these reasons, fair-play theory is likely to
remain a live but much disputed option for those who believe in political obligation.

4.4 Membership or Association

According to proponents of a theory that has emerged in the last thirty years or so, political
obligation is best understood as an “associative” obligation grounded in membership. If we are
members of a group, they argue, then we are under an obligation, ceteris paribus, to comply with
the norms that govern it. Nor does this obligation follow from our consenting to become
members, for it holds even in the case of groups or associations, such as families and polities,
that people typically do not consent to join. Voluntary or not, membership entails obligation.
Anyone who acknowledges membership in a particular polity must therefore acknowledge that
he or she has a general obligation to obey its laws.

At the core of the associative approach is the idea that political obligation is a form of non-
voluntary obligation on a par with familial obligations. In Ronald Dworkin's words, “Political
association, like family and friendship and other forms of association more local and intimate, is
in itself pregnant of obligation” (1986, p. 206). The same idea, with an explicit analogy between
family and polity, is at work in John Horton's account of political obligation:

My claim is that a polity is, like the family, a relationship into which we are mostly born: and
that the obligations which are constitutive of the relationship do not stand in need of moral
justification in terms of a set of basic moral principles or some comprehensive moral theory.
Furthermore, both the family and the political community figure prominently in our sense of who
we are: our self-identity and our understanding of our place in the world (1992, pp. 150–51).
As members of families and political communities, on this view, we are subject to what Michael
Hardimon calls “noncontractual role obligations” — that is, obligations that simply flow from
“roles into which we are born” (1994, p. 347).

The associative account of political obligation has at least three attractive features. The first is
the refusal of its proponents to treat ‘voluntary’ and ‘involuntary’ as two parts of a dichotomy. It
is true, they say, that most people do not voluntarily undertake to become members of a polity,
but that hardly means that membership has been forced or imposed on them. There is a middle
ground, and it is fertile soil for a theory of political obligation, just as it is for those who believe
that being a member of a family entails obligations that we have neither chosen, on the one hand,
nor incurred against our will, on the other. A second attraction of the associative account is that it
squares with a common intuition, as a great many people apparently do think of themselves as
members of political societies who have an obligation to obey their polities' laws. This intuition,
moreover, points to the third attractive feature, which is the way in which the obligation to obey
the laws grows out of the sense of identity that members of a polity commonly share. If this is
my polity, and I find myself thinking of its concerns as something that we members share, and its
government as our government, then it will be easy to think also that I have an obligation to obey
its laws. For Yael Tamir, in fact, “the true essence of associative obligations” is that they “are not
grounded on consent, reciprocity, or gratitude, but rather on a feeling of belonging or
connectedness” (Tamir, p, 137; see also Scheffler 2001, esp. p. 64).

Like the other theories of political obligation, however, the membership account has met with
considerable criticism, with three main objections being raised (Simmons 1996; Wellman 1997;
Dagger 2000). First, the critics maintain that the analogy between the polity and the family is
neither persuasive nor attractive. It is unpersuasive because the members of the modern polity
lack the close and intimate relationships with one another that family members typically share;
and it is unattractive because it raises the possibility that the paternalism appropriate within the
family may be extended to the polity. Second, the critics object that the associative account
conflates the senseof obligation with obligation itself. As Wolff and other philosophical
anarchists have argued, the fact that many people feel a sense of identity with and obligation to
their countries does not mean that they really have such an obligation; nor need one be a
philosophical anarchist to share this conclusion. Finally, there is the problem of what may be
called group character. All groups have members, including groups that are not decent, fair, or
morally praiseworthy; but if membership is sufficient to generate an obligation to obey, then the
members of unjust and exploitative groups will have an obligation to obey the rules. In the case
of the polity, this leads to the unpalatable and counter-intuitive conclusion that the routinely
exploited and oppressed “members” of an unjust polity are under an obligation to obey its laws.

Whether the proponents of the associative theory can overcome these objections remains, not
surprisingly, a matter of debate. In some cases the proponents attempt to meet the critics head on,
as Horton does in the second edition of his Political Obligation (2010). There Horton develops a
two-pronged account of political obligation according to which the polity in question must
supply the “generic good of order and security” and its members must identify with it and
acknowledge its political authority (2010, p. 177, p. 184). In other cases, proponents attempt to
bolster the associative theory by incorporating elements of other theories, as in Massimo Renzo's
“quasi-voluntarist reformulation of the associative model,” with its claim that we voluntarily
occupy our roles even in families and polities as long as “we could have stepped out of them if
we had wanted” (2012, p. 109, p. 120). To others, however, appeals to membership may be
valuable “as conceptual explorations of the hermeneutics or the phenomenology of political
association,” but they “will not generate political obligations unless the communities they
describe can be legitimated in accordance with one or more of the standard repertory of
arguments …” (Knowles 2010, p. 190).

4.5 Natural Duty

The final contenders in the political obligation debates are natural duty accounts. In this context,
natural duties are understood to be ones people have simply in virtue of their status as moral
agents; they need do nothing to acquire them, nor does their bearing such duties depend on their
occupying some role in a socially salient relationship. Natural duties are also universal in scope;
they are owed to all members of a class defined in terms of possession of some feature, such as
sentience or rationality. John Rawls first broached such an argument for political obligation
when he asserted in A Theory of Justice that everyone is subject to a natural duty of justice that
“requires us to support and to comply with just institutions that exist and apply to us” (1999
[1971], p. 99). More recently, Jeremy Waldron (1993, 1999), Thomas Christiano (2008),
Christopher Heath Wellman (2005), Anna Stilz (2009), and, arguably, David Estlund (2008; see
§4.1, above) have refined and expanded upon Rawls's somewhat vague contention, some of them
in ways reminiscent of or even explicitly modeled on Kant's defense of political obligation (see
§1.5, above).

Contemporary natural duty theorists differ over the natural duty that provides the basis for
political obligation. Christiano grounds his account in a fundamental principle of justice
requiring the equal advancement of people's interests, Wellman in a Samaritan duty of easy
rescue, and Stilz in a Kantian duty of respect for others's freedom-as-independence, understood
as a secure sphere of self-determination defined by a person's rights. These theorists agree,
however, that moral agents can discharge their natural duty to others only through submission to
the authority of a common legal order. This is so for several reasons: the demands of justice are
sometimes underdetermined; its achievement requires the resolution of coordination problems;
and most important, people reasonably disagree over the demands of justice. Christiano traces
this disagreement to what he calls the facts of judgment: diversity in people's natural talents and
cultural surroundings, cognitive biases in their interpretation of people's interests and the value
assigned to their own interests relative to the value assigned to the interests of others, and
fallibility in both moral and non-moral judgment. In light of these facts, even those who make a
good faith effort to discern what justice requires of them in their interaction with others will fail
to reach a consensus. Agents who act on their own, private, judgment of justice will be perceived
by others to be acting unjustly. If some are able to unilaterally impose their conception of justice
on others, the latter will not enjoy freedom-as-independence (Stilz 2009), or will suffer the
violation of their fundamental interests in being at home in the world, in correcting for others'
cognitive biases, and in being treated by one's fellows as a person with equal moral standing
(Christiano). Only submission to a common legal order can provide a solution to this problem of
domination and conflict, argue the natural duty proponents of political obligation. “There is no
way other than general compliance with a single authoritative set of rules to secure peace and
protect basic moral rights” (Wellman 2005, p. 45); law “settle[s] for practical purposes what
justice consists in by promulgating public rules for the guidance of individual behavior”
(Christiano, p. 53); or in Stilz's Kantian terms, law replaces the unilateral imposition of
obligations on others with the omnilateral imposition of obligations on all.

Not just any legal order will do, though. Rather, many natural duty theorists of political
obligation argue either that the law must crafted according to democratic procedures or that it
must not violate certain individual rights, or both, if those it addresses are to have a duty to obey
it. Christiano, for instance, argues that against a background constituted by diversity, cognitive
bias, and fallibility, agents can be sure that their fundamental interest in judgment will not be
unjustifiably set back only if political power is exercised within institutions that publicly realize
equality, i.e., democratic ones. Likewise, Waldron defends the authority of a majority-rule
decision procedure on the basis of its “commitment to equality — a determination that when we,
who need to settle on a single course of action, disagree about what to do, there is no reasonable
basis for us in designing our decision-procedures to accord greater weight to one side than to the
other in the disagreement” (Waldron 1999, p. 117; see also Lefkowitz 2005a). Even if a person
does not believe that the particular scheme of distributive justice realized in the law treats her
justly, she can recognize that the process whereby that scheme was created, and can be modified
or eliminated, does treat her as an equal. Stilz argues that law omnilaterally imposes obligations
on all only if it expresses a general will. It does the latter if and only if it “first, defines rights
(protected interests) that apply equally to all; second, it defines these rights via a procedure that
considers everyone's interests equally; and third, everyone who is coerced to obey the law has a
voice in the procedure” (Stilz 2009, p. 78). The latter two conditions, she maintains, can only be
met by a democratic procedure.
Whatever its details, many natural duty theorists also argue that the conception of the person that
grounds their accounts of political obligation also limits the scope of legitimate law. Reasonable
disagreement over freedom-as-independence does not extend to torture, for example, and at some
perhaps indeterminate point the denial of freedom of conscience clearly conflicts with a person's
fundamental interests in correcting for cognitive bias and being at home in the world. Most
natural duty theorists conclude that subjects of a legal order that recognizes no rights on the part
of some or all of its subjects against such treatment lacks legitimate authority, even if it is
democratic.

Recall that natural duty accounts of political obligation begin with duties that all moral agents
owe to all other moral persons as such. Simmons argues that this commitment renders natural
duty accounts unable to justify the particularity of political obligations; that is, the fact that
people have political obligations in virtue of their citizenship or residence in particular states,
and that they owe those obligations to that particular state (or to their fellow citizens) (Simmons
1979, pp. 31–35; 2005, pp. 166–79). Even if we have a natural duty “to support and comply with
just institutions,” as Rawls claims, why must we discharge that duty by supporting and
complying with the just institutions that comprise the state in which we are citizens or residents?
True, those are the institutions that “apply to us,” in the sense that they claim jurisdiction over us.
But why think that this social fact has any moral import, particularly if we think the political
institutions of other states more worthy of our support because they better promote justice, or are
in greater need of support?

Some natural duty theorists point to the intensity and frequency of interaction among those who
live in close proximity to one another as a justification for the duty to obey the laws of the
particular jurisdiction in which one resides (Waldron 1993, 1996). Others emphasize that a
person who free-rides on his fellow citizens' support for and compliance with the law to act on
his own judgment of how he can best discharge his natural duty of justice unfairly takes
advantage of them. Absent their good-faith sacrifice of the liberty to act on their private
judgments regarding what justice requires, the free-rider would likely be unable to act as he does
(Wellman 2005, pp. 44–45). Finally, some natural duty theorists argue that Simmons
misconstrues the natural duty of justice. Justice is not an outcome or state of affairs that agents
have a duty to promote via whatever means they judge to be most effective or efficient, be it the
political institutions of their state or those of another. Rather, justice characterizes a particular
manner of interacting with others, such as with respect for their freedom-as-independence or
their fundamental interests, including but not limited to their interests in judgment. At least for a
citizen of a liberal democratic state, the latter construal of justice entails that she can only treat
her fellow citizens justly if she guides her conduct according to its law.

Simmons has recently rebutted this second line of argument (Simmons 2013; but cf. Stilz 2013).
The argument entails, he claims, that citizens of one liberal-democratic state who are forcibly
subjected to the rule of another liberal-democratic state immediately acquire political obligations
to the second state as long as they are accorded full citizenship rights. Simmons treats this
implication as a reductio ad absurdum of the democratic Kantian justification for political
obligation, a demonstration that it cannot properly account for the particularity of such
obligations. In part, this latest rejoinder by Simmons evidences and gives further impetus to a
shift in the debate over political obligation from the question of what gives states a right to rule
particular people, to which correlates their duty to obey the law, to the question of what gives
states a right to rule over a particular territory. But it also points to the need for natural duty
theorists to elaborate upon their so far brief discussions of the contribution that a legitimate
international legal order makes to the legitimacy of domestic legal orders.
 Semester IV- Political Values and Ideologies
Module 1 – Rights

The Concept of Rights

It had not always been felt throughout history that all human beings are entitled to rights (and
recognition). Kings and religious Clergy/Priests for instance in many societies have had more
rights than commoners. But the with the onset of early classical liberalism there had been a
demand raised for equal rights and recognition on the basis that all men are born equal
particularly by the newly rich trading bourgeois who felt that while they had the same wealth as
feudal lords and princes they did not have the same legal and social power. Later socialism
added it’s own interpretation to the concept of rights and recognition who were followed by the
Positive Liberals in the early part of the twentieth century. By the middle of that century the
concept of rights was well accepted and fairly universally excepting in the cases some special
countries like South Africa and some Islamic states like Saudi Arabia in the Middle East where
women have till today been not granted the status of full human beings both in theory and
practice. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 cemented the legitimacy of rights
forever in a way.

Each school of thought defined rights and recognition in it’s own way. The central question or
theme on the basis of which views have differed has been on what basis rights and recognition
should be given to the individual? . Over three hundred or so years in the development of the
concept since the birth of liberalism different theories have been propounded which have based
their justification for rights (and recognition) on different bases. The main theories of rights have
been:

1. Theory of Natural Rights

2. Theory of Legal Rights

3. Historical Theory of Rights

4. Idealist/Moral Theory of Rights

5. Social Welfare Theory of Rights

6. Recent Liberal Theory of Rights

7. Marxist Theory of Rights.

The Theory of Natural Rights was the first plea for rights in the western world on the basis that
naturally by birth man is entitled to some rights and there are no requirement of birth, family
position, social position, wealth etc that can be imposed. John Locke, the classic liberal had
declared all men are born with some inherent rights and ‘God gives them to his children just as
he gave them arms, legs, eyes, and ears’. The social contract theorists like Hobbes, Locke, and
Rousseau argued that man had these basic rights before the origin of the State and he surrendered
some of them to a superior authority, i.e., civil society to safeguard his other rights from
encroachment to obtain the benefits of community living. Hobbes called the right to life a natural
right, Locke the rights to life, liberty and property whereas Rousseau said that liberty and
equality are gifts of nature. They argued the individual cannot surrender these rights to the state.
The theory of natural rights came under attack and disapproval of later thinkers. The great
utilitarians did not find the idea that man had rights before the advent of and prior to the
relationship with the state. They argued rights can only be conferred by the law. English political
and legal thinker Edmund Burke argued rights can only be on the basis of customs and
sentiments of the society in which an individual lives. The main points of criticism of the natural
theory have been along the following lines:

(a) If an individual’s rights are absolute then the society cannot touch them even in conflicting
situations where the interest of the most members of society by restricting those rights. For
instance in a famine, if a man asserts his right to property on one side and hoards food and on the
other hand many others lose their rights to life as a consequence, there is conflict.

(b) It was argued rights are there due to social recognition for the same. So there cannot be any
inherent rights. Green pointed out every right must be justified in terms of ends, which the
community considers good and that which cannot be attained without rights. The positive liberals
like Green and Laski related rights with useful functions in society.
(c) The natural theory assumed one can have rights and obligations independent of society but
many thinkers have argued the question of rights emerges only in the society and in the context
of social relationships.

(d) Also many thinkers have felt to use the term ‘natural right’ lands one in a tricky situation
because one cannot define and justify what ‘natural’ means.

