Political Theory and Theories of the State — UPSC PSIR Optional Notes

1. Meaning of political theory

Origin of the word: 'theory' comes from the Greek theoria, meaning contemplation or looking at something attentively; political theory is careful reflection on political life.

Basic meaning: a body of ideas that explains the nature and purpose of the state, government, power and authority, and judges how they ought to work.

Two sides: it is both explanatory (what is) and normative (what ought to be); most classical theorists, from Plato to Rawls, combined both.

George Sabine: in A History of Political Theory (1937) he treated political theory as the disciplined investigation of political problems, rooted in the problems of its own time.

Andrew Hacker: in Political Theory: Philosophy, Ideology, Science (1961) he described it as combining a dispassionate search for the good state and society with a search for knowledge of political reality.

David Held: in Political Theory Today (1991) he described it as a network of concepts and generalisations about political life, covering the nature and purpose of government, state and society and the political capacities of human beings.

Definition of politics used with it: David Easton defined politics as the authoritative allocation of values for a society (The Political System, 1953); Harold Lasswell titled his book Politics: Who Gets What, When, How (1936).

2. Political theory and related terms

Political thought: the ideas of a whole community or period, including statesmen, poets and activists; it need not be systematic, for example the thought of the Indian national movement.

Political theory: a systematic, often individual, explanation of political phenomena with a claim to general validity, for example Marx's theory of the state.

Political philosophy: the most abstract and normative level, asking about ultimate values such as justice, freedom and obligation, for example Plato's Republic.

Political ideology: an action-oriented set of beliefs that mobilises people and seeks to keep or change the social order, for example liberalism, socialism or fascism.

Political science: the empirical study of political behaviour and institutions using observation and testing; it supplies data that political theory interprets.

3. Nature of political theory

Descriptive and explanatory: it identifies patterns, for example why democracies rarely go to war with each other or why elites dominate parties.

Normative and prescriptive: it sets standards to judge institutions, for example Rawls's principles of justice or Gandhi's idea of swaraj.

Critical: it questions existing power; Marxist, feminist and post-colonial theories show whose interests apparently neutral arrangements serve.

Conceptual: it analyses the meaning of contested concepts such as liberty, equality and rights; W.B. Gallie (1956) called such terms essentially contested concepts.

Contextual yet universal: every theory responds to its own crisis (Hobbes to the English Civil War, Marx to industrial capitalism), yet its questions recur in every age.

Interdisciplinary: it draws on philosophy, history, economics, sociology, law and psychology.

Isaiah Berlin's view: in 'Does Political Theory Still Exist?' (1962) he argued that political theory arises wherever the ends of social life are disputed, so it cannot disappear in a free society.

4. Significance of political theory

Conceptual clarity: it clarifies terms used loosely in public debate, such as secularism, nationalism or merit.

Normative guidance: it provides yardsticks to judge laws and policies, for example whether a policy treats citizens as equals.

Understanding institutions: it explains why states, constitutions and parties are designed as they are.

Critique and emancipation: Marx wrote in the Theses on Feuerbach (1845): 'The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.'

Citizenship: it trains citizens to reason about public questions instead of relying on slogans.

Policy-making: ideas from theory shape real policy; Keynes, Hayek and Rawls influenced welfare states, market reforms and debates on redistribution.

Rajeev Bhargava: in What is Political Theory and Why Do We Need It? (2010) he argues that political theory gives us reflective understanding of the values embedded in our political practices.

5. Classical, modern and contemporary political theory

Classical (Plato to Rousseau and beyond): philosophical, normative and concerned with the ideal state and the good life.

Modern empirical theory (twentieth century): scientific, value-free and focused on behaviour, systems and measurable data.

Contemporary theory (after 1970): a return of normative questions with new themes such as justice, multiculturalism, gender, environment and global justice.

6. Indian context

Constitution as applied political theory: the Preamble's justice, liberty, equality and fraternity are core concepts of political theory written into law.

Ambedkar on social democracy: in his speech to the Constituent Assembly on 25 November 1949 he said: 'Political democracy cannot last unless there lies at the base of it social democracy.'

Indian debates: secularism (Rajeev Bhargava's 'principled distance'), affirmative action and federalism show political theory at work in Indian politics.

Bhikhu Parekh: in 'The Poverty of Indian Political Theory' (1992) he argued that modern India produced great political practice but little systematic political theory, a claim others have contested by pointing to Gandhi, Ambedkar and Nehru.

Judiciary as theorist: judgements such as Kesavananda Bharati (1973) on basic structure and Puttaswamy (2017) on privacy involve reasoning about liberty, dignity and the limits of power.

7. Using it in the exam

10-mark answer: define political theory with one scholar, distinguish it from one related term, give two features and one sentence on significance.

20-mark answer: meaning with two definitions, nature (descriptive, normative, critical), significance with examples, the decline and resurgence debate in brief, and Indian relevance.

Keywords: theoria, normative and empirical, essentially contested concepts, authoritative allocation of values, critique of power, Berlin.

Quotation: Marx's eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, quoted above, for the critical and emancipatory role of theory.

Quotation: Ambedkar's line on social democracy, for linking theory to Indian constitutional practice.

Link: connect this topic with approaches (next topic) and with the decline and resurgence debate, which questions often combine.

1. What an approach means

Approach: a standpoint that decides which questions are asked, which data count and which methods are used; a method is the narrower technique of collecting and testing data.

Broad division: traditional approaches (normative, historical, philosophical, legal-institutional) and modern approaches (empirical, behavioural, systems, post-behavioural), with critical approaches (Marxist, feminist, post-colonial) cutting across both.

2. Normative (philosophical) approach

Core idea: asks what the state, law and society ought to be; deals with values such as justice, liberty and the good life.

Method: deductive reasoning from first principles and thought experiments rather than surveys.

Thinkers: Plato's ideal state in the Republic, Rousseau's general will in The Social Contract (1762), Kant, Hegel, T.H. Green and, in the twentieth century, John Rawls's original position in A Theory of Justice (1971).

Strengths: gives standards to judge institutions and keeps moral questions at the centre of politics.

Critique: behaviouralists called it speculative and unverifiable; Marxists see in it the hidden values of the ruling class.

3. Historical approach

Core idea: political ideas and institutions can be understood only through their history and the context that produced them.

Older form: histories of political ideas by William Dunning and George Sabine traced the development of ideas from the Greeks to modern times.

Cambridge School: Quentin Skinner, in 'Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas' (1969), argued that a text must be read as an act in a specific debate of its time, asking what the author was doing in writing it; J.G.A. Pocock developed a similar contextual method.

Leo Strauss's contrast: in What Is Political Philosophy? (1959) and other works he read classical texts as answers to permanent questions and criticised historicism for treating all ideas as products of their time.

