Assignment Code: BPSC-131/ASST/TMA/2021-22

Course Code: BPSC-131

Assignment Name: Introduction To Political Theory

Year: 2021-2022

Verification Status: Verified by Professor

There are three Sections in the Assignment. You have to answer all questions in the Sections.

Assignment - I

Answer the following in about 500 words each.

1. Write a note on what is politics. 20

Ans) Politics is essentially about settling contestation over the distribution of material goods. This may have been a fair characterisation of politics in the post-World War II era – an era that saw the rolling out of progressive taxation and welfare provision by a relatively centralised state and a party-political system based on a traditional left-right ideological cleavage. Everybody has some idea about the meaning of the term politics; to some people the question may even appear quite superfluous. ‘Politics’ is what one reads about in the papers or watches on television. It deals with the activities of the politicians, notably the leaders of political parties. What is politics all about? Why, precisely, are these activities ‘political’ and what defines the nature of politics? If one starts with a definition couched in terms of the activities of politicians, one might say that politics concerns the rivalries of politicians in their struggle for power. This would certainly be the kind of definition with which most people would agree. There would, also, probably be agreement that politics refers to the relationship between states on an international scale.

 ‘Politics is about power and how it is distributed.’ But power is not an abstract entity floating in the void. It is embodied in human beings. Power is relationship existing wherever a person can impose his will on other persons, making them obey whether they want to or not. Hence, a situation arises characterized by leadership, a relation of domination and subordination. Max Weber, in his famous lecture of 1918, ‘Politics as a Vocation’, started by proposing that the concept of politics was ‘extremely broad-based and comprises any kind of independent leadership in action.’ In whatever context such leadership in action exists, politics is present. In our terms, political would include any situation where power relations existed, i.e., where people were constrained or dominated or subject to authority of one kind or another. It would also include situations where people were constrained by a set of structures or institutions rather than by the subjective will of persons. Such a broad definition has the advantage of showing that politics is not necessarily a matter of government, nor solely concerned with the activities of politicians.

Politics exists in any context where there is a structure of power and struggle for power to gain or maintain leadership positions. In this sense, one can speak about the politics of trade unions or about ‘university politics. One can discus ‘sexual politics’, meaning the domination of men over women or the attempt to alter this relation. In a narrower sense, however everything is politics, which affects our lives through the agency of those who exercise and control state power, and the purposes for which they use that control. In the lecture quoted above, Weber after initially giving a very broad definition of politics in terms of general leadership, went on to produce a far more limited definition: ‘We wish to understand by politics’, he wrote, ‘only the leadership, or the influencing of leadership, of a political association, hence today, of a state’. In this perspective, the state is the central political association. A political question is one that relates to the state, to the topic of who controls state power, for what purposes that power is used and with what consequences, and so on.

2. Examine the normative approach of political theory. 20

Ans) The normative approach in political theory is known by different names. Some people prefer to call it philosophical theory, while others refer to it as ethical theory. The normative conception is based on the belief that the world and its events can be interpreted in terms of logic, purpose and ends with the help of the theorist’s intuition, reasoning, insights, and experiences. In other words, it is a project of philosophical speculation about values. The questions, which are asked by the normativity, would be: what should be the end of political institutions? What should inform the relationship between the individual and other social organisations? What arrangements in society can become model or ideal and what rules and principles should govern it? One may say that their concerns are moral, and the purpose is to build an ideal type. Hence, it is these theorists who have always conceived ‘utopia’ in the realm of political ideas through their powerful imagination.

Normative political theory leans heavily towards political philosophy, because it derives its knowledge of the good life from it and uses it as a framework in its endeavour to create absolute norms. In fact, their tools of theorisation are borrowed from political philosophy and therefore, they always seek to established inter-relationships among concepts and look for coherence in the phenomena as well as in their theories, which are typical examples of a philosophical outlook. Leo Strauss has strongly advocated the case for normative theory and has argued that political things by nature are subject to approval or disapproval and it is difficult to judge them in any other terms, except as good or bad and justice or injustice. But the problem with the normativity is that while professing values which they cherish, they portray them as universal and absolute. They do not realise that their urge to create absolute standard for goodness is not without pitfalls. Ethical values are relative to time and space with a heavy subjective content in them, which precludes the possibility of any creation of absolute standard. We will do well to remember that even a political theorist is a subjective instrument in the assessment of the world and these insights are conditioned by many factors, which may be ideological in nature. The exponents of empirical theory criticise normativism for:

a) Relativity of values

b) Cultural basis of ethics and norms

c) Ideological content in the enterprise and

d) Abstract and utopian nature of the project.