The Theory of Legal Rights was propounded by the legal philosophers, and utilitarians like
Bentham, who argued all rights of man are derived from law and law itself is based upon utility.
Law and rights he said are simply two aspects of something, which is essentially one: law the
objective aspect and right the subjective. The state draws up and lays down a bill of rights and so
the rights are not prior to the state but from the existence of the state itself. It is also the legal
framework of the state that guarantees rights. It is again the state which changes the content of
rights whenever it wants. But they accepted that rights may not necessarily be the creation of the
state but they become rights only when they are enforced by the state. The legal theory of rights
was rejected by the later positive liberal thinkers (and others) who argue along the following
lines:

(a) The legal theory did not cover the whole range of rights. There are rights we enjoy from our
society that often don’t enjoy legal recognition but they exist nevertheless.

(b) It seems the legal theory only accepts only those rights, which are drawn up by the state and
legally enforced and recognised. Laski argued men enjoy rights not merely as members of the
state but also as members of the society and various associations and relationships in society. He
found the idea of limiting rights to one source, the state, unacceptable and strange.

(c) If the state and the law are the sole source of rights then there is no right against the state.
The liberal writers like Green and Laski saw the need to resist the state in certain circumstances.
As Laski argued the material source of rights is the community’s sense of justice and not the law.
Law is nothing but the concretisation of the feelings of the community and hence the obedience
to the state is obedience to right and not might and obedience to the law is obedience to the
justice and not authority.

The Historical Theory of Rights has its origin in the writings of Savigny and Puchta in Germany,
Sir Henry Maine and Edmund Burke in England and James Carter in the USA. The position
taken by these thinkers was that all rights are derived from the character of the state and the law,
which are in turn basically entirely historical in nature. They are all a product of history. Burke
argued for instance that the French Revolution gave rights to the French people, which were not
a part of their historical common consciousness, and so after the revolution and the execution of
the King the system could not sustain and the revolution turned into a dictatorship. Rights are the
crystallization of custom, the historical school argued, which in the course of time become rights.
If there is a tradition of certain rights or there are rights which people are accustomed to having
then people start assuming they ought to have those rights. Or in other words custom is the
original form of law and most of the rights according to the historical school are those, which
turn out to have had the sanction of the longest and least broken custom. It appears the historical
theory was principally an attack on the natural law theorist and on the analytical school of
jurisprudence to regain the old conservative traditional positions. The theory obviously does not
bother to distinguish between what would be right and wrong in customs as a source of law. If
somebody argued that he had a right to keep slaves, indulge in polygamy, apartheid etc could he
be allowed to stand his ground. Will people wait for the day when abominable customs and
traditions change so that they can have basic rights. Progressive reform and social justice comes
to a stop if this theory is accepted and hence this theory is almost laughable.

The Idealist/Moral Theory of Rights holds that the basis of all rights is morals and neither
nature’s actions, nor law, nor customs etc. Every individual has a moral self and the need to
develop his personality and rights provide the environment to help man in his journey of moral
upliftment. Since everybody in society has the same aim of developing his personality it implies
that rights arise only in the context of a society and the rights of the individual are to be in
harmony with those of others. So the individual’s rights are a part of serving the common good
as well. Rights are recognised by the society and enforced by the state and so there is no question
of rights without the state. So positive liberals Green supported the moral theory and aw it as
supportive of their idea of a welfare state. The moral theory bases its concept of rights on morals
but it has been pointed out that moral rights are contextual rather than universal because they are
limited to people who share a common code of morality.

The Social Welfare Theory of Rights was a combination of the various theories of rights that
came before it like those that were based on natural rights, legal, ideal or historical. This theory
was developed by the positive liberals and to support their prescription of a welfare state. The
major contributors were T.H. Green, G.D.H. Cole, L.T. Hobhouse, Harold Laski, Ernest Barker
etc. Their central proposition was that a law, custom, natural right etc should all yield to what is
socially useful or socially desirable. As Hobhouse put it: ‘Genuine rights are conditions of social
welfare and the various rights owe their validity to the functions they perform in the harmonious
development of society’. Laski commented on this concept of rights extensively in his book A
Grammar of Politics and made the following major points as follows:

(a) The concept of Rights emerges only in the context of a society. A right is at once a private
claim of the individual and a right shared with others together in a community situation. Hence
when promoting individual rights the common good is and must be served.

(b) An individual can claim and justify rights only in relation to the functions he performs in
society for the social good.

(c) Rights are a claim against the state and the state must enable the realisation of rights. The
state can put limitations on rights in the interest of social welfare of the society as whole but if
these restrictions become unreasonable then it looses it’s moral authority and then the individual
has not only a right but a duty to resist the state.

(d) Since establishment of rights are a condition for social welfare, the state must guarantee
some rights like the right to work, a right to a minimum or adequate wage, a right to reasonable
hours of work, education and the right to participate in industry. The state also needs to limit the
right to property.

(e) The authority of the state must be limited, democratic and decentralised. The state must not
be alien to the citizen and there must be active and proper communication between the two.

In the last quarter of the twentieth century there has been a new wave of Liberal Theories of
Rights dominated by thinkers like John Rawls and Robert Nozic who in turn have inspired other
writers in the same tradition. While Rawl was clearly a positive liberal in the Keynesian tradition
Robert Nozic was a in the neo-liberal tradition that is really a re-incarnation of the early classic
liberals in many ways. So while Nozic argued for unbridled free markets and free trade
capitalism, and a minimal state, Rawls argued for the welfare state concept while preserving the
capitalist system. Nozic asserts ‘individuals have rights and there are no things persons or groups
may do to them (without violating their rights)’[1]. What he basically meant by that was the right
to own property and to profit unrestrictedly from using that property through trade but the moral
logic he adopted to build his theory was based on celebrating the individualistic nature of man.
He argued individuals must be the ends and not the means and hence individual’s rights are
supreme and society can not restrict them I the interest of the common good. Respect for rights
he suggested was respecting people’s rights to be equal. He negates the idea of welfare rights of
the individual as held in the positive liberal tradition. His far right concept of property rights
excludes any welfare rights and their protection by the state. He also suggest all political
institutions are coercive by definition and must command the unanimous assent of the governed.
Every individual lives in his own exclusive domain and must not be disturbed. He is the owner of
himself and his talents and property and he should have full freedom with no restrictions even in
the interest of societal good to put them to whatever use he wants. Rawls on the hand used the
words ‘rights’ and ‘justice’ interchangeably. All rights emerge from justice. To do justice rights
are granted and they may also be taken away for the same reason. He was of the view rights
should guarantee a fair share of economic resources. The social and economic inequalities should
be managed and such that those with the least material goods such as income , wealth, education
etc get a larger share than they have been getting. But Rawls does not wish to change the basic
structure of the market economy with it’s inevitable creation of extreme material inequalities but
wants the system of taxation for instance to be so designed that leads to some level of
redistribution of goods to the worse off in society. He advocated that people’s rights to social
goods should not be dependent upon their natural endowments.

The Marxist Theory of Rights would be a bit of a misnomer because the Marxists never really
attempted to propagate a separate theory of rights but offered a great critique of the liberal
‘bourgeois’ concept of rights. He argued economic inequalities lead to political inequalities and
make most constitutionally guaranteed liberal rights meaningless. Marx made the following
points in his criticism of the bourgeois concept of rights:

(a) Most rights guaranteed in a liberal constitutional set up are abstract and formal and useless
really unless institutional changes were introduced by law to make the rights a living reality. For
example the right to life means nothing if it doest mean the right to means of subsistence on
which life depends. Marx made the point that property ownership does not merely give the
holder of property the power over the thing that he owns but also power over men because the
property is also a means of production and using that means of production men earn their living.
The owner of the property or the means of production can easily exclude who ever he fancies.
That means whoever is excluded for whatever reason becomes jobless and hence must starve.

(b) Equality of rights is an essential condition for achieving social justice but it is not enough.
That is because the rich always are protected and given justice differently from the poor due to
the influence of the money power. Hence Marx declared ‘every right is in general a right of
inequality’ in a liberal set up. A right to be equal only ends up meaning a right to be unequal due
to the power of capital or money or property of the rich.

(c) Rights granted by the state constitutionally can never make them a de facto reality but they
are dependent on the economic structure and cultural development of society for a real existence.

(d) Rights were hence not as important as setting up a classless society in a revolutionary
struggle which is the only way to achieve socio-economic and structural conditions that will
endure on a permanent basis and not get corrupted or distorted and guarantee real de facto equal
rights.

Module 2 – Basic Political Values

LIBERTY

The word liberty is derived from the word liber which means ‘free’. We all want to be free and
have as much freedom as possible. But what exactly to be free means or should mean. Should
there be restrictions on freedom and what and how much? . What if the freedoms enjoyed by two
people leads them to come into conflict. Such questions have been attracting thinkers from the
earliest times.

Almost all liberal thinkers commented on liberty but they all brought their own flavour to it and
one can't assert that there is an exact uniform view. Also this is one concept on which the views
have been more philosophical and ethical than either political or political-economic. Hobbes
defined liberty as the ‘absence of external impediments, which impediments may oft take part of
man’s power to do what he would do’[2]. For the German philosopher Hegel, liberty strangely
was simply obedience to the law. John Stuart Mill, one of the most important thinkers in the
liberal tradition, commented ‘the only freedom that deserves the name is that of pursuing our
own good in our own way so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs or impede
their efforts to obtain it’[3]. Later after the limits of liberal capitalism became apparent. Marxian
and Socialist thinking emerged to interpret liberty as (1) liberation from the coercive social
apparatus and institutions (which the working class faces), and (2) to establish an atmosphere in
which man could build a world according to the needs of humanity as opposed the needs of
capital and capitalists who own the capital.

Post the socialist critique of the liberal interpretations of liberty, the positive liberals in the early
part of the twentieth century refined the old liberal notions. Laski, for instance, defines liberty as
the ‘absence of restraints upon the existence of those social conditions which in modern
civilisation are a necessary guarantee of individual happiness’[4]. And McPherson defined
liberty as living life to the fullest. (Obviously he meant if you had all the freedom and liberty but
not enough food or decent shelter and were worked like an animal or a machine all day, liberty
would be a theoretical meaningless notion for you.)

So at one stage of history, liberty merely was understood to be ‘absence of restraint’ in the free
competition of men with being law being as ‘silent’ as possible and ‘state interference’ at its
least. Soon it was realized after the experience of a century or so, that liberty needs to be
‘attained’ by all and can not merely be left to the lack of impediments. The state and social
institutions need to actively help in that process of attainment it was left. So while the earlier
concept of liberty which was in the nature of bar on the state was a sort of a ‘negative liberty’
the latter conception asking for the involvement of the state and society in helping people get
achieving liberty was ‘positive liberty’.

There are three problems or aspects that arise when analysing or thinking about the concept of
liberty:

(i) the nature of liberty

(ii) the institutions to safeguard liberty and

(iii) hindrances to achieve liberty.

As far as the ‘nature of liberty’ is concerned the early Liberal thinkers were obsessed with
individual liberty, may be because they were principally fighting against medieval orthodoxy,
feudalism, ignorance, and a society based on privileges of kings and landed feudal lords. They
were arguing that once man is freed from these chains, man will individually, each according to
his preference, find his own individual happiness. All that was needed was rule of law and
political rights, representative government with separation of powers and independence of the
judiciary. Political parties were conceived and became the principal ‘institutions’ to safeguard
liberty. It was realised it is not enough for the rights and freedoms to be granted but there was a
need for institutions like political parties, parliament etc. But since the number of people who
would unselfishly and honestly uphold liberty and who had the means to do so was extremely
small due to the class divide in society, Socialist and Marxist ideas of liberty emerged which
argued that ‘hindrances’ in the path of liberty are not only the absolute and dictatorial political
institutions, the removal of which will provide liberty, but also much more deep rooted and
difficult problems like poverty, hunger, ignorance, alienation, and economic inequality etc.
(They also argued women, who were one-half the population of course have always been denied
liberty.) They argued that a collective initiative was needed from humanity as a whole in which
some people may even loose their individual liberties which liberalism considers as sacred. So
the emphasis moved on from preventing the state or anybody else denying an individual living
his life to asking what would the quality of that life be? .

Liberal thinking on liberty changed from negative liberty to positive liberty over a century and a
half, from Adam Smith to Hobhouse and Laski, from the notion of ‘silence of laws’ as liberty to
‘the presence of socio-economic conditions and political conditions’ to ensure true freedom.

The development of the initial concept of negative liberty happened over a century or so as a
result of the contribution of thinkers like Adam Smith (1723-90), John Locke, David Hume,
Thomas Paine, Herbert Spencer, Bentham and John Stuart Mill (1806-73). Later in the second
half of the last century, mainly among some economists, advocating maximised free markets and
free international trade, the early concepts of liberty made a comeback. Thinkers like economists
like F.A. Hayek, Milton Friedman and Robert Nozic etc and Sir Isaiah Berlin, also sometimes
referred to as neo-liberals, are the principal advocates of this latest trend in liberal thought.
The most eloquent of the early liberals who advocated what we now call Negative Liberalism
was John Stuart Mill (1806-73) whose essay On Liberty (1859) went beyond mere liberty from
the interference of the state. It also talked of liberty for the individual from the pressures of
society, public opinion and social customs and conventions. He really saw liberty as the means to
an end, the end being self-development. (This was also the concern of the classical Green
thinkers like Socrates and Plato.) As long as an individual did not harm others or interfere with
others interests he should be free to pursue his own development and interests the way he wanted
or deemed good. So even if a person wanted to smoke, drink, gamble, take drugs, watch
pornographic films all day and even decide to commit suicide, he should be free to do so because
these are his personal individual decisions and he needs to have full liberty to pursue his own
path of growth.

(It is safe to assume Mill would had no problem with many of the modern debates of the day like
marriage between homosexuals or allowing full freedom for abortion or allowing euthanasia. He
would have heartily supported all of them. Quite something for a man of that long ago clearly.)

Mill also of course, like other early liberals, extended his theme of personal liberty to the
economic sphere to advocate what Adam Smith had advocated a hundred or so years back - that
is the capitalist model of classical economics, which saw maximum economic benefit for all in
allowing and promoting maximum economic licence and freedom for operations in trade and
commerce.

Mill was convinced social and political progress depended mainly on the originality and energy
of the individual and his free choice and so every encouragement was needed for each person to
assert himself in his own peculiar way. For this reason very interestingly he objected even to
state provisions for education because he feared this may lead to brain-wash or to the moulding
of each person like another. Most significantly for his times, he was even suspicious of
democracy for he felt it could lead to the tyranny of the majority over the minority and wanted
protection for the minority from the interference of a democratic state. He commented:

‘The notion, that the people have no need to limit their power over themselves, might seem
axiomatic… such phrases as ‘self-government’ and ‘ the power of the people over themselves’,
do not express the true state of the case. The ‘people’ who exercise the power are not always the
same people with those over whom it is exercised; and the ‘self-government’ spoken of is not the
government of each by himself, but of each by all the rest. The will of the people, moreover,
practically means the will of the most numerous or the most active part of the people…
precautions are as much needed against this as against any other abuse of power. The limitations,
therefore, of the power of government over individuals loses none of its importance when the
holders of power are regularly accountable to the community… and in political speculations ‘the
tyranny of the majority’ is now generally included among the evils against which society is
required to be on its guard’[5].