Strengths: avoids anachronism and shows how ideas respond to crises.

Critique: Easton (1953) blamed historicism for turning political theory into a study of dead ideas; extreme contextualism may deny that old texts speak to present problems.

4. Empirical approach

Core idea: knowledge of politics should come from observation and experience, not speculation; it studies what is rather than what ought to be.

Early roots: Aristotle is traditionally said to have studied the constitutions of 158 Greek city-states; Machiavelli based his advice in The Prince (written 1513) on how rulers actually behaved.

Modern form: rests on the fact-value distinction and the positivist idea that only verifiable statements count as knowledge.

Critique: facts are selected through values, so a fully value-free study is impossible; empirical work may describe the status quo and implicitly defend it.

5. Behavioural approach

Origins: Graham Wallas, Human Nature in Politics (1908), and Arthur Bentley, The Process of Government (1908), shifted attention to behaviour and groups; Charles Merriam's New Aspects of Politics (1925) and the Chicago School, including Harold Lasswell, called for scientific study.

Post-war growth: after 1945, especially in the USA, behaviouralism became the dominant approach, helped by survey research, funding and the wish to compete with the natural sciences.

David Easton's eight intellectual foundation stones: regularities, verification, techniques, quantification, values kept separate from facts, systematisation, pure science and integration with other social sciences (set out in his 1960s writings on the meaning of behaviouralism).

Unit of study: the observable behaviour of individuals and groups (voting, opinion, leadership) instead of formal institutions and legal texts.

Robert Dahl: in 'The Behavioral Approach in Political Science: Epitaph for a Monument to a Successful Protest' (1961) he described behaviouralism as a protest movement that had succeeded and was being absorbed into the mainstream.

Related frameworks: Easton's systems analysis (input, conversion, output, feedback) and Gabriel Almond's structural-functional approach and study of political culture with Sidney Verba (The Civic Culture, 1963).

6. Critiques of behaviouralism

Leo Strauss: argued that value-free political science cannot even recognise tyranny, because identifying tyranny is already a value judgement.

Hyperfactualism: critics said it collected trivial measurable data while ignoring urgent questions of war, poverty and racism.

Status quo bias: by studying stable American democracy it treated existing institutions as normal and desirable.

Sheldon Wolin: in 'Political Theory as a Vocation' (1969) he defended the epic tradition of theory against narrow methodism.

Context of crisis: the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War and student protests in the 1960s made the claim of neutrality look like irresponsibility.

7. Post-behavioural approach

Announcement: David Easton, in his presidential address to the American Political Science Association in 1969, 'The New Revolution in Political Science', proclaimed a post-behavioural revolution; its watchwords were relevance and action.

Credo of relevance: substance must come before technique; research should address social change rather than only stability; it must not lose touch with the brute realities of politics.

Values and action: values cannot be excluded from research; intellectuals have a responsibility to protect humane values and should apply knowledge to social problems.

Politicisation of the profession: professional associations and universities cannot remain aloof from the struggles of their time.

Nature: post-behaviouralism did not reject scientific methods; it aimed to combine them with values and public purpose, a future-oriented synthesis.

Caucus for a New Political Science (1967): a group of radical political scientists in the USA who pressed for this change from within the profession.

8. Indian context

Behavioural research: the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), founded in 1963 with Rajni Kothari among its founders, pioneered survey-based election studies; its Lokniti programme runs the National Election Studies.

Systems and political sociology: Rajni Kothari's Politics in India (1970) used a systems and political-sociology framework to explain the Congress system.

Normative approach: the Directive Principles of State Policy and the Preamble are normative statements of what the Indian state ought to achieve.

Historical approach: reading Gandhi's Hind Swaraj (1909) in the context of debates with revolutionaries and moderates is a contextualist exercise.

Post-behavioural relevance: research on poverty, caste atrocities and displacement by dams reflects the demand that political science be relevant to social problems.

9. Using it in the exam

10-mark answer: on post-behaviouralism, define it, cite Easton 1969, give three tenets of the credo of relevance and one sentence on its significance.

20-mark answer: compare traditional and modern approaches, explain behaviouralism with Easton's foundation stones, give critiques and show how post-behaviouralism synthesised fact and value.

Keywords: fact-value distinction, verification, quantification, Chicago School, hyperfactualism, relevance and action, Cambridge School contextualism.

Quotation: 'relevance and action' as Easton's watchwords for post-behaviouralism.

Diagram: a simple table of approaches with their question, method and thinker saves words.

Link: connect behaviouralism with the decline of political theory and post-behaviouralism with its resurgence.

1. The decline thesis

Meaning: the claim, made mainly in the 1950s, that grand normative political theory in the tradition from Plato to Mill had stopped producing new work and had lost relevance.

David Easton: in The Political System (1953) he argued that theory had declined into historicism, the mere retelling of past ideas, and had failed to build a general, empirical theory of politics.

Alfred Cobban: in 'The Decline of Political Theory' (Political Science Quarterly, 1953) he argued that theorists had withdrawn from engaging with the real political problems of their own time, unlike the classical thinkers.

Peter Laslett: in his introduction to Philosophy, Politics and Society (1956) he wrote: 'For the moment, anyway, political philosophy is dead.'

Robert Dahl: in 'Political Theory: Truth and Consequences' (1958) he observed that political theory was in poor health in the English-speaking world and suppressed in communist countries.

2. Causes of the decline

Logical positivism: the Vienna Circle and A.J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic (1936) held that value statements cannot be verified and are therefore not genuine knowledge, which undercut normative theory.

Behaviouralism: the drive to make political science a value-free, quantitative discipline pushed philosophical questions to the margins.

Historicism: theory became a history of ideas, treating thinkers as museum pieces rather than as contributors to living debates.

End of ideology: Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology (1960), and Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man (1960), argued that in Western societies the great ideological battles were over and politics had become technical problem-solving.

Experience of totalitarianism: fascism and Stalinism made grand theories that claimed to know the good society appear dangerous; Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) attacked Plato, Hegel and Marx on these grounds.

Growth of the administrative state: politics seemed to be about management and economic growth rather than fundamental ends.

3. Defences of political theory

Isaiah Berlin: 'Does Political Theory Still Exist?' (1962) argued that as long as people disagree about ends and rational curiosity exists, political theory will continue; only a society with a single agreed goal would have no need for it.

Leo Strauss: defended classical political philosophy, criticised value-free social science and historicism, and argued that the question of the best regime is permanent.

Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and The Human Condition (1958) showed that original political theory was still being written.

Dante Germino: Beyond Ideology: The Revival of Political Theory (1967) argued that political theory was reviving and that the decline thesis had been exaggerated.

Other works of the period: Michael Oakeshott, Bertrand de Jouvenel and C.B. Macpherson, whose The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (1962) re-read Hobbes and Locke critically, show that theory never stopped.