But in the distant past those who championed normative theory always tried to connect their principles with the understanding of the reality of their times. In recent times, again the old sensibility within the normative theory has re-emerged and the passion for good life and good society has been matched by methodological and empirical astuteness. John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice is a case in point which attempts to anchor logical and moral political theory in empirical findings. Rawls, with his imagination, creates ‘original position’ to connect normative philosophical arguments with real world concerns about distributive justice and the welfare state.

Assignment - II

Answer the following questions in about 250 words each.

1. What are Isaiah Berlin’s ‘Two concepts of Liberty’? Explain. 10

Ans) The answers to the above questions have been provided by Sir Isaiah Berlin in his famous essay ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ in which he made a distinction between positive liberty and negative liberty based on the role of the state. Negative liberty implies freedom from undue interference of the state. It implies an area in which the individual is free to do what he/she likes without being obstructed by others. The negative concept of liberty, in Berlin’s words, is involved in the answer to the question, “What is the area within which the subject — a person or group of persons — is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons?”. Positive liberty, according to Berlin, attempts to answer the question, “what, or who, is the source of control or interference that can determine someone to do, or be, this rather than that”? Thus, positive liberty implies freedom of ‘rational self’. Isaiah Berlin in his essay, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ said a frontier must be drawn between the area of private life and that of public authority.

The public private distinction has European origin which signifies division of sovereignty through rights. Public belongs to the state while private belongs to the individual. Classical liberal theorists continued to treat family as a natural, biological and a personal unit. They claimed that the family is composed of individuals who enter the institution through their free will, and the state must not intervene in that institution. John Locke had argued that family starts due to voluntary consent between man and woman and state interference should be avoided. John Rawls says that the family is one of the social institutions to be evaluated by the theory of justice but for him the traditional family is just and remained on the fringes of his theory of justice. J S Mill recognized a link between virtue and good politics.

2. Discuss some arguments against liberty. 10

Ans) Mill’s argument on liberty can be classified into two categories i.e., freedom of thought and expression and freedom of action. Liberty vs. Censorship Mill believes in absolute liberty in case of freedom of thought and expression and argues “if all mankind, minus one were of one opinion, and only one person was of contrary opinion, mankind would no more be justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind”. He further explains why suppressing even one individual’s voice can be dangerous for society and questions what if that person’s opinion is true? In that case, humanity is deprived of the truth and the opportunity of development is taken away. Secondly, he accepts that there is a possibility that the opinion to be suppressed is false, but in this case as well, expression is valuable as it will reaffirm the existing truth. Lastly, he also discusses the third option and agrees to the idea that the truth is often ‘eclectic’ and may be partly true and partly false. He argues that the decisions made by individuals are often based on beliefs which they assume are infallible and discard all options of discussion around it.

Mill proposed that individuals should enjoy the greatest possible realm of freedom, but also recognized that unrestrained liberty may create probability of oppression and result in tyrannical behaviour. Thus, he divides all human actions into two categories namely ‘self-regarding actions’ and ‘other-regarding actions. Self-regarding actions are those which concern only the individual performing them and there should be no intervention in this realm and interference with the individual’s liberty of action is justified only to prevent him from ‘harming’ others i.e., in the case of other-regarding actions. In effect, the ‘harm principle’ ensures individual’s duty towards the society.

3. Elaborate the concept of social justice. 10

Ans) Social justice relates to the balance between an individual’s rights and social control ensuring the fulfilment of the legitimate expectations of the individual under existing laws and to ensure him benefits and protection against any encroachment on his rights. Let us examine the term, ‘social justice’ in terms of the following aspects of justice, viz. one, the notion of the predominance of the interest of the community and two, the notion of ‘reform’, or social change.