(This was probably the earliest realisation by any thinker of the perils of oppressive rule by a
majority that democracy clearly can lead to. This was also the reason one has to assume why
Mohd. Ali Jinnah asked for the partition of India and the creation of a separate state of Pakistan
at the time of the partition of India for he feared that without the presence of the British the
Hindu majority would use it’s majority position to create a parliamentary tyranny against the
Muslim minority. Also another example of a more personal liberty being violated would be the
recent reports from some states where some universities have tried to impose a dress code on
women students barring them from wearing jeans to college and have received the support of
some elected representatives for the same as well. Clearly this would be a case of a minority of
the population of girl students who want to wear jeans to college having to face a bar on their
personal liberty with the support of democratically elected representatives who are by definition
winners of majority support in a society. Similarly but morally at a different level perhaps would
be the recent case of the issue of closure of Dance Bars in Mumbai where a minority of the
people, those who work for dance bars and those visit them are seeing their personal liberties, the
liberals of the Mill pattern of thinking would argue, being trampled upon and extinguished by the
majority. One can look for and find numerous examples from our colourful and varied
democracy even, where in however small a way, there is a tyranny of the majority.)

Apart from Mill in more recent times, the neo-liberals like Sir Isaiah Berlin, Cranston and Milton
Friedman have gone back to many of the views of the early negative liberals. Sir Isaiah for
instance has commented that ‘you lack political liberty or freedom only if you are prevented
from attaining a goal by human beings’[6]. He even said that if a man is free to purchase food or
go on a world tour, but can not do so for lack of money, it his fault – he has the liberty but he
himself is incapable of enjoying it. He comments:
‘If my poverty were a kind of disease, which prevented me from buying bread or paying for the
journey, or getting my case heard, as lameness prevents me from running, this inability would
not naturally be described as a lack of freedom, least of all political freedom’[7]. He clearly
distinguished between the presence of liberty and the socio-economic and political-economic
conditions necessary for enjoying liberty. He says for instance:

‘Thus the distinction between freedom and the conditions for freedom is not a mere pedantic
distinction, for if it is ignored, the meaning and value of freedom of choice is apt to be
downgraded. In their zeal to create social and economic conditions in which alone freedom is of
genuine value, men tend to forget freedom itself’[8].

So clearly, the main characteristics of the belief system of the liberals - the classic early negative
liberals and the more recent neo-liberals also to some extent are the following:

1. All individuals are rational beings and know what his interests are.

2. Liberty is essentially negative – the absence of restraints.

3. The state or society can not interfere with an individuals liberty. The main liberties, which
are all personal essentially, the liberties of thought and discussion, of association and assembly.

4. There is no conflict between personal interest and collective social interest for it is by
serving his own interests that an individual serves the social interest. Personal liberty is a pre-
condition of any social progress.

5. Those actions of individuals which influence or harm the society can be controlled and
stopped by the state through the use of laws and the justice system but this interference should
be the minimum.

6. There should be a constitutional guarantee against the state taking away personal liberties
through laws. Even people’s representatives sitting in parliamentary democracy should not have
the right to enact laws beyond a point that take away an individual’s liberties. Democracy is not a
sufficient guarantee of personal liberties as it may lead to the tyranny of the majority over the
minority.

7. There is a difference between liberty and necessary socio-economic conditions for the
realisation of liberty. Liberty may be against justice and equality. Free market capitalism is the
only system for organising economic activity, which ensures the liberty of each individual and
also optimises production and economic benefit in any society.

The objection that one can have in accepting the above negative concept of liberty are of three
kinds:

1. Philosophical (One finds it hard to believe that man is either as isolated and individualistic
or selfish or rational in choice as they assume. In fact most of us would argue that man is
essentially a social animal. Man has lived in united and collective communities since time
immemorial and has formulated social rules and customs for smooth functioning of societies.
They have not been felt as a bar or restriction on free operation for character and personality
development at all times and by all participants. There have been exceptions of course. And also
of course the case of women and lower castes in the Indian context is totally different.)

2. Moral (Morally freedom to do as one wills or ‘free will’ can be quite difficult to digest at
times. What if one man’s freedom is harming another and the man doing the harm cannot or fails
to see that he is harming others. It can be argued moral norms exist not against freedom but they
exist to ensure the right use of freedom.)

3. Economic (Free competition and markets as will be later discussed often only leads to the
wild volatile gyrations or up and down in prices of commodities and services, leaving for the
duration of those extremes in pricing the poor and the vulnerable without the availability of those
essential commodities and services even those without which life is not possible and can cause
starvation for instance. Also free markets over time it has been observed leads to the
concentration of wealth and power in the hands of those individuals and families who emerge the
winners in the free market business competition that the early negative liberals and modern day
neo-liberals advocate. What about others? . Should they be forgotten about? . What use is there
to argue that the losers in the free competition or the poor have all the rights and they need only
work their way up using those rights when clearly only a few at any given time can be the
winners and all the rest must be the losers given the nature of the game. There can be only a few
winners in any game and there is a winner only if there is a loser. This realisation led to the
development of Socialist and Marxist thought and even to the new school of Liberal thinking that
is called Positive Liberalism and is discussed below.)
After the Socialist and Marxist critique of the liberal view of the world the middle of the
nineteenth century onwards and following the historic lacuna that capitalism in the classical
liberal sense threw up in the closing decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of
the twentieth century (which peaked in the Great Depression of 1929), a new positiveconcept of
liberty emerged which as explained above is also referred to as Positive Liberalism. The
foremost thinkers of this new school of liberal thought were Green, Bosanquet, Barker and
Laski. In more recent times McPherson, John Gray and John Rawls have also made noteworthy
contributions. The positive concept of liberty emphasises the moral and social aspect of man and
views liberty in relation to society, socio-economic conditions for the realisation of liberty, law,
morality, justice and equality. Liberty according to the positive liberals is a positive thing and is
not merely the absence of restraint.

The most influential of positive liberal thinking that emerged was that of H. J. Laski. He defined
liberty as follows:

‘By liberty I mean the eager maintenance of that atmosphere in which men have the opportunity
to be their best selves.Liberty, therefore, is a product of rights… Without rights there cannot be
liberty, because without rights men are the subjects of law unrelated to the needs of personality.
Liberty, therefore, is a positive thing. It does not merely mean absence of restraint’[9].

Taking the opposite view of John Stuart Mill, he declared ‘Liberty thus involves in its nature
restraints, because the separate freedoms I use are not freedoms to destroy the freedoms of those
with whom I live’[10]. While he believed that personal liberty cannot be enjoyed in isolation
from society he did nevertheless maintain that liberty should not be left at the mercy of the State
because ‘state action is action by government… Liberty, therefore, is never real unless the
government can be called to account; and it should always be called to account when it invades
rights’[11].

Laski classified liberty into three kinds – private, political and economic. He saw all of them as
essential for the development of the human personality. By private liberty he understood mainly
the personal individual liberty, which he saw essentially as negative like the negative liberals.
Political liberty he defined ‘means the power to be active in the affairs of the state. It means that
I can let my mind play freely about the substance of public business’[12]. He saw the need for
two conditions to prevail for political liberty to be real. One, education and the other, provision
of an honest and straight forward supply of news. Economic liberty he defined as ‘the security
and opportunity to find reasonable significance in the earning of one’s daily bread… I must be
safeguarded against the wants of tomorrow’[13]. Thus he clearly sees political and economic
liberty as meaningless without the necessary conditions being available for their realisation. The
responsibility for creating these conditions Laski saw as principally a job of the government and
hence Laski supported positive intervention of the state. Laski therefore put down three positive
conditions that are required for liberty to be achievable and to be meaningful:

1.The Absence of Special Privileges: No person, family or class or group od persons in a

society can be granted special privileges according to Laski for liberty to be achieved.
Special privileges he opined are incompatible with freedom and search for freedom is a
characteristic of all humans alike. Thus liberty is possible only when equality is there.

2. The Presence of Rights: Liberty can only be enjoyed in the presence of rights. There
cannot ‘be liberty where the rights of some depends upon the pleasure of others’[14]
and it is the duty of the state to maintain equal rights.

3. Responsible Government: The government must be responsible which means it is

responsible for creating the socio-economic conditions and political conditions so that
all can realise liberty and rights in actual practice. Or in other words the government
should be a welfare state.

(Later in 1929 Laski reacting mainly to the rise of fascism changed his views somewhat. He
wrote in the send edition of his book A Grammar of Politics in 1929:

‘In 1925, I thought that liberty could most usefully be regarded as more than a negative thing. I
am now convinced that this was a mistake, and the old view of it as an absence of restraint can
alone safeguard the personality of the citizens’.

In more recent times, the liberal thinker McPherson has forcefully argued for positive liberty
and has preferred to rename it developmental liberty even though he has argued there is no
division between negative and positive liberty. Not accepting the logic for the classification or
division of liberties he has argued negative liberty is the absence of any extractive power and it is
counter-extractive liberty. Counter-extractive liberty meaning that in which there is no exploiting
force in the society and it is a precondition to developmental liberty. McPherson defined liberty
to mean availability of life (or life’s basics) and labour (or employment) to each member of
society. He suggested that capitalist mode of production, based on private property, should be
replaced by some other system. Liberty cannot merely be the negative liberty he argued because
the liberty of one individual (to trade and engage in accumulation of wealth through business for
instance without any limit or bar of the state) can destroy the liberty of another individual (the
worker for instance who becomes like a slave to his owner employer after some time). He
comments since ‘each individual’s liberty must diminish or destroy another’s, the only sensible
way to measure individual liberty is to measure the aggregate net liberty of all the individuals in
a given society’[15]. By focussing on total liberty of all in a society McPherson is giving
importance to the social dimensions of liberty.

John Gray put the same thoughts more clearly:

‘The political content of the positive view of liberty is that if certain resources or amenities are
needed for self-realisation to be effectively achievable, then having these resources must be
considered a part of freedom itself’[16].

(It is the content of the above thoughts of the positive liberals starting with Laski’s in the early
part of the twentieth century that led to the gradual development of the concept of welfare state
as freedom enhancing or establishing institutions particularly after the Keynesian revolution in
Economics. In India too, what is referred to as ‘Nehruvian Socialism’ - for the welfare state that
Nehru launched after independence from the British - had its roots in this school of thought.)

Liberty – The Two Concepts

NEGATIVE LIBERTY POSITIVE LIBERTY

1. Focuses on the personal aspect of man’s 1. Looks upon it in totality in the socio-
liberty and regards it as inherent to the economic and political conditions of
personality of an individual. society.

2. Sees liberty mainly as absence of 2. Emphasizes the essential availability of

positive conditions for meaningful
 restraints. realisation of liberty by individuals in
society.

3. Sees the state as an enemy of personal 3. Sees the state as the essential responsible
liberty. agency for creating socio-economic and
other conditions, which will ensure the
realisation of liberty.

4. Emphasizes the personal philosophical 4. Emphasizes the social and economic

and political aspects of liberty. aspects of liberty.

5. Does not wish to associate concepts of 5. Regards liberty, justice and equality as
rights, equality, morality and justice with mutually related and different aspects of
the concept of liberty. one and the same thing.

6. Wants the state to be minimised and as 6. Wants a welfare state that will actively
tiny as possible. intervene to create adequate socio-
economic and political conditions for a
meaningful realisation of liberty.

7. Believer in the concept of each man for 7. Believer that man is a social animal and
himself. Free competition between free hence collective effort for collective benefit
men that will maximise utility for society via the welfare state is the way forward if
as a whole with no special allowance or necessary by denying the absolute right to
care shown for those left behind or the private property. (The Socialist also
losers of the free competition. supported this view.)

It has already been explained how and in what circumstances the rise of radical Socialist and
Marxist thought happened as a reaction to early negative liberal thinking just as that classical
negative liberal thinking had emerged in reaction to the feudal-monarchical mercantilist order
that preceded the rise of liberalism. The early liberals were supporters of free market capitalism
that by the middle of the nineteenth century had begun to show its limitations. While there was
great development new industry and technology led manufacturing and great wealth as a
consequence for some individuals and families, there was also emerging oppression,
exploitation, unemployment and starvation and liberty it was clear was while being available in
theory was not available in practice for the vast majority.

The Socialists (as indeed the later positive liberals) were unwilling to accept the absolute nature
of the right to property and property accumulation that the Negative Liberals advocated. They
argued that liberty has no meaning if you did not have the basics – food, clothing and shelter.
And that free market capitalism eventually leads to the real (as opposed to theoretical)
undermining of liberties in this sense because a vast majority loose or don’t have the basics.
Further that there needs to be central planning and intervention in the economy and government
ownership of productive resources, either fully or substantially, for the creation of conditions that
will aid the realisation of liberties.

Marxian Socialism went further and suggested the complete abolition of private property or any
productive resource (not the most fundamental basics like personal belongings etc). Karl Marx
(1818-1883), the most influential socialist thinker in history, went so far as to predict that on its
own a point is reached in a capitalist free market economy where the majority of the population,
the working class, rise in revolt at their plight of exploitation and misery at the hands of the
upper classes and owning classes, and overthrow their rule to establish the rule of the
‘proletariat’.

Marx carried out an incisive analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the sort of capitalism
that prevailed in his day in the middle of the nineteenth century and argued that all commodity
value is determined by labour content – direct and indirect in the form of capital equipment like
machinery. For example, the value of a shirt comes from the efforts of the textile workers who
put it together, plus the efforts of the workers who made the looms. By implying that the value
of the output is really the value of the labour ultimately, Marx showed in a mathematically
argued theory that the part of the output that is produced by workers but received by capitalists
amounts to “unearned income” which Marx saw as an injustice. He also argued that
technological advances enable capitalists to replace workers with machinery as a means of
earning greater profits, but this increasing accumulation of capital has two contradictory
consequences. As the supply of available capital increases, the rate of profit on capital falls but at
the same time, with fewer jobs, the unemployment rate rises, and wages fall. Marx’s predicted
the “reserve army of the unemployed” would grow, and the working class would grow
progressively alienated from their jobs because working conditions would deteriorate. So he
concluded this unbalanced growth could not continue forever. He predicted that there would be
an ever increasing economic inequality which would lead to the gradual emergence of class
consciousness among the downtrodden proletariat. Business cycles would become ever more
volatile as mass poverty resulted in macroeconomic under consumption. Finally a cataclysmic
depression would sound the death knell of capitalism. Just as happened with feudalism before it,
capitalism would contain the seeds of its own destruction.

(The Great Depression of the 1920s in the western world, particularly in America, and the
overthrow of the Russian Czar and the Russian Revolution were the high points of Marx’s
predictive model coming true - it has to be accepted. But then Positive Liberal thinking arrived
on the scene and under the leadership of economists like J.M. Keynes massive reforms were
carried out to the capitalist model, and capitalism the 1920s and 1930s onwards, wasn’t the same
as that of the nineteenth century. Massive investments and interventions were undertaken by the
state in the economy (by creating massive productive resources in the public sector) and the
business environment and concepts like ‘minimum wage’ and maximum working hours
introduced for workers under President F.D. Roosevelt’s (FDR) rule, for instance, in America.
All measures that nowadays would be promptly dubbed “leftist” and hence somewhat suspect
under the neo-liberal influenced and dominated economic and social policy environment that we
live in.)

He felt deeply for the animal like plight of the working class at the receiving end of both the
business owning employers (capitalist class) and the state and state institutions, who were
usually under the influence of the capitalist owners. This led him to give a call for the overthrow
of the capitalist class in the Communist Manifesto (1848) saying: ‘Let the ruling classes tremble
at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains’. His also
penned the following words that appear on his gravestone:
‘Up till now philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, though, is
to change it’.