4. The resurgence

Post-behaviouralism: Easton's 1969 call for relevance and action reopened the place of values in political science.

John Rawls: A Theory of Justice (1971) restored systematic normative theory; it is widely seen as the turning point of the revival.

Debate around Rawls: Robert Nozick's libertarian Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) and the communitarian critiques of Michael Sandel (Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, 1982), Michael Walzer (Spheres of Justice, 1983), Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue, 1981) and Charles Taylor created a lively field.

Critical theory: Jürgen Habermas developed theories of the public sphere and communicative action, which later grounded deliberative democracy.

Social movements: civil rights, feminist, environmental and anti-war movements generated new theoretical questions about equality, identity and nature.

5. New directions in contemporary theory

Multiculturalism: Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (1995), and Bhikhu Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism (2000), on group rights and cultural diversity.

Feminist theory: Carole Pateman, Susan Moller Okin and Iris Marion Young questioned the public-private divide in liberal theory.

Green political theory: ecological limits, intergenerational justice and the rights of nature.

Global justice and cosmopolitanism: Thomas Pogge and Peter Singer on duties across borders.

Postmodernism and post-colonialism: Michel Foucault on power and knowledge, Jean-François Lyotard's incredulity toward grand narratives (The Postmodern Condition, 1979), and Edward Said's Orientalism (1978).

Recurring end claims: Francis Fukuyama's 'The End of History?' (1989) and The End of History and the Last Man (1992) claimed liberal democracy had won the battle of ideas; the debate it provoked itself shows that theory was alive.

6. Critiques and assessment

Was there a decline at all? Many scholars argue that what declined was only a particular Anglo-American academic style; political thinking continued in Europe and in anti-colonial movements.

Narrow view of theory: the decline thesis equated theory with the Western canon and ignored Gandhi, Fanon or Ambedkar, who wrote original political theory in the same decades.

Ideology did not end: the 1960s protests, decolonisation and later religious nationalism disproved the end of ideology claim.

Balanced view: the episode is better described as a shift in the centre of gravity, from history of ideas to empirical science and then back to normative theory enriched by new concerns.

7. Indian context

Parallel creativity: while the decline was being announced in the West, India's Constituent Assembly (1946-1949) was debating rights, federalism, secularism and minority protection, a major exercise in applied political theory.

Original Indian theorists: Gandhi's critique of modern civilisation, Ambedkar's Annihilation of Caste (1936) and M.N. Roy's radical humanism show non-Western theoretical innovation.

Contemporary Indian theory: Rajeev Bhargava on secularism, Partha Chatterjee on nationalism and political society, Gopal Guru and Sundar Sarukkai on experience and caste (The Cracked Mirror, 2012) show a vibrant field.

Parekh's lament and replies: Parekh's 1992 claim of a poverty of Indian political theory is itself part of the resurgence debate, and has been answered by this growing body of Indian work.

Constitutional jurisprudence: Supreme Court reasoning on dignity, privacy and equality draws on Rawls, Dworkin and Ambedkar, showing theory's practical revival.

8. Using it in the exam

10-mark answer: state the decline thesis with Easton and Laslett, give two causes and name Rawls 1971 as the turning point of resurgence.

20-mark answer: decline (claims and causes), defences (Berlin, Strauss, Arendt), resurgence (post-behaviouralism, Rawls and his critics, new themes), assessment and Indian dimension.

Keywords: historicism, logical positivism, hyperfactualism, end of ideology, Berlin 1962, Rawls 1971, communitarian debate, plurality of new theories.

Quotation: Laslett's 'For the moment, anyway, political philosophy is dead' to open, and Berlin's argument about disputed ends to answer it.

Link: connect with behaviouralism and post-behaviouralism (previous topic) and with Rawls and communitarianism (Chapter 3).

1. Core ideas of the liberal theory of the state

Individual first: the individual is prior to the state; the state exists to protect individual life, liberty and property.

Consent and social contract: political authority is legitimate only if it rests on the consent of the governed.

Limited government: the state's power is limited by a constitution, fundamental rights, separation of powers and the rule of law.

Neutral umpire: the state stands above competing interests and does not impose a particular idea of the good life.

Distinction of state and society: civil society and the market are spheres of free individual action, separate from the state.

2. Classical liberal thinkers

John Locke: in the Two Treatises of Government (1689) he argued that people form government to protect natural rights to life, liberty and estate; a government that violates this trust may be resisted.

Montesquieu: The Spirit of the Laws (1748) proposed separation of legislative, executive and judicial powers to protect liberty.

Adam Smith: The Wealth of Nations (1776) argued that markets coordinate individual self-interest for the common good; the state's duties are defence, justice and certain public works.

Thomas Paine: in Common Sense (1776) he wrote: 'Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil.'

Bentham and Mill: Jeremy Bentham and J.S. Mill pursued utilitarian reform of law; Mill's On Liberty (1859) limited state interference to preventing harm to others.

Herbert Spencer: The Man versus the State (1884) opposed state intervention as a threat to individual freedom.

Night-watchman state: a term used critically by the German socialist Ferdinand Lassalle (1862) for a state confined to protecting property and order.

3. From classical to welfare liberalism

Reason for change: industrial poverty, unemployment and the extension of the vote showed that formal freedom meant little without basic resources.

Thomas Hill Green: in Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation (published 1882) he defended positive freedom; the state should remove obstacles to the good life (often summed up as 'hindering the hindrances').

Leonard Hobhouse: Liberalism (1911) linked liberty with social harmony and justified state action for education, health and minimum wages.

John Maynard Keynes: The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) justified state spending to manage demand and maintain full employment.

Beveridge Report (1942): identified five giants (want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness) and laid the basis of the British welfare state.

Rawls: A Theory of Justice (1971) gave a philosophical defence of redistribution through the difference principle.

4. Neo-liberal theory of the state

Background: the stagflation of the 1970s and the perceived failure of Keynesian policies revived free-market liberalism.

Friedrich Hayek: The Road to Serfdom (1944) argued that central planning leads to loss of freedom and to tyranny; The Constitution of Liberty (1960) defended a state limited to general rules; his knowledge argument holds that no planner can gather the dispersed knowledge that markets use.

Spontaneous order: Hayek held that markets and law are spontaneous orders that evolve without design, so the state should not attempt social engineering or pursue social justice, which he called a mirage.

Milton Friedman: Capitalism and Freedom (1962) argued that economic freedom is a necessary condition of political freedom; he favoured monetarism, deregulation and school vouchers.

Robert Nozick: Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) defended the minimal state limited to protection against force, theft and fraud and enforcement of contracts; he held that 'taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor'.

Public choice theory: James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent (1962), treated politicians and bureaucrats as self-interested, explaining government failure and the growth of the state.