The Concept of Social Change

Social justice is used to denote organization of society based on ideas of fairness and equality current at the time. It seeks a revision of social order to have a more equitable society. Men through the ages have sought changes in social order, just as much as they have also sought to preserve a given social order. Social justice stands for reformative justice, for revision of the social order and a redistribution of rights to suit current ideas of fairness. When Aristotle spoke of ‘distributive justice’ he had reformative or what Raphael calls “prosthetic” justice in mind, because their aim was to modify the status quo. The affirmation of the idea of social justice is very well contained in the interpretation of Dean Roscoe Pound who presents a six-fold illustration of social interest and lays down eight jural postulates to ensure social justice. Thus, the idea of social justice promotes the welfare of the people by securing a just social order. Theories of social justice are criticised on three grounds. Firstly, demands for social justice, by implication, enlarge the activities of the state. The state, then, will have to decide, “who gets, what, when and how.” Where the officers of the state develop vested interests, such subjective determination is not likely to serve the ends of social justice. Secondly, policies of social justice and their implementation require curtailment of liberty.

Assignment - III

Answer the following questions in about 100 words each.

1 Nature of Rights 6

Ans) The nature of rights is hidden in the very meaning of rights. Rights are not only claims; they are claims. Rights are claims but all claims are not rights. Rights are those claims which are recognised as such by society. Without such recognition, rights are empty claims. Society is organised in character and an individual obviously cannot have any right apart from what the society concedes. To quote Hobhouse: “Rights are what we may expect from others and others from us, and all genuine rights are conditions of social welfare. Thus, the rights anyone may claim are partly those which are necessary for the fulfilment of the function that society expects from him. They are conditioned by, correlative to, his social responsibilities.” Rights are social; they are social in the sense that they emanate from society at any given point of time; they are social because they are never, and in fact, can never be, anti-social; they are social because they had not existed before the emergence of society; and they are social because they cannot be exercised against the common good perceived by society.

2 Overview of Indian democracy 6

Ans) India is a parliamentary democratic republic in which the President of India is the head of state, and the Prime Minister of India is the head of government. It is based on the federal structure of government, although the word is not used in the Constitution itself. India follows the dual polity system, i.e., federal in nature, that consists of the central authority at the centre and states at the periphery. The Constitution defines the organisational powers and limitations of both central and state governments; it is well recognised, fluid and considered supreme, i.e., the laws of the nation must conform to it.

3 Gender and politics 6

Ans) There are diversity of approaches regarding range of themes concerning gender and politics.

a) First, women are seen in the categories and analyses of political science thereby gendering the classic “units of analysis” such as citizens, voters, legislators, parties, legislatures, states, and nations.

b) A second strand on women has examined political activities in arenas traditionally seen as outside political science.

c)  A third strand has looked at gender as a structure of social organization.

d) Finally, struggles within the broader feminist movement, women of colour (women of marginalized races and ethnicities), women in the developing world, post-colonial feminists, and LGBTQ scholars who pressed for a place in the study of gender politics, sometimes finding a degree of accommodation and sometimes, frustrated with resistance.

4 Communitarian perspective of citizenship 6

Ans) Communitarianism is a philosophy that emphasizes the connection between the individual and the community. Its overriding philosophy is based upon the belief that a person's social identity and personality are largely moulded by community relationships, with less development being placed on individualism. Although the community might be a family, communitarianism usually is understood, in the wider, philosophical sense, as a collection of interactions, among a community of people in each place (geographical location), or among a community who share an interest or who share a history. Communitarianism usually opposes extreme individualism and disagrees with extreme laissez-faire policies that neglect the stability of the overall community.

5 Censorship

Ans) The origin of the term ‘censorship’ can be traced to the office of censor established in Rome in 443 B.C. to regulate morals and ritually purifying the people. From this office derives the modern use of the term ‘censorship’ to denote the practice of examining, restricting, and prohibiting public acts, expressions of opinion, and artistic performances. Censorship is today generally regarded as a relic of an unenlightened and much more oppressive age. The suppression or control of ideas, public communication and information circulated within a society is termed as censorship. Ritu Menon argues censorship is when a work of art expressing an idea which does not fall under current convention is seized, cut up, withdrawn, impounded, ignored, maligned, or otherwise made inaccessible to its audience. Censorship is a tool which is used either by state or society for the maintenance of power, achieved through manipulation of the cultural sphere.