Marx was the first major thinker to carry out an entirely economic interpretation of history and
he was probably the first to focus on how economic interests mainly lie behind and determine
our values. He would argue for instance, why do business executives and owners support parties
that want to focus on economic reforms that will help them expand business and profits whereas
labour leaders support parties that advocate putting in place and raising if necessary minimum
wages or introducing unemployment benefits and legislative acts for employment guarantee.
Marx was convinced principally people’s beliefs and ideologies reflect the material interests of
their social and economic class.

The Marxian concept of Liberty is based on the Marxist concept of freedom.

Marx and Engel argues that in a capitalist bourgeois society Liberty comes to have no real
meaning ultimately for the vast majority. And this majority eventually gets alienated from
society. Since this vast working class gets dehumanised and loses the objective of living for self-
development because of poverty and exploitation and social injustice, there is no question of the
development of moral and social personality using legal and constitutional guarantees of liberty.
Marx argued in a constitutional capitalist democracy there might be all the liberties available
legally but in such a society neither the rich man is free nor the poor man. The rich man is the
slave, rather than the master, of the wealth that he owns and the poor man is the slave of his
unmet material needs. Man is not an isolated being but is defined in relation to the society he
lives in for man is a social animal. Marx defined liberty to mean freedom he did not regard mere
absence of restraint as freedom. Nor did he agree that personal and political freedoms are the
highest ideals and other freedoms are based on these. He linked freedom to the essence and
purpose of man. Marxist thinkers Huberman and Paul Sweezy explain this as follows:

‘Freedom means living life to the fullest – the economic ability to satisfy the needs of the body in
regard to adequate food, clothing and shelter, plus effective opportunity to cultivate the mind,
develop one’s personality, and assert one’s individuality’. Rejecting the liberal individualist
position, that says man seeks maximised happiness and pleasure (in the absolute sense), and that
therefore is the priority, Marxism rejects ‘all attempts to seek man’s purpose outside of social
relations in the realm of abstract ideals, the sphere of the instincts, or that of individual
psychology, in activity directed to the satisfaction of selfish interests, not to mention attempts to
find it outside the world of real things… Man’s purpose in the Marxian view is creative activity
directed towards improved well-being and the achievement of free all round development for
society and all its members’[17]. Or in other words, man’s purpose is not merely his own well-
being or self-interest than it will be contrary to his essence. Man cannot separate his happiness
and development from social happiness and development. Marx advocated a ‘revolutionary’ and
conscious effort at overthrowing oppressive systems and creating new systems which will be in
tune with the socialist concept of humanism. According to the Marxist view ‘a life devoted to the
joy of others, their happiness, freedom, equality and welfare, for the triumph of genuinely human
relations, conscious struggle for a new social order, for socialism and communism’[18] - that is
what constitutes the meaning of life and real happiness.

The best thinkers in the liberal tradition have taken the position as Rousseau took that ‘man is
born free’. Marx argued man is not independent from natural and social laws as immediately
after his birth, he becomes the slave of natural forces like hunger, weather, illness, etc.

One of the most important facets of the Marxian approach to liberty and freedom is its analysis
from the class point of view. If the Liberal view of freedom is accepted, Marxists would argue,
what it means or comes to mean eventually is that freedom for the owners of property will mean
freedom to own private property without restrictions (without urban land ceiling laws for
instance to illustrate with the help of an example we urban Indians are familiar with), of earning
profit from employing property without restrictions (like taxes for instance), of employing
someone or removing him (with the least labour laws or none at all) etc etc. On the other hand,
Marxists argued, for the property-less it can only mean in effect or in reality the freedom to
starve, to be laid off from one’s job when the employer doesn’t need him anymore or if he
doesn’t like him for any reason, working conditions and salary terms that are bad and
exploitative but which must be accepted because that is what the contract with the employer
stipulates (full freedom of contract is of the essence of liberal constitutional democracy) and
there are no other jobs available to earn one’s living and avoid starvation etc etc. So Marxists
argue, in a class-divided society freedom will be meaningless for working people. For them
freedom means emancipation from exploitation, starvation, poverty, excessive hours of work,
social insecurity, etc and hence for him freedom can only mean the struggle for the establishment
of a class less society which is only attainable via a socialist revolution.

To summarise the main points of the Marxist view on freedom and liberty:

1. The issue of liberty is associated with humanism and can only be considered with due
consideration to it.

2. The essence of man is in his social relations, the sum total of it. In a class-divided society
based on private property, man is alienated eventually and his existence contradicts his essence
and hence in that case the question of his freedom can not arise.

3. Freedom means the availability of conditions for the multi-dimensional development of

man as a social being which alone leads to self-fulfilment and self-realisation.

4. There cannot be free will ultimately as man’s free will is subject to the objective laws of
nature and society (material want) which exist independently of human will.

5. Man can achieve freedom by developing scientific understanding of these objective laws.

6. Once scientific understanding is attained, there should be revolutionary social activity on

that basis to change society because without changing society and nature, freedom is not
possible.

7. In a class-divided society the freedom of owners of property is built upon the un-freedom
of the property-less. So freedom in such a society is class determined.

8. Freedom is only possible in a classless society and because in only such a society man gets
the socio-economic conditions for the free development of his personality.

9. The struggle for a socialist revolution is thus justified and is really a struggle for freedom.

Liberty – The Liberal VS. The Marxist View

Negative Liberalism is based on the Marxism believes there can not be free will
philosophical concept of free will and because the laws of nature and society
believes free will being the absolute ideal restrict fee will and make it meaningless.
there should be no social or political But Marxism maintains that by
restrictions on individuals. Positive understanding the scientific laws of nature
Liberalism also believes in the absolute and society and by working to counter
validity of individual free will but them, one can make gradual progress
advocates state creation of some soci0- towards greater freedom and free will.
economic conditions to make free will
meaningful.

The principal purpose of man is to serve his Marxism suggests there can be a
own selfish ends and to seek happiness in contradiction between man’s essence and
his own way and society is an artificial his existence. Man’s essence is the sum
invention that exists to serve individual total of his social relations and in a
ends. Man needs liberty for personal capitalist society because of alienation the
development and the fundamental character essence of man does not correspond with
of liberty is personal and not social. his existence and he gets dehumanised.

Negative Liberalism regards the State as an Marx believes both the State and Class
enemy of individual freedom but considers divisions in a society need to disappear for
it necessary only for the purpose of a free society to be established.
maintaining security and law and order or,
governance. Positive Liberalism wants the
state to enlarge and grow as big as
necessary to create socio-economic
conditions for the meaningful realisation of
individual liberty.

Liberalism is focused on the political Marxism and socialism regards all the other
aspects of liberty even though Positive liberties to be based upon economic liberty
Liberalism does regard it also necessary in a true sense for all and believes till
that adequate socio-economic conditions be economic exploitation is eliminated no
liberties can be realised. Marxism goes
created. further and advocates the abolition of all
private individual means of production and
the state to take over.

Liberalism talks about freedom in abstract Socialism and Marxism views freedom in
philosophical terms linking it to the relation to social, economic and historical
philosophical concepts of free will and free circumstances.
soul of atomised individuals, and maintains
personal freedom can be restricted by
society, social organisations and
institutions. So the less of these the better.

Liberals have no problems with society Marxism regards class struggle as

being divided along class lines and believe fundamental and maintains in a class-
freedom and liberty can be provided to all divided society, a class struggle will always
classes, both rich and poor. Freedom eventually inevitably break out since
according to Liberalism basically means freedom is basically only available to the
free choice. They believe all classes and business owners of means of production
individuals can co-exist harmoniously in and the working class is usually exploited.
what they call an ‘open society’. So only in class less free society is freedom
for all possible since a wolf and sheep
cannot live side by side. The struggle for
the establishment of a class less free society
is therefore a freedom struggle and is
referred to as a ‘socialist revolution’ by
them.

Liberals are divided on the issue of Socialism and Marxism also support the
negative and positive freedom. Classical positive concept of freedom but unlike
early liberals and present day neo liberals, Positive Liberalism defines the exact
both support basically the idea of a conditions necessary. Marxism for instance
 negative concept of liberty and freedom. defines an exact “scientific way” way to
But the revisionist liberals of the early 20 th achieve liberty and specifies abolition of
century like Laski called for a positive private means of production, equality,
concept of liberty. Positive Liberals don’t socialist revolution and material
specify the exact conditions necessary for development as the means to that end.
achieving liberty but want the ‘democratic
state’ to take upon itself this task.

EQUALITY

Equality is a somewhat modern concept. Not always has humanity felt the need for equality
between men as at present. In the western world kings and monarchs had a divine right to rule
and so did feudal lords in the areas under their rule and priests and the clergy often assumed to
know the best on most matters. Everybody else was there to serve the king and the church.

(In our country the brahmin was at the top of the heap and had the sole right to lay down the
ultimate wisdom on all matters, the kshatriya had the sole right to armed military might and the
vaishya enjoyed a monopoly of making money and accumulating wealth through trade and
money lending. The dalit or the shudra had no superior rights, only a monopoly similarly, on all
the inferior rights and jobs of society. And this continued for thousands of years.)

In the Greek period there was a feeble rather limited attempt made at establishing equality but it
was only the in the 17thcentury in Europe that demands for rights and liberty began to be raised
and only in the 18th and 19th century that equality was demanded.

The initial demands were raised by the newly rich among traders and businessmen, or
bourgeois, who questioned why was it that while both they and the feudal lords and monarchs
had wealth and economic status but the legal status was not the same. In England for instance, as
Tawny puts it:

‘Since most conspicuous of them in equalities were juristic not economic, it was in the first place
legal privilege, not inequality of wealth, which was the object of attack….The primary aim of
reformers was the achievement of the first (legal equality), since once the first was established,
the second (economic equality), in so far as it was desirable, would, it was thought establish
itself’[19]. Similarly in France, the issue was not economic equality but the uniformity of legal
rights, and the struggle for equality ‘set the new aristocracy of wealth on a footing of parity with
the old aristocracy of land’[20].

While in the 18th century the voice for legal and political equality was raised mainly, it was in
the 19th century that a more vigorous demand for social-economic equality was made as a result
of the rise of a new working class. The march of lazes faire capitalism in the 19th century while
creating great wealth for some families on one side also created great poverty and economic
inequality on the other. Hence the demand for economic equality arose and was raised by
humanists, utopian socialists, Marxists and positive liberals. This demand for economic equality
was not for negative political and legal equality but a demand for positive equality and it implied
a check on private property, a check on exploitation of the poor by rich, and it implied a positive
role of the State with regard to the overall economic system of society.

A very important milestone in the struggle for equality was in the early part of the twentieth
century when women got the right to vote as a result of the movement by suffragettes. Also in
the same century the freedom movements in colonies likeIndia from imperial powers like Britain
marked further movement in the march of equality.

Defining Equality is tricky. It is far more abstract than immediately apparent. Most people sub-
consciously associate equality with the ideas that words like same, identical, equitable similar etc
indicate. H.J. Laski commented ‘no idea is more difficult in the whole realm of political
science’[21] than equality. Rousseau distinguished between natural and conventional equalities.
Inequalities created by nature (one man being lame for instance or blind and another being
neither) are natural inequalities whereas inequalities created by society (like caste, gender, rich-
poor, worker-capitalist, malik-naukar etc) are conventional inequalities. Socialists and Marxists
have argued conventional inequalities particularly economic ones have the power to over-
shadow all natural inequalities. Marx comments:

‘…what I am and am capable of is by no means determined by my individuality, I am ugly but I

can buy for myself the most beautiful women. Therefore, I am not ugly, for. The effect of ugliness
– its deterrent power – is nullified by money. I, according to my individual characteristics, am
lame, but money furnishes me with twenty-four feet. Therefore, I am not lame. I am dishonest,
unscrupulous, stupid, but money is honoured and hence its possessor….I am brainless, but
money is the real brain of all things and how then should its possessor be brainless? Besides, he
can buy clever people for himself, and is he who has power over the clever not more clever than
the clever?’[22].

(It is thoughts like the above that lead socialist and Marxists to be so wary of the abusive power
of economic inequalities in society.)

Laski, the most influential positive liberal thinker, set down the following conditions for
equality:

1. End of special privileges in society

2. Adequate opportunities to all for developing the full potential of their personalities.

3. Access to social benefits for all with no restrictions on any ground like family position or
wealth, heredity etc.

4. Absence of economic and social exploitation.

Recently Bryan Turner has attempted a comprehensive concept of equality by suggesting that
equality should have the following component concepts:

1. Fundamental equality of persons: which is expressed for instance in statements like "all
our equal in the eyes of God". .

2. Equality of opportunity: means access to important social institutions necessary for

social growth should be available to all without discrimination. If there are any
selection criterion it should be based on qualities like interests, achievements and
talents.

3. Equality of condition: where there is an attempt to make the conditions of life equal for
relevant social groups. It is not enough for instance to say that there is free competition
if some people are starting with fundamental disabilities whether economic or any
other, and there is no level playing field.

4. Equality of outcome: or in other words equality of results or of consequences which

seeks to transform inequalities that we start with to social equalities at the end.
Equality has mainly four dimensions – legal, political, economic and social.

Legal equality refers to equality before the law and equal protection of the law. The concept is
all men are created equal and hence deserve the same status before the laws. The law is blind and
will make no allowance for the person being dealt with. He may be wise or a fool, brilliant or
dumb, short of tall, rich or poor etc but he would be treated the same by the law as others. But
there are exceptions – for instance a child would not be treated as an adult man or woman and
allowance would be made to a child.

(Legal equality does not necessarily mean real equality unfortunately because as we all know
legal justice is not free and the rich can hire the best lawyers and even bribe judges in some cases
and get away with injustice. In a strictly liberal set up while you will have theoretical equality
before the law you will need time and money to make use of it and if you did not have it the legal
equality promised to you would be meaningless.)

Political equality basically refers to universal suffrage and representative government. Universal
suffrage means the right to vote to all adults and one-man-one-vote. Representative government
means all have the right to contest elections without distinction and contest for public service. It
does not mean however that all will be forced to vote and give his or her preference. Or that if
some people are dissuaded not to vote or vote one way or the other due to undue influence, the
state can do much about that. Also no political inequality can be alleged, as per the strict liberal
understanding of the term, if most people or, a large segment of the population, don’t vote,
thereby diluting the representative character of the government.

(For instance in America, which regards itself as a democracy offering full political freedom
and equality to all its citizens, it has been found that just about half the country usually votes in
elections. The people not voting are mostly the poorer half and blacks particularly poorer
blacks. In the liberal tradition this is not a cause for particular concern as long as
constitutionally, equality is guaranteed and present for all.)

Mere political equality guaranteed technically or constitutionally also does not mean real
political equality for it has been found that money power in elections come to a play major role
in liberal democracies giving people, groups and classes with the money power and the
willingness to exert it, an advantage in pushing their political interests that is quite formidable to
neutralise. So sheer money power usually and often manages to control the result of elections to
a large extent.

(It is believed President George Bush and his Republican Party spent a few hundred billion
dollars in his election campaign last year almost all of it raised from large business houses and
corporate groups. It is not conceivable how his party and he himself can resist taking the side of
corporate interests versus that of the common people, should the need to choose in a particular
issue arise. Hence it is clear political equality is a very difficult idea state that is almost never
established in any liberal democracy. It may be mentioned here that in India it can take even
cruder forms where voters are sometimes paid cash illegally or even offered a night of free
drinking by candidates and parties to vote for them. Also of course, it is an open secret that most
Indian political parties have corporate friends who donate hundreds of crores of what is usually
black money paid in cash for fighting elections etc.)