Policy form: Thatcher in Britain (from 1979) and Reagan in the USA (from 1981); the Washington Consensus, a term coined by John Williamson in 1989, summarised fiscal discipline, liberalisation, privatisation and deregulation.

New Public Management: applied market ideas to administration; David Osborne and Ted Gaebler, Reinventing Government (1992), urged governments to steer rather than row.

5. Critiques

Marxist critique: the liberal state is not neutral; it protects private property and the capitalist class (see next topic).

Karl Polanyi: The Great Transformation (1944) argued that the self-regulating market was itself created by the state and provokes a protective counter-movement in society.

David Harvey: A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005) interprets neo-liberalism as a project to restore the power of economic elites.

Strong state paradox: Andrew Gamble, The Free Economy and the Strong State (1988), showed that neo-liberal governments used strong state power to create and police markets.

Inequality and crises: rising inequality and the global financial crisis of 2008 led to rescue packages that contradicted market fundamentalism; Joseph Stiglitz criticised the Washington Consensus in Globalization and Its Discontents (2002).

Feminist and communitarian critiques: the abstract individual of liberalism ignores care work, community and the unequal family.

6. Indian context

Liberal constitutional state: Fundamental Rights (Part III), judicial review, separation of powers and free elections make the Indian state liberal-democratic in form.

Welfare commitment: Article 38 directs the state to secure a social order with social, economic and political justice; Article 39 deals with livelihood and prevention of concentration of wealth.

Mixed economy: the Nehruvian model combined liberal democracy with planning and a large public sector; 'socialist' was added to the Preamble by the 42nd Amendment (1976).

Neo-liberal turn: the 1991 reforms under P.V. Narasimha Rao and Finance Minister Manmohan Singh introduced liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation; later steps include the FRBM Act (2003), GST (2017) and the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (2016).

Rights-based welfare alongside: MGNREGA (2005), the Right to Education Act (2009) and the National Food Security Act (2013) show that India combined market reform with expanded welfare, so it fits neither model fully.

Debate: Jagdish Bhagwati stressed growth-led poverty reduction, while Amartya Sen (Development as Freedom, 1999) stressed state investment in health and education to expand capabilities.

7. Using it in the exam

10-mark answer: define the liberal state, give three features (consent, rights, limited government) and mark its shift to the welfare state.

20-mark answer: classical liberalism, welfare liberalism, neo-liberalism with Hayek, Friedman and Nozick, critiques (Marxist, Polanyi, Harvey) and India's hybrid path after 1991.

Keywords: social contract, rule of law, night-watchman state, positive freedom, welfare state, minimal state, spontaneous order, Washington Consensus.

Quotation: Paine's 'necessary evil' line for classical liberalism and Nozick's line on taxation for neo-liberal libertarianism.

Link: connect with liberalism as an ideology (Chapter 4), Rawls and Nozick on justice (Chapter 3) and planning and liberalisation in India (Chapter 10).

1. Classical Marxist theory of the state

Base and superstructure: in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) Marx held that the economic structure (forces and relations of production) is the base on which the legal and political superstructure, including the state, rises.

Class instrument: the Communist Manifesto (1848) of Marx and Engels states: 'The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.'

Origin of the state: Engels, in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), argued that the state arose when society split into irreconcilable classes with the emergence of private property; it is not eternal.

Bonapartism and relative autonomy: in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) Marx showed that when classes are evenly balanced the state can appear to stand above them, a seed of later relative autonomy theories.

Withering away: Engels, in Anti-Dühring (1878), wrote that the state is not abolished but withers away once class antagonisms disappear.

Lenin: in The State and Revolution (1917) he wrote that the state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms; the bourgeois state must be smashed and replaced by the dictatorship of the proletariat before it withers away.

2. Neo-Marxist theories

Antonio Gramsci: in the Prison Notebooks (written 1929-1935) he argued that the ruling class rules mainly through hegemony, the consent produced in civil society by schools, churches, media and parties, backed by coercion; he described the state as political society plus civil society.

Louis Althusser: in 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses' (1970) he distinguished the Repressive State Apparatus (army, police, courts) from Ideological State Apparatuses (school, family, church, media), with the school as the dominant one in mature capitalism.

Ralph Miliband: The State in Capitalist Society (1969) took an instrumentalist view, showing that state elites and business elites share class background, education and networks, so the state serves capitalist interests.

Nicos Poulantzas: Political Power and Social Classes (1968) took a structuralist view; the state serves capital not because of who staffs it but because of its structural position, and it has relative autonomy to protect the long-term interests of capital as a whole, even against individual capitalists.

Miliband-Poulantzas debate: conducted in New Left Review (1969-1970), it is the classic exchange between instrumentalist and structuralist Marxism.

Later developments: Claus Offe and Jürgen Habermas on legitimation crises of the welfare state, and Bob Jessop's strategic-relational approach.

3. Critiques of the Marxist theory

Economic reductionism: pluralists and liberals argue that the state responds to many pressures besides class, such as nationalism, religion, bureaucracy and electoral competition.

Weber's challenge: Max Weber treated the state as a human community that claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a territory, with its own bureaucratic logic not reducible to class.

Historical record: socialist states did not wither away but became powerful bureaucratic states, as Milovan Djilas argued in The New Class (1957).

Welfare state: universal suffrage and welfare legislation show that workers could win gains through the state, which a pure instrument theory struggles to explain.

Feminist critique: Marxism neglects patriarchy and treats gender oppression as secondary to class.

4. Pluralist theory of the state

Core idea: society contains many groups and associations, each with its own legitimate sphere; power is dispersed, and the state is either one association among many or an arena where group interests compete.

English pluralists: F.W. Maitland, J.N. Figgis, G.D.H. Cole and the early Harold Laski challenged the monistic theory of sovereignty of John Austin; Laski, in A Grammar of Politics (1925), argued that since society is federal in nature, authority must also be federal.

American group theory: Arthur Bentley, The Process of Government (1908), and David Truman, The Governmental Process (1951), saw politics as the interaction of interest groups, with public policy as the outcome.

Robert Dahl: A Preface to Democratic Theory (1956) and Who Governs? (1961), a study of New Haven, found that different groups prevailed on different issues, so no single elite ruled; in Polyarchy (1971) he called real-world democracies polyarchies, marked by participation and public contestation.

Role of the state: a neutral referee or broker, balancing pressures; stability comes from overlapping memberships and cross-cutting cleavages.

5. Critiques of pluralism and neo-pluralism

Elite theory: Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca held that an organised minority always rules; Robert Michels, in Political Parties (1911), stated the iron law of oligarchy; C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (1956), described an interlocking military, corporate and political elite in the USA.

Unequal groups: E.E. Schattschneider, in The Semisovereign People (1960), wrote: 'The flaw in the pluralist heaven is that the heavenly chorus sings with a strong upper-class accent.'