It is not merely the actual money spent by candidates and parties but the whole range of money
relationships that helps. Media plays a huge role in modern day liberal democracies particularly
in those with a large middle class and even though media is supposed to be free, they in reality
cannot be so because they owe their economic survival and viability substantially to corporate
advertising and therefore they need to be sensitive to the political sensitivities and interests of the
collective business and corporate agenda. To the extent that media influences people, these
agendas then get transmitted or propagated, whether by design or otherwise, or due to
compulsions or otherwise, whatever they may be, and hence ends up skewing the level of
political equality that would have otherwise possibly existed in practice without their presence.

Quite apart from the above, in most democracies like India, there are powerful executive
bureaucracies and members of the judiciary services, who are not elected by the people (as with
politicians) and who cannot be thrown out in elections if people are fed up with them. The
members of these groups due to educational and family backgrounds often come from higher
economic, class (and caste) categories usually and maintain an ongoing powerful influence on
policy formulation. These groups clearly are more politically equal than others. When a judge of
the Supreme Court for instance stops a policy measure of the government and declares it illegal,
which was put in place by elected representatives of the people in free and fair elections,
however illiterate or non qualified educationally they may be, from the purely political (as
opposed to the legal) point of view, he is clearly enjoying a position of greater political equality
than most other of his fellow citizens.

(There is even a liberal theory of democracy referred to as the ‘Elitist Theory’ of democracy,
which claims political equality is a myth, as political power is always enjoyed, and should
always be enjoyed by an elite. Hence there is no need and it is futile to make efforts to grant
greater political say or equality to the poor and economically weaker citizens.)

The notion of Economic or social equality implies rather differently to different people. Early
liberals meant by economic equality merely the right of choosing one’s trade or profession
irrespective of family position or economic status and the right or freedom to contract so that
everybody in the land is treated equally as far as contractual obligations are concerned.
Gradually the position began to change towards a notion of equality of opportunity for everyone
to live the life of a full human being.

(No doubt this was partly due to the Socialist and Marxist critique of capitalism which
developed great acceptance worldwide before the onset of positive liberalism culminating
probably with the Russian revolution of 1917 and its emphasis on economic equality which they
defined almost as identical economic conditions for all.)

It was understood and accepted gradually equality should mean no one in society should be so
poor that he or she lacks the basic needs and the basic opportunities for mental and physical
development. As Rousseau put it, ‘by equality we should understand not that the degree of power
and riches be absolutely identical for everybody, but that no citizen be wealthy enough to buy
another and none poor enough to be forced to sell himself’[23]. H.J. Laski gave the positive
liberal notion of economic equality finer shape and meant by equality availability to all things
without which life is meaningless. He said the basics must be accessible to all without distinction
in degrees or kind. All men must have access to the essentials of food and shelter. He insisted
equal satisfaction of basic needs as a precondition for equality of opportunity and advocated for
that creation of economic equality by reduction of the extremes of economic inequality.
(Whether by progressive taxation or interventionist welfare schemes for the poor for instance. It
was the onset of the welfare state as a consequence of the influence of ideas of positive liberal
thinkers like Laski and economists like Keynes that policies like mixed economy, differential
taxation, regulation and raising of wages by stipulating minimum wages etc, all of which
basically seeks to tax the rich to provide welfare for the poor were introduced. The positive
liberals and Keynesians claim this changed capitalism for ever into a welfare system and did
much to eradicate poverty and economic disparity and levelled the ground for all citizens from
the point of view of economic equality. The great economist and thinker John Kenneth Galbraith
has even claimed that this almost made economic inequality a non-issue in the western world for
many some decades. In the last few decades particularly the 1980s onwards influence of neo-
liberal thinking which is similar to the old classical early liberal thinking has taken such a strong
hold and put the clock back so much in that sense that any suggestions and ideas that are similar
to positive liberal welfare ideas are immediately seen as leftist socialist or Marxist and hence
scary from the point of view of the neo-liberal dominated policy establishments worldwide.)

The Marxist view of equality associates equality, particularly economic equality, with property
and class-exploitation. In fact, the link between equality and property has been pointed out by
some non-Marxist liberal thinkers as well, like Rousseau and Gans. Gans comments for instance:
‘Societies that have no use for private property, such as nomadic and hunting tribes, find it easy
to be egalitarian, but societies that enable individuals to collect such property do not’[24]. In
Marxian analysis equality is only established with the abolition of classes or a class divided
society and that is only fully achievable by the abolition of private property. The Marxian idea is
to establish a society where there will be no private property or economic classes and each will
have or will be given ‘from each according to his ability to each according to his need’. The job
of distribution will be of the state. Lenin and other Marxists attack the positive liberal social
democratic notion, that by intervention of the state economic disparities can be removed and the
basics for living guaranteed for all, for they believe, without abolishing private property sooner
or later economic exploitation and disparities will creep back in due to the power of money of
the upper classes.

Social equality refers to the absence of discriminations on the basis of colour, gender, caste,
sexual orientation etc. Quite apart from the legal, political, and economic aspects of equality over
the years it has been realised the residual social discriminations that have existed for thousands
of years in some societies can be very difficult to undermine even with a rapid march of
constitutional political and legal rights and economic development and removal of economic
inequalities. Women got the right to vote even in Englandas late as in the 1920s. Blacks in South
Africa and parts of the United States until just a few decades back were barred from large areas
of their own country. In many countries scavengers are forced to live away from society in
ghettos not due to economic or political reasons really but due to social conditionings in society.
Even today there are villages in India where members of the lower castes are treated almost like
animals by members of the upper caste and even if anybody from among them managed to get
rich or powerful he or she would not be treated differently.

(The former Chief Minister of Bihar, Laloo Pradad Yadav for instance has narrated many times
how in his childhood he could not walk past the house of any upper caste member of his village
through public roads in slippers or any other footwear. The norm was all members of the lower
castes must be bare foot.)

Neo-Liberal thinking, propounded in particular by thinkers like economists Milton Friedman

and F.A. Hayek[25] that holds such great sway on policy formulation worldwide at present,
particularly at international institutions like the IMF and the World Bank, believe liberty and
equality are fundamentally opposed to each other and hence inequality has to be tolerated for the
sake of liberty. (They also believe ultimately tolerating inequality will be of the maximum
benefit to the economy as a whole as a result of the growth in private economic activity.)

The main features of this neo-liberal belief system are:

1. Liberty is natural and so is inequality. So it is ordained by nature that liberty and inequality
are not compatible.

2. Liberty principally means absence of any restraint or coercion, but establishing equality
would mean some restraints or some levelling which is fundamentally against the idea of liberty.
Also the economic well being of an individual is dependent on his personal efforts and ability
rather than on society. The liberty to own private property without any restriction is a natural
liberty and should not be restricted in the interest of equality.

3. When in an effort to establish equality, the powers of the state are increased as they must
be, to whatever level, that is a threat to liberty by definition. Equality needs a positive
interventionist state whereas Liberty needs a negative and minimised State.
4. Without free market capitalism the power of the State cannot be checked and without such
a check liberty is always incomplete and under threat. Thus Liberty and Capitalism complement
each other but Equality and Capitalism are fundamentally in conflict. (This view was first
articulated by Milton Friedman.)

5. The Elitist Theory of Democracy which must be regarded as part of the neo-liberal
tradition, advocate the presence of an economic and political elite without which according to
them democracy descends into a mobocracy and populism, and liberty ceases to be available
eventually in such a system. Since without an elite there can be no liberty or democracy,
establishing equality by eliminating elites, destroys liberty. Hence Equality and Liberty are
opposed to each other.

Along with rights, liberty and equality, justice is another very important concept that has
attracted the interest of political thinkers through the ages. Also property, what it is and who
should own it are other important questions that political thinkers have studied and will be taken
up in this article. It can also be argued that rights, liberty and equality are all associated in one
form or the other with property.

Political Ideas of Justice

Mankind has always had a problem in deciding what should be the exact meaning of justice and
nearly always ended up explaining it in the context of the times. Loosely it has meant what is
good and it has been stretched accordingly. As D.D. Raphael commented justice is ‘Janus like or
dual faced, showing two different faces at the same time. It is legal as well as moral. It is
concerned with social ordering and rights of society as much as individual right…It is
conservative (looking to the past) as well as reformative (looking to the future)’[1].

The Greeks and the Romans first attempted to settle on a meaning of justice (as far as western
thought is concerned, that is). Plato, the Greek philosopher defined justice as one of the
principles of what he called virtue along with temperance, wisdom, and courage. Justice is about
sticking to one’s duty or station in life, he said and is the virtue that harmonises all the other
virtues. According to him justice is the virtue that introduced or preserved balance in any society.
His disciple Aristotle, modified the notion of justice by stating that justice necessarily implies a
certain level of equality. This equality could be based upon (1) identity of treatment and (2)
proportionality or equivalence. He further said identity of treatment leads to ‘commutative
justice’ and proportionality leads to ‘distributive justice’ - the role of the courts and the judges
being to distribute commutative justice and the role of the legislature being to distribute
distributive justice. In legal disputes between two individuals the punishment should be as per
the principles of commutative justice with the judiciary seeking to reach the middle point of
equality. And in matters of allotment of political rights, honour, wealth, and goods, it should be
as per the principles of distributive justice. Also there is a need to reconcile the demands of
distributive and commutative justice in any society, and so he saw the concept of justice in any
society as a moving equilibrium, and nothing that is fixed, forever.

The Romans and the Stoics developed a rather different notion of justice. They regarded justice
as that which is not adapted from laws and customs but is discovered by reason. It would be
divine and same for all men. Laws of society must be in with these laws to be worth anything.
Positive law, to be worthy of law must conform to it and the idea of Natural Justice which the
Stoics first developed and which was later adopted by the Roman Catholic Christian fathers and
which treated all men as equal. Justian in his book Institutes made a distinction between the law
discovered or developed by reason and that of the common people or the common law of the
people or jus gentium.

Then not much happened till the Reformations, Renaissance and Industrial revolutions in
Europe. Thinkers like Locke, Rousseau and Kant associated saw justice as a synthesis of liberty,
equality and law. The early liberals saw feudalism, absolute monarchy and caste privileges as
unjust and hence illegal. Justice without liberty and equality made no sense according to them.
This became the prevailing notion of justice until the nineteenth century when there arose a
disagreement between the Liberal and Socialist or Marxist schools of thought. Bentham and
Mill’s Utilitarian Theory, which held great sway, saw justice as what was conducive to the
maximisation of happiness or utility of mankind. They felt total absence of all restrictions would
be happiness maximised but the Socialists and Marxists then emerged to argue that extremes of
poverty and economic inequality arising out of capitalist property relations are unjust and can not
be supported which of of course the Liberal had no problems with. As far as the liberal schools
of thought go, the view of justice held by the classical early liberals was the man view till the
middle of the twentieth century. But with the rise of Keynesian welfare states, a new notion of
justice had to be developed in the liberal tradition. That notion is probably best explained in John
Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (1971). By the closing decades of the twentieth century and the rise
of neo-liberalism and what is called in America, Libertarianism, which is substantially a return to
the notions of early classical liberals (with suitable changes made to build the case for
Globalisation and International Free Trade) of free markets, minimal state, and absolute
individual rights to freedom and property, yet another theory of justice emerged in the liberal
tradition. This is the ‘Entitlement Theory of Justice’ popularised by Robert Nozic in his book
Anarchy, State and Utopia.

Rawls’ Theory

John Rawls in his work, Theory of Justice attempted to build a theoretical foundation for the a
notion of justice that would be in the liberal tradition but not as each-man-for-himself as the
early liberals and hence help to support the notion of a welfare state that became the preferred
developmental aim and route of non-communist nations worldwide by the end of the second
world war.

(Including in India for instance where Jawaharlal Nehru launched a model of a developmental
interventionist state and an ideology behind it that is also referred to as Nehruvian Socialism. In
reality of course it was not remotely socialistic but firmly positive liberal in the Laskian and
Keynesian tradition.)

Needless to say Rawls’ theory takes a position that was opposed to that of the Utilitarian
Classical Liberals like Bentham and Mill whose ideas of justice held great sway particularly in
the legal traditions of Anglo-Saxon countries till the middle of the last century. Rawl draws up
his theory on the basis of the notions of social contract and distributive justice. He defines two
kinds of goods (1) Social Goods: such as income and wealth, opportunities and power, rights and
liberties that are directly distributed by social institutions and (2) Natural Goods: like health,
intelligence, vigour, imagination, natural talents etc which are not directly distributed by social
institutions but may be subject to those institutions partly or affected by them.

Since Rawl also built his theory in the traditions of Rousseau, Hobbes and Locke, he used the
hypothetical assumption of a social ‘contract’ in his analysis. Rawl assumes a pre-social period
in the history of mankind and nature when human beings did not naturally live together in
communities and societies but later came together after reaching a consensus among themselves
as to the form the society that they live in and agree to be members of should take. Here he
assumes that the individual participants in a society would naturally choose a form of society,
which is ‘just under the sterile conditions of impartial choice’. About the individual participants
for the purpose of his theory he makes the following assumptions:

1. All the individuals are indifferent to others and don’t suffer from envy as long their own
interests are satisfied.

2. All the individuals in agreeing to be part of one society are seeking to maximise their own
interests like rights, liberty, opportunities, income or wealth.

3. Each individual is under a ‘veil of ignorance’ at all times which prevents him from
knowing fully about the talents of others.

If these conditions or assumptions are satisfied, then that would be what Rawl terms the
‘original position’ in which he says every one has ‘particular wisdom’ and ‘general ignorance’.
Rawl believes such a society would be a just society since each person would seek to advance his
own interest but since no one is able to distinguish him self from others, he will favour principles
which allow the maximum opportunity to everyone for the pursuit of one’s life plans to
everyone. Also everyone will choose a kind of society which minimises his possible losses and
makes sure that even the worst of persons is not too destitute. Rawl terms this the ‘maximising
principle’ and says it maximises the minimum welfare. In such a just society, according to
Rawls, people would inevitably choose two principles of justice:

(1) That each person should have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberties.

(2) And Social and Economic inequalities are to be so arranged so that both are (a) to the
greatest benefit to the least advantaged, and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all
under conditions of fair quality of opportunity[2].

Rawls also deals with the possibility of conflict between the two above principles of justice. For
instance it is possible that a restriction on liberty of some individuals may constitute an
inequality but it may satisfy the second principle above that is it may lead to lead to greater
benefits for everyone. But Rawls says such inequalities will not be acceptable then since people
will always give priority to the first principle – that is liberty. Even an improvement of in the
welfare of everyone is an insufficient justification for inequitable abridgement of liberty. So
clearly Rawls puts liberty first and says the basis for self esteem in a just society is the publicly
affirmed distribution of fundamental rights and liberties. Thus the two principles of justice and
the priority of the liberty principle are the fundamental elements of justice.

Rawls suggests that after fixing the justice principles, the constitution needs to be decided upon
and it should be so done that the principles of justice are subsumed into the principles of liberty.
After the establishment of the constitution legislation in parliament should be such that it targets
the long-term social and economic goals. The social and economic policies should be aimed at
maximising the long-term expectations of the least advantaged under conditions of fair equality
and opportunity. Hence if the laws are such that they favour the privileged but no benefit accrues
to the least advantaged as a consequence, to the maximum extent, then those laws have to be
regarded as unjust.