Faces of power: Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz, 'Two Faces of Power' (1962), showed that power also works through non-decision-making, keeping issues off the agenda; Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View (1974), added a third dimension, shaping people's very preferences.

Neo-pluralism: Charles Lindblom, Politics and Markets (1977), argued that business holds a privileged position in market democracies; Dahl's Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy (1982) accepted that organisational pluralism can entrench inequality.

Convergence: neo-pluralists and neo-Marxists moved closer, both recognising that the state is shaped by unequal power while retaining some autonomy.

6. Indian context

Marxist readings of the Indian state: Pranab Bardhan, in The Political Economy of Development in India (1984), described a coalition of three dominant proprietary classes (industrial capitalists, rich farmers and professionals, including the bureaucracy) whose competing demands for subsidies slowed public investment.

Relative autonomy: Bardhan and others argued that the Indian state, especially under Nehru, had considerable autonomy in setting the development agenda.

Gramscian readings: Partha Chatterjee and Sudipta Kaviraj used Gramsci's idea of passive revolution to describe how the Indian bourgeoisie gained power through the state without a full social revolution.

Pluralist readings: Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph, in In Pursuit of Lakshmi (1987), described the Indian state as a 'weak-strong' state facing a demand polity, with fragmented interest groups that they called involuted pluralism.

Rajni Kothari's Congress system: the Congress party contained many factions and interests and managed them through internal bargaining, a form of pluralism within one-party dominance.

Group pressure in practice: business associations such as FICCI and CII, trade unions and farmers' organisations shape policy; the repeal of the three farm laws in November 2021 after sustained farmer protests shows group pressure at work.

7. Using it in the exam

10-mark answer: on the Marxist theory, cite the Manifesto, explain base and superstructure and withering away, and name one neo-Marxist refinement.

20-mark answer: compare Marxist and pluralist views of who holds power, the nature of the state and its neutrality, with critiques of each and Indian illustrations.

Keywords: base-superstructure, class instrument, relative autonomy, hegemony, ISA and RSA, polyarchy, cross-cutting cleavages, non-decision-making, privileged position of business.

Quotation: the Manifesto's 'committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie' for Marxism, and Schattschneider's 'heavenly chorus' for the critique of pluralism.

Link: connect with Gramsci and Marx in Western thought (Chapter 6), power and hegemony (Chapter 4) and pressure groups in India (Chapter 10).

1. Post-colonial theory of the state: core ideas

Starting point: the post-colonial state was not born from the internal development of society, as in Europe, but was imposed by colonial rule and then inherited by nationalist elites.

Colonial legacies: a centralised bureaucracy, a strong army and police, laws designed for control, artificial borders and an economy shaped for the metropolis.

Critique of Western models: liberal, Marxist and pluralist theories assume European class structures and civil societies that did not exist in the same form in colonies.

Intellectual roots: Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961), warned that national middle classes might simply step into the shoes of the colonisers; Edward Said, Orientalism (1978), showed how Western knowledge constructed the colonised as inferior.

2. Major post-colonial theorists

Hamza Alavi: in 'The State in Post-Colonial Societies: Pakistan and Bangladesh' (New Left Review, 1972) he argued that the post-colonial state is overdeveloped in relation to society, because it was built to dominate all indigenous classes; its military-bureaucratic oligarchy enjoys relative autonomy and mediates among three propertied classes: the metropolitan bourgeoisie, the indigenous bourgeoisie and the landed classes.

Gunnar Myrdal: in Asian Drama (1968) he described South Asian states as soft states, unable or unwilling to enforce their own laws and policies against powerful interests.

Developmental state: Chalmers Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle (1982), described a state that plans and guides industrialisation; Peter Evans, Embedded Autonomy (1995), argued that successful states combine bureaucratic autonomy with close ties to business.

Joel Migdal: Strong Societies and Weak States (1988) showed how many Third World states lack capacity because local strongmen and social organisations resist them.

Mahmood Mamdani: Citizen and Subject (1996) described the bifurcated colonial state in Africa, with civil law for citizens in towns and customary rule through chiefs for rural subjects.

Partha Chatterjee: in Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (1986) and The Nation and Its Fragments (1993) he examined how anti-colonial nationalism both resisted and borrowed from colonial knowledge; in The Politics of the Governed (2004) he distinguished civil society (a small elite of rights-bearing citizens) from political society (the poor and marginal who negotiate with the state as populations targeted by welfare, often outside strict legality).

Subaltern Studies: launched by Ranajit Guha in 1982, it recovered the politics of peasants and the poor; Guha's Dominance without Hegemony (1997) argued that colonial rule rested on dominance without the consent of the colonised.

3. Critiques of the post-colonial approach

Overemphasis on the colonial past: critics argue it underplays post-independence choices, democratic institutions and the agency of local elites.

Varied outcomes: states with similar colonial pasts developed very differently (India's democracy, Pakistan's military rule, the East Asian developmental states).

Cultural essentialism: some post-colonial writing risks treating the West and the non-West as fixed opposites, a charge raised against parts of Subaltern Studies.

4. Feminist theory of the state: core ideas

Patriarchy: a system of male domination in family, economy and state; Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1970) made patriarchy a central political concept.

The personal is political: the slogan of second-wave feminism, associated with Carol Hanisch's 1969 essay of that name, argued that power relations in the family and sexuality are political matters.

Public-private divide: liberal theory limits the state to the public sphere and leaves the family private, which shields domestic violence and unpaid work from scrutiny.

Social construction of gender: Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949): 'One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.'

5. Strands of feminist theory of the state

Liberal feminism: Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), J.S. Mill, The Subjection of Women (1869), and Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963), see the state as basically neutral and seek equal rights, education and representation through law reform.

Radical feminism: sees the state itself as patriarchal; Catharine MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989), argued that the state is male in the sense that law sees and treats women the way men see and treat women.

Marxist and socialist feminism: following Engels's Origin of the Family (1884), links women's oppression to private property and capitalism; socialist feminists add that patriarchy and capitalism work together, for example through unpaid domestic labour.

Carole Pateman: The Sexual Contract (1988) argued that the social contract of Hobbes and Locke presupposed a hidden sexual contract that subordinated women; she also criticised the patriarchal welfare state.

Susan Moller Okin: Justice, Gender, and the Family (1989) criticised Rawls and others for ignoring justice within the family.

Post-colonial and intersectional feminism: Chandra Talpade Mohanty's 'Under Western Eyes' (1984) criticised Western feminism for treating Third World women as a single victim category; Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) coined intersectionality to show how race, class and gender combine.

Ambivalence about the state: Wendy Brown, 'Finding the Man in the State' (1992), warned that seeking state protection can bring new forms of regulation and paternalism.

6. Critiques of feminist theories of the state

Overgeneralisation: treating the state as uniformly patriarchal ignores reforms won through it, such as suffrage, equal pay laws and laws against violence.

Internal disagreement: liberal, radical and socialist feminists differ on whether to use, reform or resist the state.

Essentialism: early feminism spoke for white middle-class women; Dalit, Black and Third World feminists corrected this.

7. Indian context

Post-colonial continuity: the Government of India Act 1935 supplied much of the structure of the Constitution; the IAS continued the ICS; colonial laws such as sedition (Section 124A IPC) remained on the books until the Supreme Court kept it in abeyance in 2022 and the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (2023) replaced the IPC.

Nehruvian developmental state: planning, a public sector and import substitution made the Indian state the driver of development; Atul Kohli, State-Directed Development (2004), compared India with South Korea, Brazil and Nigeria.

Political society in India: slum dwellers, street vendors and squatters negotiating with municipal authorities illustrate Chatterjee's idea.

Feminist interventions: the Mathura custodial rape case led to the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act 1983; Vishaka v State of Rajasthan (1997) produced guidelines on sexual harassment at work, later replaced by the POSH Act 2013; the 2012 Delhi gang rape led to the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act 2013.

Personal law and the state: the Shah Bano case (1985) and the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act 1986 showed tension between gender justice and community claims; Shayara Bano (2017) held instant triple talaq invalid; Joseph Shine (2018) struck down the adultery provision.

Representation: the 73rd and 74th Amendments (1992) reserved one-third of seats in local bodies for women; the Constitution (106th Amendment) Act 2023, the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam, reserves one-third of seats in the Lok Sabha and State Assemblies for women, to take effect after the delimitation that follows the next census.

Indian feminist theory: Uma Chakravarti's concept of Brahmanical patriarchy links caste and gender; Sharmila Rege's Dalit feminist standpoint ('Dalit Women Talk Differently', 1998) and Nivedita Menon's Seeing Like a Feminist (2012) are key works.

8. Using it in the exam

10-mark answer on the post-colonial state: define it, cite Alavi's overdeveloped state and one other thinker (Myrdal or Chatterjee), and give an Indian example.

10-mark answer on the feminist state: explain patriarchy and the public-private divide, distinguish liberal and radical views, and give one Indian legal reform.

20-mark answer: compare how post-colonial and feminist theories both challenge the neutrality of the liberal state, with critiques and Indian evidence.

Keywords: overdeveloped state, relative autonomy, soft state, developmental state, political society, patriarchy, public-private divide, sexual contract, intersectionality.

Quotation: de Beauvoir's 'One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman' and the slogan 'the personal is political'.

Link: connect with feminism as an ideology (Chapter 4), Ambedkar and caste (Chapter 5), women's movements (Chapter 10) and the state in comparative perspective (Chapter 11).

1. Political Theory: Meaning, Nature and Significance

Example 1 (UPSC 2024, 20 marks): Elucidate the meanings inherent in the term ‘political’ with appropriate illustrations.

Paper and question: Paper I, Q2(a)

Approach: The question asks for the different meanings of ‘the political’, so the answer moves through classical, power-centred, systems, conflict-based and feminist conceptions, illustrating each, and ends with a synthesis.

The word ‘political’ comes from the Greek polis, the self-governing city. It has no single meaning: each school draws the boundary of the political differently, and that boundary decides what political science studies.

Classical meaning: for Aristotle (Politics) man is by nature a political animal, and the political is the shared life of citizens deliberating about the common good. Hannah Arendt (The Human Condition, 1958) revived this idea: politics is action and speech among equals in a public realm, as in the debates of the Constituent Assembly.

Power and allocation: Max Weber saw politics as striving for a share of power within or between states. Harold Lasswell defined it as who gets what, when and how (1936), and David Easton as the authoritative allocation of values for a society. Fixing MSP or reservation quotas is political in this sense.

Conflict and conciliation: Carl Schmitt (The Concept of the Political, 1932) located the political in the friend–enemy distinction, while Bernard Crick (In Defence of Politics, 1962) saw it as the peaceful conciliation of differing interests, as in Centre–state bargaining in the GST Council. Chantal Mouffe separates ‘the political’, the dimension of antagonism, from ‘politics’, the institutions that tame it.

Expanded meanings: the feminist slogan ‘the personal is political’ extends the term to the family and the body, making dowry and unpaid care work political questions. Michel Foucault found power in prisons, clinics and schools.

A balanced understanding treats the political as the sphere where collective, binding decisions are contested and made, while recognising that power reaches beyond the state. This is why Indian debates on caste, gender and the environment are rightly part of political theory.

2. Approaches to Political Theory: Normative, Historical, Empirical, Behavioural and Post-behavioural

Example 2 (UPSC 2025, 10 marks): Explain the Philosophical approach to the study of Political theory.

Paper and question: Paper I, Q1(a)

Approach: Define the philosophical approach, show its method and thinkers, note its value and limits, and conclude on its continuing relevance.

The philosophical approach is the oldest way of studying politics. It asks what the state, law and authority ought to be and why citizens should obey, rather than how institutions actually work.

Method: it reasons deductively from first principles about human nature and the good life, uses thought experiments, and clarifies concepts such as justice and liberty. Leo Strauss (What Is Political Philosophy?, 1959) defended it as the attempt to replace opinion about political things with knowledge of them.

Thinkers: Plato’s ideal state ruled by philosopher-kings, Hobbes’s state of nature in Leviathan (1651), Rousseau’s general will and, in our time, Rawls’s original position and veil of ignorance in A Theory of Justice (1971).

Value: it supplies the standards by which policies are judged; debates on reservation, euthanasia or privacy (Puttaswamy, 2017) are at bottom philosophical.

Limits: behaviouralists such as Easton called it speculative and unverifiable, and it can ignore the facts of power.

Today it works best alongside empirical research: facts tell us what is possible, philosophy what is desirable.

Example 3 (UPSC 2025, 20 marks): Provide a comparative analysis of behavioural and institutional approach to the study of political theory.

Paper and question: Paper I, Q3(a)

Approach: A comparison is demanded: explain each approach, then compare them on focus, method, unit of analysis and values, and end with the new institutionalism that bridges them.

Political science began as the study of institutions and was transformed after 1945 by the behavioural revolution. The two approaches differ on what should be studied and how.

Institutional approach: the traditional approach studied formal structures such as constitutions, legislatures, executives, courts and federal arrangements, using legal, historical and descriptive methods. James Bryce (Modern Democracies, 1921) and Herman Finer compared constitutions country by country. Its strength was precision about rules; its weakness, as critics said, was that it described the law on paper and ignored how people actually behave.