Rawls theory, as far as distributive justice is concerned stands somewhere in between the classic
liberal laissez faire on the one extreme and the communist or Marxist view on the other extreme.
He clearly concludes that the proper function of government is not limited to maintaining social
order but ‘the achievement of distributive justice by placing the highest social value on the need
of the neediest’. But he is not advocating complete elimination of inequalities and a fully
egalitarian distribution. According to him, natural abilities and circumstances of birth foster
privileges and since such inequalities can not be eliminated, a just society will seek to
compensate for the resulting privileges by investing its resources including the abilities of the
most talented in efforts assigned to improve the plight of the least fortunate. Justice does not
mean rewarding those with superior abilities (ethics of reward) but compensating those endowed
with lesser ability (ethics of redress). Hence Rawl, it seems, basically provides a theoretical
concept of justice to support the liberal welfare state that is a constitutional democracy. He
comments:

‘If law and government act effectively to keep market competitive, resources fully employed,
property and wealth distributed over time and to maintain the appropriate social minimum, then
if there is equality of opportunity underwritten by education for all, the resulting distribution will
be just’[3].
Critiques of Rawls’ Theory

Rawls’ theory has faced criticism from thinkers along the following lines mainly:

1. Brian Barry has argued that (i) it is difficult to identify the least advantaged individuals
and groups in any society, (ii) what is included in the connotation of self-respect by Rawl is not
clear, and (iii) the principles of constitutional engineering enunciated by Rawl are too fragile to
make an impact.

2. Norman P. Barry has argued the theory of Rawl is just a re-statement of the liberal-
capitalist principle and according to him it seems, ‘the pleasure of the better off, however great,
can not compensate for the pains of the worst off’.

3. The positive liberal thinker MacPherson has argued, Rawl assumes that a capitalist society
will always be badly class divided and that inequality of income will always be necessary in such
a society as an incentive to efficient production and hence in a welfare state transfer payments
must always be limited by design to an amount that leaves one class better off than another. But
this class inequality can in free market capitalist system lead to an inequality of power as well as
income and as a consequence allow one class to dominate over the other.

The American libertarians have questioned the idea of distributing both talents and natural assets
on the basis and for satisfying the principles of social justice.

Entitlement Theory of Justice

Robert Nozic’s Entitlement Theory is the most influential among modern day neo-liberal views
on the concept of justice. He explained his theory in his book Anarchy, State and Utopia. He is
like all neo-liberals for the most minimised existence for the state akin to almost a non-existence.
There is no role almost, in the neo-liberal view of the world that Free Markets cannot play and
play better than anybody else, particularly the state. Re-distributive taxation (taxing the rich
more to give relief to the poor) is morally and inherently wrong and a violation of basic rights as
far as they are concerned. People have a right to sell what they produce at any price they want
and work for others for as cheap as they want (or in other words even if they are compelled to do
so due to socio-economic conditions) and the government and the state should stay away and not
try to intervene and provide social justice to the needy. He comments:
‘People have rights and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating
their rights). So strong and far reaching are these rights that they raise the question of what, if
anything, a state and its officials may do’[4].

Nozic in his Entitlement Theory makes a central assumption which relates justice with the
market. He assumes if everyone is entitled to the goods they currently posses then a just
distribution is simply whatever results from people’s free exchanges in a free market economy
set up or society. Any distribution that results from free transfers and exchanges, from a situation
that was just to begin with is just itself. And for the government to step in and tax these market
determined exchanges and transfers is unjust even if the taxes are used to compensate
undeserved natural handicaps in individuals. The only taxation that is acceptable is what is
needed to maintain the background institutions of governance that will protect the system of
exchanges and free market transfers and enforce the those transfers (like police, law courts,
regulatory bodies like SEBI for instance etc).

(This is the core of the neo-liberal belief system that is in a dominant position at present
particularly as far as the developmental strategies in countries worldwide are concerned and as
far as the basic ethical/moral/political assumptions in the policy prescriptions of the
international organisations like World Bank/IMF are concerned. This is also the belief system
that the so called “leftists” challenge arguing that governance can not be limited to merely
facilitating free market business exchanges and transfers and needs to go further and offer direct
aid and assistance to the to the needy and the exploited.)

The entitlement theory is based upon three principles of justice:

(i) The Principle of Transfer: whatever is acquired without injustice as per the laws
must be freely transferable without any state or other interference

(ii) The Principle of Just Initial Acquisition: how the acquisition was originally made
and that it was done by just means is important

(iii) The Principle of Rectification of Injustice: If the acquisition was not just then there
needs to be rules to rectify that.
The three principles taken together would mean if people’s current holdings are justly acquired,
then, the formula of just distribution as Robert Nozic formulates it in his book is ‘from each as
they choose, to each as they are chosen’.[5]

Nozic relies on two appeals, it would seem, to justify his theory. One, that the free exercise of
property rights is absolute and is more attractive. Two, that the principle of what he calls self-
ownership justifies that right. By the first he means if somebody has acquired something without
breaking the law then he has an absolute and natural right over it and to dispose it off as he
wishes even if such transfers cause inequality and lack of opportunity for some other members of
society. Or in other words if some people are more talented than others they will get ahead and
get rich and they can get as rich as they want and have all the rewards even if others as a
consequence of that starve and suffer. Nozic argues that starting from any initial state of
distribution which is legitimate if free market exchange and transfers lead to inequalities there is
no logic in taxing the rich by the state to create distributive social justice for a third party, i.e.,
the victim of inequality, starvation etc.

The second appeal of Nozic’s theory is based on the principle of self-ownership as Nozic puts it.
What Nozic means by that is that people are the ‘end-in-themselves’ in the tradition of German
philosopher Kant and not the means to an end. So they should not be used or sacrificed for others
or the benefit of others by society because we are all individuals in the end and have our own
rights, which nobody has the right to take away. In other words Nozic believes:

(1) recognising people as owners of their own selves fully or ‘self-owners’ is

fundamental to treating people as equal with equal rights and

(2) only unrestricted free market capitalism recognises this self-ownership.

Hence according to his theory only a minimised state limiting itself to the narrow function of
protection against force, theft, fraud, and enforcement of commercial contracts and so on is
justified and acceptable. Any efforts on the part of the state to take an initiative in things like
education, public health care, transportation, roads, or parks is unjust because all of these would
involve the ‘coercive taxation’ of people with excess money against their will, violating the basic
justice principle of Entitlement Theory - ‘from each as they choose, to each as they are chosen’.
 The Socialist Theories of Justice are mainly Marxist and that of Democratic Socialism. The
historical context in which socialism and Marxism emerged before has been explained before.
By the fag end of the nineteenth century there was an attempt to synthesis democracy, liberalism
and socialism, which is sometimes refereed to as Democratic Socialism.

Marxist notion of justice as propounded by Marx and Engles went beyond merely defining
justice as social justice and argued that to say that the capitalist system is ‘unjust’ and drawing
attention towards its inequalities was not sufficient because it obscures the essential nature of
capitalist production, which is inherently exploitative and therefore justice in a capitalist system
is impossible. The only solution was to create a new society on socialist lines and principles.
Marx attacked the very idea of justice as commonly understood up to his time along the lines of
‘equal rights’ and ‘fair distribution’. He argued some people have greater talent and will
inevitably get ahead and accumulate control over means of production and constitute a separate
class. Ultimately the people without the talent will be exploited at their hands. So the right to
equality is in fact a right to inequality. And any attempt to create equality by redistribution of the
wealth and resources will only solve the problem temporarily since eventually again the
successful upper classes will climb back into a position of power and be in a position to exploit
the poor. The only permanent solution, he therefore argued, was to distribute the means of
production equally among the members of the whole society and that means ownership of the
production capacities by the state itself. Marxists believe the question of justice will arise only if
circumstances are maintained that perpetuate conflict or the possibility of conflict. If conflict
persists hen justice will be needed. So the best thing to do is to get rid of the possibility of
conflict itself and that is best achieved by all members of society living in a situation where the
means of production are controlled by the state with everybody contributing in his own way and
taking the reward ‘from each according to his need to each according to his ability’. Conflicts
arise due to lack of uniformity of goals among members of society and due to the scarcity of
resources. So both will needed to be dealt with to eliminate the potential for conflict and hence
eliminate the need for a juridical system of justice in the liberal sense. Marxists held the root
cause for injustice in the world (particularly it would seem of the times when Marx lived) was
exploitation and in the context of industrial societies exploitation of workers by capitalists. The
Liberal state according to Marxists legalises the exploitation by allowing the buying and selling
of labour. Workers are forced to work for the capitalists since they don’t own the productive
assets of society and can only earn a living to avoid starvation by working for the properties
classes. Hence wage-relationships are inherently exploitative. So all citizens including
disenfranchised women for instance and unemployed and wage-workers have an unequal access
to the means of production and in that sense are always victims of exploitation due to the system
of the liberal state. Marx also argued that it wrong to argue that the capitalist class always
acquired their property through conscious savings or through their hard work or better talent and
many times violent conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, fraud an d force played the greater
part in capitalist accumulation.[6]

Democratic Socialism’s notion of justice is a modification of the Marxian notions in many ways.
The basic difference between Marxian Socialism and Democratic Socialism is on strategies and
even on what constitutes the substance of socialism. Democratic Socialism unlike Marxism
(which wanted a violent revolutionary overthrow of capitalism) wanted a slow evolutionary
transformation process towards socialism using the structures of the capitalist liberal-framework.
As long as the democratic constitutional set up genuinely exists according to democratic
socialists, the best way is to use that state set up to achieve socialism, which according to them in
not by definition another instrument of upper class exploitation as the Marxists believed.

(The Marxists have suggested that with their superior money power upper class industrialists
and controllers of the economy always manage to bribe or otherwise influence state actors like
the politicians, police and the bureaucracy and also manage to influence the media etc which
ultimately means the state in even a democratic liberal constitutional set up ultimately becomes
an instrument of upper class exploitation. The democratic socialists regard this as alarmist and
have faith in working through the structures and systems of liberal constitutional democracies to
achieve socialism.)

It is important to remember the historical background here. Democratic Socialism emerged by

the end of the nineteenth century and in the first quarter of the twentieth century. By then
agitations by workers and women etc had begun to change a lot of things and the predicted
collapse of capitalism as a consequence arguably of that did not come through. Legislation
designed to benefit the working class under the pressure of the working class movements and the
freedom granted to trade unions (including in this country where a Trade Unions Act was passed
by the British colonial government in 1926) had begun to diminish the revolutionary tendencies
of the working class and the alienation and polarisation between the upper owning classes and
the working classes that had been predicted by Marx did not happen in most western capitalist
democracies. Instead there was emerged a belief based on those successes that socio-economic
justice can be achieved by peaceful agitation (instead of the revolutionary path of Marx) through

agitations for universal suffrage, direct legislation, and civil rights. Thus socialism was seen as
the potential logical culmination of the working out of liberal principles. So the idea of a path of
Democratic Socialism emerged and it was believed a just society can be achieved by pursuing
democracy fully and then due to political power and trade union pressure the working class can
take over means of production. The basic features of a democratic socialist view of justice can be
summed up as follows:

1. Democratic Socialism has faith in the power of the state in a liberal constitutional
democracy and seeks to make use of it to achieve a socialist society. So in other words
democratic socialists see Socialism as the fulfilment of liberal democracy.

2. Only Socialism according to Democratic Socialism can deliver social justice. Social justice
exists in a state of full employment, universal higher education, a high standard of living for all
and not just a few, as fair a distribution of income and resources as possible and a full equality of
opportunity to develop one’s talents as much as possible.

3. To achieve socialism and welfare of the community it is necessary to promote public

ownership of the means of production. This may take the nationalisation of existing industries
(wherever necessary but not in every case), creation of new public enterprises and consumers’
and producers’ co-operatives.

4. Trade Unions and organisations of producers and consumers are a necessary element of a
democratic society.

5. Socialist planning does not necessarily mean that all economic decisions should be placed
in the hands of the government and economic power should be decentralised as much as
possible.

6. An individual should be rewarded according to his efforts.[7]

Apart from the liberal and socialist concepts of justice discussed above, there have also been
miscellaneous schools of thought referred to as Anarchists who have based their notions of
justice and a just society on the belief that justice is only possible when their is no state or
authority to govern people. For the anarchists the State is an abomination for it is unfair with its
subjects not by accident but due to its very nature and unavoidably. The only solution therefore
according to them is to have no state.

(These theories being slightly on the fringe of mainstream thought both in terms of number of
followers and in terns of influence in the history of mankind so far is not discussed in detail. In
that sense it is outside the scope of the syllabus even arguably for the B.Com(h) paper this book
is principally designed for. Those who are interested to further exploreAnarchism may read the
book edited by I.L. Horowitz[8] and also of course can look up the topic on the internet.)

And quite apart from the views of liberal, socialistic and the anarchist schools of thought it is
undeniable justice has always meant and worked out rather differently for some parts of
humanity like women or specially disadvantaged people (like lower castes in the Indian context
for instance) and hence there has been also been a Feminist View of justice for the former and a
Subaltern View for the latter.

Isn’t it amazing that women, even in England, the home of liberalism in many ways and of the
great Bentham and Mills did not give women even the right to vote until the late 1920s and that
too was granted under pressure due to the intense path breaking agitation launched by the women
suffragette activists of that era. That even today in India which calls it self a democracy based on
the principle of universal adult franchise in most parts of the country women decide to vote not
of their own volition but are taken to the polling booths and ordered to vote by their male family
member one way or the other.

The above are just examples but there is no denying that women have had negligible role in
formulating economic and developmental policies until recently event though lack of economic
progress and democratic and other rights influence women as much as and arguably even more
than men. Hence Feminists thinkers have forcefully argued that justice and the discussions of the
concept is incomplete and quite meaningless without taking into account the fact that for half of
humanity, the female half, it has been quite another story. What justice can be there even in the
so called constitutional liberal democracies (like India for instance) when in large segments of
the population the status of women is like that of chattel (and even worse as merely sexual
objects). What justice have we been talking about? . Interestingly most of the schools of thought
over the march of history had accepted the egalitarian principle that all members of society
should be treated equally but until recently have tended to defend gender discrimination taking
various pleas like family life, privacy, good of children, nature’s ordained roles etc and as
feminists have argued mankind has tended to design principles of justice with only men’s
interests and priorities in mind without incorporating women’s needs and experiences. The
feminist view of justice is based on three broad issues: (1) the nature of gender discrimination,
(2) public versus private sphere arguments and (3) justice and the ethics of care.

The nature of gender inequality has been such that women have been fundamentally treated by
men and society as inferior and incapable and unsuited for most roles outside the home. This has
in turn led to a tendency over time, which is only slightly changing now, to define roles in terms
that favour men with no effort being made to accommodate women in the process. Laws and
legislations to force equality have failed to a large extent. As long as men’s attitudes don’t
undergo a revolutionary change it would seem, gender justice is a far away goal.

On the issue of public versus private arguments there are three aspects. One the assumption that
classical liberal theory had made that it is biologically ordained that men are the heads of
families and the sphere of public issues is of men and that of the family of women justice is only
a matter of relations between families. Feminists have stoutly argued against these assumptions.
Another aspect is the arguments that are based on the right to privacy. It has been argued by
feminists that the right to privacy that is invoked in the context of family life acts as huge
hindrance to reforms to deal with domestic oppression of women. After all if a husband just
beats up his wife everyday for instance and when the society tries to intervene, he argues that it
is his private family miya-bibi acrimony and everybody should stay out, what it really means in
practice is that the victim, that is the woman, will just have to continue to continue to suffer and
have her basic human rights and dignity violated on daily basis quietly. So feminists have
strongly argued against the privacy plea being taken. Privacy is a basic and almost sacred liberal
principle, but according to feminists, and rightly so it would seem, it can be a huge hindrance to
achieving gender justice. Another argument of feminists is that only women are presented with a
choice between career and family. If a woman can not simultaneously raise her child and manage
a full time job, then she is forced to depend economically on somebody like her husband who is
a regular income earner. Why should women have to make this difficult choice. Should not the
state intervene and treat the raising of the child as a societal responsibility and pay the woman
for instance who is only rearing a child and not doing anything else.