Behavioural approach: led by Charles Merriam’s Chicago School and systematised by David Easton, it shifted attention to the observable behaviour of voters, legislators and groups. Easton’s intellectual foundation stones included regularities, verification, quantification, value-free inquiry and integration with other social sciences. Voting studies, surveys and Almond and Verba’s The Civic Culture (1963) were typical products.

Comparison: the institutional approach is normative-legal, qualitative and state-centred; the behavioural approach is empirical, quantitative and individual-centred. The first asks what the rules say, the second what actors do. The first is often parochial to Western constitutions; the second claimed universal, scientific laws but was criticised as value-blind and status-quoist.

Indian illustration: an institutional study of Parliament examines its constitutional powers; a behavioural study examines party discipline, defections and voting patterns, as in the Lokniti-CSDS election studies.

Synthesis: the new institutionalism of James March and Johan Olsen (‘The New Institutionalism’, 1984; Rediscovering Institutions, 1989) shows that institutions shape behaviour and behaviour reshapes institutions.

The two approaches are therefore complementary rather than rival: a sound analysis of any political system needs both the formal rules and the behaviour that gives them life.

Example 4 (UPSC 2024, 10 marks): Behavioural approach to Political Science

Paper and question: Paper I, Q1(a)

Approach: Explain the origin and core tenets of the behavioural approach, its contribution, and its critique leading to post-behaviouralism.

The behavioural approach studies politics through the observable behaviour of individuals and groups rather than formal institutions or abstract values. It began with Charles Merriam’s New Aspects of Politics (1925) at the Chicago School and dominated American political science in the 1950s and 1960s.

Tenets: David Easton (‘The Current Meaning of Behavioralism’, 1962) listed its intellectual foundation stones: regularities in behaviour, verification, rigorous techniques, quantification, separation of facts from values, systematic theory, pure science, and integration with sociology, psychology and economics.

Contribution: it gave political science voting studies, opinion surveys, Almond and Verba’s political culture and Easton’s systems analysis. In India, election studies on caste and voting owe much to it.

Critique: Leo Strauss and others attacked its claim of value-neutrality; critics called it conservative and blind to the crises of the 1960s, the Vietnam war and civil rights.

Easton himself launched post-behaviouralism in 1969. Behaviouralism’s rigour survives, but now joined to relevance and values.

Example 5 (UPSC 2023, 10 marks): Normative approach in Political Science

Paper and question: Paper I, Q1(a)

Approach: Define the normative approach, give its features and thinkers, note the behavioural critique and its revival after Rawls, with an Indian illustration.

The normative approach studies politics in terms of what ought to be. It is concerned with values such as justice, liberty, equality and legitimacy, and with the standards by which states and policies should be judged.

Features: it is prescriptive rather than descriptive, deductive and philosophical in method, and openly value-laden. It treats facts as meaningful only in the light of purposes.

Thinkers: Plato’s just state, Locke’s limited government, Rousseau’s general will, Kant’s moral autonomy and T.H. Green’s positive freedom belong to this tradition. In the twentieth century John Rawls (A Theory of Justice, 1971), Robert Nozick and Amartya Sen (The Idea of Justice, 2009) revived it.

Critique and revival: behaviouralists dismissed it as unscientific, and Peter Laslett declared political philosophy dead in 1956. Rawls’s work showed that questions of justice cannot be settled by data alone.

In India, the Preamble’s ideals and the Directive Principles are normative commitments, and debates on reservation or the basic structure rest on them. The approach remains the moral compass of political science.

Example 6 (UPSC 2023, 15 marks): ‘Credo of Relevance’ in post-behaviouralism advocates the importance of action science. Analyze.

Paper and question: Paper I, Q2(c)

Approach: Explain the Credo of Relevance and its tenets, show how it makes political science an ‘action science’, and assess its merits and limits.

Post-behaviouralism was announced by David Easton in his 1969 presidential address to the American Political Science Association, ‘The New Revolution in Political Science’. Its programme, the Credo of Relevance, had two watchwords: relevance and action.

Tenets: substance must precede technique, so pressing social problems matter more than sophisticated methods; behaviouralism concealed an ideology of social conservatism; values are inseparable from research; intellectuals must protect humane values; to know is to bear the responsibility to act; and the profession itself must be politicised.

Action science: the credo rejects ‘pure science’ detached from society. Easton argued that knowledge must be put to work to reshape society, so political science should be an applied, problem-solving discipline. It emerged against the background of the Vietnam war, racial conflict, urban poverty and the threat of nuclear war, which value-free research had failed to anticipate.

Merits: it restored the link between facts and values, paved the way for the revival of normative theory with Rawls, and encouraged policy studies, peace research and environmental politics. Indian work on poverty, caste atrocities or displacement by dams reflects this spirit.

Limits: critics noted that it kept behavioural methods, so it was a correction rather than a revolution, and that ‘relevance’ is vague and may let ideology replace evidence.

On balance, the credo made political science both rigorous and socially responsible, which remains its most lasting legacy.

Example 7 (UPSC 2022, 10 marks): Systems Approach

Paper and question: Paper I, Q1(a)

Approach: Explain Easton’s systems approach with its key concepts (inputs, conversion, outputs, feedback, environment), mention related models, and evaluate briefly.

The systems approach treats political life as a system of interactions that persists by responding to its environment. Borrowed from biology and Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s general systems theory, it was applied to politics by David Easton in A Framework for Political Analysis and A Systems Analysis of Political Life (both 1965).

Key concepts: the political system is the set of interactions through which values are authoritatively allocated. It receives inputs (demands and support) from its environment, converts them through institutions, and produces outputs (decisions and policies). Feedback carries the effects of outputs back as new inputs. Gatekeepers such as parties and pressure groups regulate demands so the system is not overloaded.

Related models: Gabriel Almond’s structural-functional approach and Karl Deutsch’s communication model (The Nerves of Government, 1963) built on it.

Evaluation: it gave a general framework for comparing all political systems, but critics found it abstract, biased towards stability and silent on power, conflict and change.

A farmers’ agitation leading to a policy change and then fresh demands illustrates the cycle.

Example 8 (UPSC 2021, 15 marks): Examine the importance of behavioural approach in political theory. What led to its decline?

Paper and question: Paper I, Q2(b)

Approach: Two parts: first the importance of behaviouralism (method, concepts, contributions), then the reasons for its decline, ending with its legacy.

The behavioural approach, rooted in Charles Merriam’s Chicago School and given shape by David Easton, Robert Dahl and Gabriel Almond, sought to make political science a science of observable behaviour. Dahl called it a successful protest against traditional political science (1961).

Importance: it shifted attention from formal institutions to the actual behaviour of voters, elites and groups; introduced surveys, statistics and verification; and produced general concepts such as political system, political culture, socialisation and elite circulation. Easton’s systems analysis and Almond and Verba’s The Civic Culture (1963) made comparison across countries possible. It integrated political science with sociology, psychology and economics.