An important reason for relegating women to the domestic sphere has been the belief that men
and women are associated with different modes of thoughts and feelings. And so a lot of
traditions in politics and ethics of the public realm has been justified on gender lines. The belief
that the task of governing and regulating social order and managing public institutions should be
monopolised by men because they are perceived to more rational possibly erroneously, whereas
the task of sustaining private personal relations is should be of women because they are more
sentimental, friendly and caring again possibly erroneously is challenged by feminists who argue
it is precisely this sort of thinking that sustains patriarchy. Perhaps women were caring and
sentiment, feminists argue, because of the roles that they were thrust into away from public
responsibilities and because they were not offered opportunities to pursue other roles requiring
application of rational decisive thinking. Feminists have pointed out theories of justice have not
adequately taken into consideration gender issues when constructing their impressive edifices.

(There is a difference of views between Liberal feminists and Marxist feminists. Liberal
feminists argue equal rights and opportunities with men are all that is needed because then
women can then compete with men in all fields and achieve equality. Marxist feminists on the
other hand argue oppression of women throughout history has been basically a by-product of free
market capitalism with it’s consumerist focus. They point out to how in capitalist societies in
spite of laws to guarantee gender equality we see advertising for products and services for
instance that are sexually degrading and portray women as sexual show pieces and sex objects
and as to how for instance prostitution survives and thrives as an industry in a Liberal State with
the state mostly failing to do anything about it because the women workers involved in such
trades can argue back that they have a basic liberal democratic right to earn their living the way
they want. Yet another school called the Radical feminists focus mainly on the experiences of
women under patriarchy and argue all subordination of women can be traced to patriarchal
attitudes. Socialist feminists combine the radical perspective of patriarchy with the Marxists
class analysis by and focus on the relationship between capitalism and patriarchy.)
Subaltern means ‘of inferior rank’ and as we all know like lower castes and tribals in India and
the blacks in America or what was South Africa in the years of apartheid there have been people
who have been much below the usual mainstream of people who do the social thinking and talk
and engage in politics and seek and introduce reforms in any society etc. Subalternism is a view
of history, society and politics from below. The purpose of a subaltern study is to understand the
consciousness that existed or exists and played or plays a role in the political action taken by
subordinate groups independent of any elite initiative. The believe we can really understand
history by studying the people down below and how they reacted and formed and fought for
justice and political rights etc. For instance a peasants view of the colonial British Raj in India
would be a triad of the sarkar (the British Government), the sahukar (the Indian money lender)
and the zamindar (again Indian) -- with all three being equally his rulers. But for the Congress
led national leadership who were fighting the freedom movement this was hardly how they felt.
Many of them were zamindars themselves and depended heavily for funds and activists on large
zamindars, traders and money lenders and industrialists. They tended to use the poorer subaltern
groups as raw material as it were in their economic and political activities. It was the elite again
that wrote the official versions of history, and formulated the thinking on norms of justice etc.
The language of the elite was (and is) in terms of nation-building, rights, liberties, political
representation, citizenship etc. The language of the ordinary people or the subalterns on the other
hand was (and is) in terms of their relationship with power, authority, and hierarchy,
colonialism, and even pre-colonialism. While the problem of the elite is how to use and exploit
the subordinate group, the problem of the subordinates or subalterns is to how to resist, ambush,
fight and negotiate exploitative relationships. TheSubaltern School draws a distinction between
mainstream theories of justice and subordinate people’s concept of justice. The major thinkers
over the time and the span of history according to the subaltern school did not really talk of
justice from the people’s perspective. For instance Greek thinker Aristotle, who is regarded as
the father of Political Science, justified slavery. Whereas for mainstream thinkers, justice has
been thought of in achieving concepts like rule of law, rights, liberty and equality, for the
subordinate groups these concepts have often ended up meaning ploys for continuation of a
system of domination and exploitative social relationships. If for the elite the right to property
without restrictions is an important right for the subordinate classes it a meaningless right
because they or their children could not ever hope to own any substantial property. Hence, for
the subordinate classes even crime may not be abnormal or inherently bad but just a case of non-
compliance by an individual. For them the law is merely an, ‘emissary of the state’ representing
dominance and suppression the elite. Hence violent crime even can be seen a glorious pathway
way to justice by subaltern subordinates.

Module 3 – Democracy

The Idea of Democracy

Every state whether it is liberal, socialist or communist or even a dictatorship like Pakistan ruled
by a military general calls itself democratic. Indeed it is fashion in modern times to pretend to be
democratic. It is very important to examine politically what democracy means or should mean.

It is not possible to claim to define democracy accurately and universally. In fact the author
Cranston has written that democracy is different doctrines in different people's minds. The great
American President Lincoln had defined democracy as government 'of the people, for the
people and by the people'. Lipset gave a more comprehensive definition:

"Democracy.....may be defined as a political system which supplies regular constitutional

opportunities for changing the governing officials and a social mechanism which permits the
largest possible part of the population to influence major decisions by choosing among
contenders for political office".

MacPherson defined democracy as 'merely a mechanism for choosing and authorising

governments or in some other way getting laws and political decisions made'. Schumpeter had
opined: 'The democratic method is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political
decisions which realizes the common good by making the people itself decide issues though the
election of individuals who are to assemble in order to carry out its will'.

Democracy it can be said is basically associated with participative politics for civil and political
liberties. The major theories of democracy that seek to explain the concept or ides of democracy
are:

1. Classical-liberal theory of democracy

2. Elitist theory of democracy

3. Pluralist theory of democracy

 4. Participatory democracy

5. Marxist theory of democracy or people's democracy.

The Classical Theory of Democracy

In the liberal tradition the concepts of liberty, equality, rights, secularism and justice are the
most fundamental and from the very beginning liberal thinkers have advocated democracy as
the best ay of realising them. After freedom from the power of monarchs and feudal lords,
democracy was seen as the natural way of governing the society. Macpherson has proposed
that actually before democracy came to the western world, there had developed concepts of
politics of choice, competitive polities and polities of markets. It was in fact the liberal state in
that sense that was democratized rather than the other way round. Early traces of democratic
ideas can be found in the writings of English thinkers like Thomas Moore (Utopia, 1616) and
Winstanley and the English Puritanism but the real birth of the democratic idea happened with
the birth of the social contract theory because the idea of the a social contract between citizens
assumes the equality of all men. Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (1651) argued for the central
democratic principle, that the government is created by the people, through a social contract.
John Locke argued that government must be by the people and aim solely for their good. Adam
Smith's free market model was also advanced on a democratic basis arguing for the freedom for
all individuals to produce, buy and sell. The great utilitarian philosophers, Bentham and Mills
supported democracy fully and in fact created a whole intellectual basis for it along utilitarian
lines. They argued that democracy maximises utility or the greatest happiness for the greatest
number because people need protection from form their rulers as well as each other and the
best way of guaranteeing this protection is through representative democracy, constitutional
government, regular elections, secret ballot, competitive party politics and rule by the majority
vote etc. J.S. Mills had added another argument to that of Bentham in arguing for democracy.
He had proposed democracy actually helps in improving and developing makind as a whole in
moral terms than any other system. He saw democracy as a prime mechanism of moral self-
development and highest and harmonious expansion of individual capacities. Interestingly
though neither Bentham nor Mills were unequivocally for the principle of universal adult
franchise or one-man-one-vote. Till 1802 Bentham advocated a limited franchise and in 1809
called for limited franchise only for householders of propertied classes and finally he called for
universal franchise in 1817 but again only for men excluding women. Similarly Mills was not in
favour of universal adult franchise because he feared people of one class being more in number
could dominate and legislate in the interest of their own class and against the interest of the
other class. Later in his book Representative Government (1861) he argued for more than one
vote for some and for excluding some like those who are poor and receive relief for it and those
who are illiterate or bankrupt or do not pay taxes -- all categories that would have excluded the
entire working class. He was only for a representative government that was severely restricted
in influencing the enjoyment of what he saw as basic liberties and that did not interfere with a
laissez faire free market economy.

Democracy continued to receive the support of later liberal thinkers and the historical evolution
of the world particularly Western Europe and North America lent strength to the acceptability of
democracy.

The classical liberal view of democracy has been questioned by various thinkers from time to
time. Firstly the assumption of democracy that each man knows what is best for him has been
questioned. Many thinkers like Lord Bryce, Graham Walls have argued that man is not as
rational, neutral, informed or active as is assumed him to be for democracy to function.
Secondly democracy rests on the basis of rule by the people but it is not easy to clarify what
exactly 'rule' or 'people' means. Hence public opinion as a basis of government is a democratic
myth. Thirdly, democracy is expected to serve the common good but there may not be such a
things as the common good. Common good in a society would different things to different
people. Also, fourthly, classical liberal theory does not take into account the power of mass
psychology for instance or group coercion and persuasion and demagogic leadership. Fifthly,
the party system in a democracy always becomes a game of the elite, or for those with money
power and they decide the issues. Also the process of policy making is too complex and not as
transparent or fair as calssical liberals hoped or assumed it would be. Lastly the most important
criticism of the classical liberal case for democracy is that it is based on political equality but
economic inequality.

The Elitist Theory of Democracy

In the twentieth century thinkers began to question the Classical Liberal theory of democracy by
asking questions like: Can the public really play a role in day to day politics without democracy
can not be participative and representative? Can ordinary citizens who are busy with many
things like trying to earn a living spare the time and energy to play a public role? Will liberty be
destroyed if the impulses of masses is allowed free play via electoral democracy without
restrictions?. In an attempt to answer these questions new theories came up like the Elitist
Theory of Democracy and the Pluralist Theory of Democracy.
The term 'elite' is used to refer to a minority among a group of people who are in advantageous
position in that community due to some factors whatever they may be. Elites are usually those
minorities who stand out in a society for their pre-eminence in the distribution of authority. The
political elite is composed of a 'minority of specialized leaders who enjoy a disproportionate
amount of power in the community's affairs' according to Presthus.

The Elite theory arose after the second world war and the main contributors have been Vilfredo
Pareto, Geatano Mosca and Robert Michels and American authors like James Burnham and C.
Wright Mills. The elite theory has as its main premise the belief that society consists of two kinds
of people - the special selected few or the elite and a vast mass of people. The special people
always rise to the top because they are the best and have the qualities. The elite, particularly
the political elite performs all political functions, monopolises power and enjoys the advantages
that power brings. The numerically vast and larger non-elite is ruled by the elite and directed
and controlled in a manner that is essentially arbitrary. It is always the organised minority that
rules over the unorganised majority. Robert Michels who gave what is known as the 'iron law of
oligarchy' claimed the non-elite should submit to the elite because the majority of human beings
are 'apathetic, indolent and slavish and permanently incapable of self-government'. The main
features of elitist theories of democracy are: (a) People are not equal in their abilities and so the
development of an elite and a non-elite is inevitable. (b) The elite can control power and
command influence because of their superior abilities (c) The group of elites is not constant and
their is constant entry of new people and exit of old people from the group (d) The majority of
the masses who constitute the non-elite are apathetic, lazy and indifferent and so there is a
need for a capable minority to provide leadership and (e) Ruling elite in the modern times are
mainly either intellectuals, industrial managers or bureaucrats.

Joseph Schumpeter in his book Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942) first formulated
what can be regarded as a systematic formulation of the elite theory of democracy. Later it was
supported in the writings of Sartori, Robert Dahl, Eckstein, Raymond Aron, Karl Manhiumand
Sydney Verba etc. This concept of democracy is based on the idea that the vast majority of
people who are mostly incapable and disinterested chose from a group of competent people
who comprise the minority elite and who are mostly chosen on merit. Te people this way get a
narrow choice but a choice nevertheless between rival elites who control political parties. The
minority are too busy earning a living and are anyway neither interested mostly nor capable of
having rational well thought out views on issues and so they chose from among the elite and
follow the leadership. The Elite theorists of democracy approve of this state of affairs as they
see it to be and argue in complex modern societies the way to efficiency is through
specialisation and so rule should be of the elite. The Elite theory also sees too much
participation of people as dangerous because a strong leader with dictatorial motivations like
Hitler could use the mobilisation of the masses to achieve power and then destroy democracy
itself, which would mean end of basic liberties. So they argue democratic and liberal values can
only be safeguarded by keeping the masses away from politics. Elite theorists argue there can
not be any real rule by the people. Rule is always for the people and never by the people
because the people have to choose their representatives who are inevitably from the elite.
Democracy in other words should suffice to mean competition between rival groups of elite and
people getting a chance to decide which group of elites will rule. So democracy is just a
procedure really whereby one of a narrow group gets to rule on marginally extra support from
people. The Elite theorists also prescribe that there should be an agreement between elites on
democratic values which is essential for the breakdown of constitutionalism. There should be a
consensus they argue among the elites - political parties, leaders, executives of large business
houses, leaders of voluntary associations and even workers unions so that the fundamental
procedure of democracy can be protected from irresponsible leaders. It would seem while one
of the aims of elite theory was to make the accepted idea of democracy more realistic and bring
it closer to the empirical reality it only transformed democracy into a conservative political
doctrine that is happy with the liberal or neo-liberal capitalist status quo at all times and wishes
to maintain its stability.

The Elite theories have come under criticism from many thinkers like C.B. Macpherson, Greame
Duncan, Barry Holden, Robert Dahl etc among others. The main complaints against the elite
theories are as follows:

(a) The Elite theories distort the very meaning of democracy and make it arbitrary without
paying any attention to its fundamental characteristics. If the people only choose
representatives then they have no voice in running the country and hence the system becomes
undemocratic.

(b) The Elite theory of democracy takes away the moral purpose of the traditional classical
notion of democracy. The classical notion has the purpose of democracy the improvement of
mankind but the Elite theory empties out that moral content and paints the whole situation just
as an inevitable passive acceptance of minority rule by the elite.
(c) The Elite theories undermine the value of participation which is a central theme of
democratic governance and instead claims no participation is possible. Hence they condemn
rule by the people as an impossibility.

(d) The Elite theories seem to patronisingly approve of a politically passive incapable common
man who will only earn his living and in the evenings spend his time with his family or friends or
listen to the media outlets and not do anything more personally than once in while choose
between sets of elite.

(e) The elite theories have been obsessed with maintenance of the stability of the system rather
than allow for radical changes through the democratic process. The main focus has been
preservation of the democratic procedure and the creation of machinery which would produce
the most efficient administration and coherent public policies. That is also why Elite theories see
social movements as a threat to democracy and disruptive of the process of law managed by
the elite.

The Pluralist Theory of Democracy

The Pluralist Theory of Democracy is another theory that emphasises the role of groups other
then the people themselves. In fact some thinkers have proposed theories of democracy that
are a mixture of the Elitist and Pluralist theories. But also the pluralist view was developed partly
as a reaction to the Elitist view. The Elite theorists are happy with a situation where power really
lies with the elite who make major decisions but the pluralists argue for devising a system that
will neutralise the tendency for elitism in a liberal democracy and elicit the true will of the will.

As a concept pluralism is quite old but it became a major part of modern liberal thinking only in
the twentieth century. Pluralism simply means scattering and decentralising power and decision-
making and not confine it to a small group in any society. In modern times with various industrial
and technological aspects to living pluralists argue power is highly fragmented and is shared by
competing public and private groups. Those in highly places have less power than one might
think because they are really mediators among conflicting interests. The various groups mediate
through their leadership and there is representation of the individual thereby. While industrial
and technological integration and technological demands have made power concentrated in a
few hands, the competition among fewer but larger interest groups goes in favour of public
interest. Competition among big business, labour and government keeps each group from
misusing its power. Thus the inequalities in wealth, education and power among citizens is
neutralised because associations and groups provide greater representation than one might
imagine possible and this make democracy more real and tot hat extent ultimately more viable.
Just as an example in a country like India when groups like the Bharatia Kisan Union of
Mahendra Singh Tikait and Narmada Bachao Andolan lead movement they carry with them the
interests and voice of millions of very poor and illiterate farmers who otherwise would not have a
voice and this makes Indian democracy more real than it otherwise might be. Of course elites
and elite news media criticise them and condemn them for stopping progress and they have to
even get stopped by Supreme Court orders from time to time but nevertheless they do make
Indian democracy more representative and real as a consequence of their efforts.

The pluralist theory of democracy got reflected and supported in the works of thinkers in
America like S.M. Lipset, Robert Dahl, V. Presthus, F. Hunter etc. They argued political power is
not as simple as it looks like in a society and is really quite widely dispersed between various
groups, associations, classes and organisations of the society along with the elites who lead the
society in general. The various interest groups raise their demands directly but also via he
political parties. One definition of a pluralist democracy is:

'a political system in which policies are made by mutual consultation and exchange of opinions
between various groups as that no group or elite is so powerful as to dominate the government
to such an extent that it may implement all its demands completely'.

The pluralists approve of this power sharing and believe that this stops any one social class
from monopolising control over the process of government decision making to the exclusion of
the interests of other classes. But the pluralists make one assumption or postulate in their
theoretical model and that is that all citizens have the legal opportunity and economic resources
to organise and pursue their interests in the political arena. Without this opportunity the citizens
can not express their support or opposition to a proposed measure. The pluralist theorists see
political as a process of resolution among groups rather than individuals and they argue
democracy works best when citizens govern indirectly through their membership of or
identification with a group that supports their particular set of interests. They advocate that
individuals in a society should actively participate in and make their will felt through groups of as
many kinds as possible. They also advocate that all groups and their members should accept
that elections are a viable instrument of mass participation in political decisions. Further all
groups and members of the elite in their competition with each other make democracy possible.
Thus the pluralist theory does not really oppose elitism fully because they accept the reality of
elites and are happy with their continuation. This is the reason pluralist theories are sometimes
regarded as only marginally different from elite theories. In fact the great American thinker
Robert Dahl combined the elite and pluralist notions of democracy. He called his notion of
democracy polyarchy. He made the point that people act both through groups and elite
politicians. He cited several sources that shape policy with their influence - business houses and
industrialists, traders, trade unions, farmer's associations, consumers, politicians, voters etc and
who influence policy making of the government. No one achieves full implementation of their
agenda. All groups are not equally powerful and also the various groups are more effective at
preventing polices that they are opposed to from being implemented rather than getting polices
that they want getting adopted.

The main criticisms of the pluralist theory are along the following lines:

1. There is an assumption in the pluralist theories that the outcome of a clash of interests
between diverse groups is promoting of those interests or that part of it that deserves to be
adopted but in fact sometimes the clash can only mean a situation of a status quo or a
stalemate or worse still one particular group getting away with its agenda creating resentments
for the future.

2. The basic axiom of the pluralist theory that individuals want what is in their interests directly is
also not always strictly true. People can be driven by nationalistic or other motivations.

3. Micheal Mavgolis has argued the pluralist theory lacks the capacity to devise ways to
increase or redistribute society's resources so that traditionally underprivileged groups like lower
castes, women, tribals etc or people who are of a lower socio-economic status come up and
bridge the gap in the interest of equality so that they can participate in politics as a same footing
as all other citizens. .

4. Mavgolis has also pointed out that pluralism does not have a plan to achieve social equality
and development at a reasonable economic and environmental cost.

The Participatory Theory of Democracy

Participation in political activities is fundamental to democracy but it has been felt from time to
time that in capitalist democracies in particular participation is often limited to no more than
voting in elections. The Participatory Theory of Democracy advocates increased participation
both as an ideal and as a functional requirement. The main proponents of this theory have been
some left wing writers from the 1960s like Carole Perelman, C.B. Macpherson and N.
Poulantzas.

Participatory democracy has two broad features:

(a) decentralisation decision-making so as to bring policy making closer to the people affected
by the decisions

(b) direct involvement of the common man in decision-making.

The participatory advocates argue that democracy is supposed to be with the equal
participation of everybody and is not just about maintaining a form of stable government as the
elite or pluralist schools seem to argue. So democracy can only be achieved in a participatory
society where citizens are active politically and take constant interest in collective problems. The
participatory advocates argue it is necessary for active participation to happen so that there is
adequate regulation of key institutions of the society and the political parties are more open and
accountable.

Unlike the Elite and Pluralist theorists who have no problems with decision making by the elite,
participatory democracy theorists argue that would make the democracy less real and therefore
want to revive the participation of the common man in decision making. They argue the
existence of democratic rights on paper or constitutionally is of little real meaning if those rights
are not realised in actual practice by the common man. The individual needs to be really free
and equal and only then he can participate. How free and equal can be judged from the
concrete liberties and opportunities that he has to participate fully and actively in political and
civic life. If people believe that opportunities exist for effective participation in decision making in
a real sense people do get attracted to the idea of participating. They also feel more liberated
and part of the system when they can effectively participate. A democracy that is dominated by
elites whether political or technical or technocratic is not satisfactory to citizens and people can
over rule and over ride the elite only by participation. The participatory theorists also argue that
in the modern age of highly advanced industrial and technological societies the level of
education in society is high enough and the gap between the intellectual and political thinking
elite is not as high as has been in the past and so participatory democracy with heavy inputs
from common people in most things is not detrimental from the point of view of efficiency and
development. In general the participatory advocates argue the best protection from tyranny is
through the dispersal of power. Participatory democracy can rescue the citizen from apathy,
ignorance and alienation and fulfil the basic essence of democracy which is political
participation of all citizens in decision and policy making.

As to the question of how exactly the common citizen might participate the various prescriptions
of the participatory theorists are as follows:
1. voting in elections, 2. membership of political parties, 3. campaigning in elections, 4. taking
part in the functioning of political parties generally, 5. membership and active participation in
pressure and lobbying groups like associations and voluntary organisations and non
governmental organisations (NGOs), 6. taking part in demonstrations, 7. and industrial strikes
particularly those with political objectives or aiming at changing or influencing public policy, 8.
participation in protest civil disobedience like refusal to pay taxes etc, 9. membership of
consumer councils, 10. participation in the implementation of social policies, 10. and community
development programmes such as those related to women and child development, family
planning, environment protection etc.

Macpherson has commented that the modern nation states are very large in size and the
number of state are formidable and it is not feasible that all citizens will fully participate in face-
to-face discussions for instance in influencing policy making but nevertheless a substantial level
of participation can be ensured if (a) the political parties are democratise according to the
principle of "direct democracy", (b) if genuinely participatory political parties operate within the
parliamentary structure, and (c) if the political parties activities are supplemented by
organisations in the work place (like trade unions) and in the community (like citizen's groups
and NGOs).

David Held has attacked the participatory theory by arguing that while it represents an advance
over the other notions like Classical/Elite/Pluralist etc it does not make it clear how and why
participation merely will lead to a greater level of human development which is among the major
philosophical aims of democracy. There is no evidence or reasoned argument that participation
will make citizens more cooperative and committed to the common good. He also argued the
central assumption that people want to assume more responsibility for policy making and
decision making on issues that impact their lives may not necessarily be true. What if people
don't want to engage in social and economic matters and policy making. Why should citizens be
forced to actively participate in public life if they want to do so. Also he asked what if people take
their democratic attitude too far and start interfering with basic liberties and right. The
participatory theorists have not opined on this a great deal. Cook and Morgan have argued
participatory democracy is not as easy to practice as it may sound. For instance what should be
the proper size and function of the participatory unit? . Also how can decisions taken at local
levels with the help of active participation of citizens be coordinated and combined in the
interest of the nation as a whole. The policy preferences of one local participatory unit may
collide with that of another. They also argued the fact that decisions are arrived at with the
widest participation does not mean they will be the most efficient decisions. Participatory
theorists do not address the issue of efficiency adequately.

The Marxist Theory of Democracy

The idea of democracy, contrary to popular belief, was accepted by Marx and subsequent
Marxist thinkers. Excepting that their notions of democracy are totally different from that of the
Western Liberal tradition. Since Marxists argued that democratic rights can not be realised in a
real sense by all people in a capitalist system but only by the rich, they argue for what they call
'people's democracy'. In Marxian democracy after the abolition of ownership of the means of
production and the assumption of control of the economy by the proletariat a socialist
democracy is built.

Marx was critical of the liberal constitutional democracy because the basis of a capitalist
democracy is the economic system where the means of production are always in the control of
a capitalist class. This capitalist class in turn using their money power controlled the political
system and thus had control of the government and the state apparatus. The state power, rights
and privileges were exclusive to that class in reality and the working class had rights and
liberties only in name. Also the state bureaucracy, courts and the police were not neutral but
served the interests of the dominant class one way or the other. Hence, democracy was
reduced inevitably into just a system for preserving and aggrandising the powers and privilege
of the ruling class and to be used as and when necessary for preserving upper class interests.

However, Marx and Engles did accept that even a liberal bourgeois democracy controlled by
the rich capitalist class and which was to that extent fake may have some historical and other
pretensions of offering real rights to its citizens and those could be used by the working class to
fight for emancipation and organise themselves and raise the level of political consciousness
and to achieve proletarian revolution. The presence of universal suffrage in liberal democracies
can be used to further the cause of a proletarian revolutionary movement. They do accept that
in some situations a violent revolutionary movement may not be necessary but regard those as
highly likely and rare. Even where the parliamentary path would be pursued in pursuit of the
aims of a socialist revolution it would be a complement to other forms of struggle.

In the Marxian analysis genuine democracy is only possible after a proletarian revolution to
establish a dictatorship of the proletariat because the liberal bourgeois democracy may have a
participative ideal but there is no real participation by the poorer working classes. Marx and
Engles in their The Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875) explained their concept: 'Between
the capitalist and the communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the
one into the other. There corresponds to this also a political transition period in which the state
can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat'. So they distinguished
between a dictatorship of the proletariat and communism. They saw it only as an intervening
period till socialist construction leads to the creation of a communist society. It is important to
understand in what sense Marx and Engles used the word 'dictatorship'. They used it in the
sense that they saw every state as a dictatorship of the ruling social class. In capitalism this
class was the rich industrial and business bourgeois while in the state they conceived
immediately after revolution it would be the proletariat who would be in control and then start the
process of socialist reconstruction leading to finally a classless society. So to them democracy
and dictatorship of the proletariat at one and the same time would not be impossible any more
than a liberal democracy in capitalism is both a democracy and a dictatorial rule in effect, by the
bourgeois composed of industrialists and business houses.

Therefore they argued after the revolution and take over by the working class or the proletariat
class the system would be a 'people's democracy'. They meant by 'people' here the vast
population of poor common people as opposed to the few rich bourgeois. The chief
characteristics of the Marxist people's democracy are as under:

(a) People's democracy is essentially a participatory form of democracy which the majority
population of the working class in a liberal capitalist bourgeois democracy set up to take over
political and state decision making from the hands of a small rich elite minority of industrialists
and business people who control the politics of the state using their economic power.

(b) People's democracy also means the community's or the people's ownership of the means of
production like farms and factories, appropriation by the state of all productive capital assets
and transportation and a rapid increase in productive capacities. It would also mean equal
liability of all citizens to work, and public direction of employment opportunities.

(c) There is an integration of executive and legislative functions in a socialist democracy and all
government personnel are directly elected after the revolution and the police and military are
replaced by a people's militia. Also all public officials are paid the same salary as a worker.

(d) At the social level, there is no inheritance, free education for all children, an equitable
distribution of population between villages and cities and a massive effort for development of
productive forces to meet the basic needs of all citizens.
(e) In Marxist analysis people's democracy is seen as a pass over stage between capitalism
and communism. After the abolition of private property and classes as a consequence, once the
socialist society is created it is a gradual move towards full communism. In full communism
there is an end to politics and a sort of habitual self-rule in a real sense is attempted at.

The establishment of socialist societies led to a further development of the ideas of Marx.

Lenin who led the formation of the first socialist state in Russia in 1917 offered many new
interpretations of Marxist ideas. Lenin accepted the importance of the Dictatorship of the
Proletariat and stressed on its importance in socialist revolution but he also made the point that
the dictatorship of the proletariat can only be exercised through the mass proletariat
organisation or the Communist Party. Further he saw democracy as being in three phases:
Capitalist Democracy, Socialist Democracy and Communist Democracy. He argued democracy
is a form of state and is one of the many varieties of state and in a class divided society,
government is both a dictatorship and a democracy. It is a democracy for one class and a
dictatorship for another. The bourgeois who control and run a capitalist system for their own
benefit have to be removed because they do not serve the interests of the working class and a
socialist democracy established. Immediately after the socialist democracy is established Lenin
accepts that the new socialist state is as much engaged in repression as the capitalist state.
This is necessary to enforce the rule of the proletariat class. Since the bourgeois is very well
entrenched and powerful, at the beginning in a socialist democracy the proletariat class have to
ruthless repress and eliminate the capitalist class. The twin purpose of the dictatorship of the
proletariat is to defend the revolution and organise a new social and economic order. This job is
to be mainly done by the communist party according to Lenin.

Lenin thus argued that in a capitalist democracy real democracy does not exist and in a
dictatorship of he proletariat there is at least more democracy than before because it is the rule
of the majority proletariat class. He also argued that finally when true communism is achieved
democracy would not be needed because it would be meaningless in the context of that society.

Many thinkers after Marx, Engles or Lenin have given their interpretations of Marxist thought.
The most prominent have been Edward Bernstein, Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemberg etc. Edward
Bernstein had argued that the Marxist analysis of capitalism is wrong and that socialist
revolution and dictatorship of the proletariat is neither necessary nor desirable. He argued
political democracy and liberal freedoms were more important. Marxist thinker had argued that
Lenin was wrong in claiming that Dictatorship of the Proletariat is necessary. He argued a
socialist revolution is impossible till the proletariat is in a majority and if they are in a majority no
dictatorship is necessary. He argued that democracy is important and by merging the
democratic tradition with the Marxist socialist doctrine socialism can be achieved through
democratic means. Marxist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg attacked the anti-democratic policy
of Lenin, which she argued tends to become not a dictatorship of the masses but a dictatorship
over the masses. She argued even if democratic institutions are not perfect it is a mistake to
abolish them because it paralyses the political life of the masses. She argued for freedom of
expression and the press and free elections and maximised democratic freedoms. She argued
dictatorship of the proletariat should not be a matter of abolishing democracy but of applying it
correctly. It was important in how she saw things for the masses to have the freedom to actively
participate and for them to do so in political life for socialism and freedom are inseparable.

After the second world war, the communist parties in Europe engaged in intense debate on the
ideas of the revolution, dictatorship of the proletariat etc and eventually moved towards a
constitutional away from the revolutionary path. So the Western Marxist concept of socialist
democracy developed in a direction opposite to that of Lenin's ideas. They have moved closer
to the view that socialism can be brought about by peaceful means like parliamentary
democracy, multi-party system, civil liberties, rights of freedom of expression and trade union
activities.