Indian relevance: studies of caste and voting by Rajni Kothari and the CSDS election studies applied behavioural methods to Indian politics.

Causes of decline: first, its claim of value-neutrality hid a bias for the American liberal status quo. Second, its obsession with technique produced trivial, measurable findings while the real crises of the 1960s, the Vietnam war, racial unrest and poverty, went unexplained. Third, Leo Strauss and the normative theorists showed that facts cannot be separated from values. Fourth, the Caucus for a New Political Science and Easton’s own 1969 ‘Credo of Relevance’ demanded relevance and action.

Behaviouralism did not vanish: its empirical rigour was absorbed into post-behaviouralism and new institutionalism. Its decline was really a correction that joined scientific method to values and social responsibility.

Example 9 (UPSC 2020, 15 marks): Discuss the significance of a normative approach to Political theory.

Paper and question: Paper I, Q4(b)

Approach: Define the normative approach and then discuss its significance under several heads (standards, critique, policy, revival), with a brief note on its limits.

The normative approach asks what political life ought to be: what makes a state legitimate, a distribution just or an obligation binding. From Plato’s Republic to Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971), it has been the core of political theory.

Gives standards of judgement: facts alone cannot tell us whether a law is good. Concepts such as justice, liberty and equality supply the yardsticks by which institutions are evaluated, as Rawls’s difference principle or Sen’s capability approach do for welfare policy.

Critique of power: by imagining the good society, normative theory exposes the gap between ideal and reality. Marx’s critique of capitalism, Ambedkar’s critique of caste and feminist critiques of patriarchy are normative at root.

Guides policy and constitutions: the Indian Preamble, Fundamental Rights and Directive Principles embody normative choices; judgments such as Kesavananda Bharati (1973) on the basic structure and Puttaswamy (2017) on privacy reason from values.

Revival: after behaviouralism declared political philosophy dead, Rawls, Nozick, Walzer and Sandel showed that public debate needs principled argument, and post-behaviouralism admitted values back into research.

Limits: it can become abstract and utopian, and its conclusions may reflect the theorist’s culture; empirical evidence is needed to test feasibility.

The normative approach thus gives political science its purpose: facts describe the world, norms tell us how to change it.

Example 10 (UPSC 2017, 10 marks): Post-modernism

Paper and question: Paper I, Q1(c)

Approach: Define post-modernism, give its key thinkers and ideas, show its impact on political theory, and note the main criticism.

Post-modernism is an intellectual current that rejects the Enlightenment belief in universal reason, objective truth and steady progress. Jean-François Lyotard (The Postmodern Condition, 1979) defined it as incredulity towards metanarratives, the grand stories such as liberal progress or Marxist revolution that claim to explain all of history.

Key ideas: Michel Foucault argued that power and knowledge are intertwined, so ‘truth’ is produced by discourses and institutions such as prisons and clinics. Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction exposes the hidden hierarchies in texts, such as male/female or West/East. Jean Baudrillard spoke of simulation, where media images replace reality.

Impact on political theory: it supports difference, plurality and identity politics, and inspired post-colonial and feminist theory; Said’s Orientalism (1978) draws on Foucault.

Criticism: Jürgen Habermas called modernity an unfinished project and accused post-modernism of relativism; without universal norms it is hard to defend human rights or to resist oppression.

Its lasting contribution is scepticism towards any single claim to truth.

Example 11 (UPSC 2016, 10 marks): The Post-Behavioural Approach.

Paper and question: Paper I, Q1(b)

Approach: Explain the origin of post-behaviouralism, its main tenets (Credo of Relevance), and evaluate its contribution.

The post-behavioural approach arose in the late 1960s as a reaction against the excessive scientism of behaviouralism. David Easton, earlier a leading behaviouralist, proclaimed it in his 1969 APSA presidential address, ‘The New Revolution in Political Science’.

Tenets (Credo of Relevance): substance must precede technique; research must address the urgent problems of society; values are central to inquiry; scholars must protect humane values; knowledge carries a responsibility to act; and the profession must engage with society. Its watchwords were relevance and action.

Context: the Vietnam war, civil rights struggles and student protests showed that value-free political science had nothing to say on burning questions.

Contribution: it brought values back, encouraged policy analysis and paved the way for Rawls and the revival of normative theory. Unlike a counter-revolution, it kept behavioural methods but made them serve social goals.

Criticism: ‘relevance’ is vague and may politicise scholarship. Still, it made political science more humane and useful, for example in studying poverty and displacement in India.

Example 12 (UPSC 2015, 15 marks): Discuss David Easton’s model of systems analysis.

Paper and question: Paper I, Q4(c)

Approach: Explain the context and components of Easton’s systems model (environment, inputs, conversion, outputs, feedback, gatekeepers), then assess its strengths and criticisms.

David Easton, a leading behaviouralist, sought a general theory that could explain all political systems. Drawing on general systems theory, he set out his model in The Political System (1953), A Framework for Political Analysis and A Systems Analysis of Political Life (1965). He defined politics as the authoritative allocation of values for a society.

Environment: the political system is surrounded by an intra-societal environment (economy, culture, social structure) and an extra-societal one (international system), which generate disturbances.

Inputs: demands (for goods, regulation, participation) and support (for the political community, the regime and the authorities). Gatekeepers such as parties, interest groups and the media filter demands to prevent overload.

Conversion and outputs: the authorities convert inputs into outputs, binding decisions and policies, through the legislature, executive and bureaucracy, which critics called the ‘black box’.

Feedback loop: outputs change the environment and return as new demands or altered support, so the system adapts and persists. For example, protests against farm laws led to their repeal in 2021, which changed the pattern of support.

Criticism: the model is abstract and better at describing stability than revolution; it treats conversion as a black box and neglects power, class and conflict; Marxists call it status-quoist. Its categories were derived from Western democracies.

Despite this, Easton’s model gave political science a common vocabulary for analysing how any political system responds to pressure.

3. Decline and Resurgence of Political Theory

Example 13 (UPSC 2026, 10 marks): Resurgence of political theory

Paper and question: Paper I, Q1(a)

Approach: Explain the context of decline, then the causes and signs of resurgence from the late 1950s, with thinkers and works, ending with its present directions.

In the 1950s, behaviouralists and logical positivists declared normative political theory dead; Peter Laslett wrote in 1956 that, for the moment, political philosophy was dead. The resurgence of political theory refers to its revival from the 1960s onwards.

Early defences: Isaiah Berlin (‘Does Political Theory Still Exist?’, 1962) argued it survives as long as people disagree about ends; Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt and Michael Oakeshott kept the tradition alive. Dante Germino’s Beyond Ideology (1967) spoke of its revival.

Causes: the failure of value-free science to explain the crises of the 1960s, Easton’s 1969 Credo of Relevance, and new movements for civil rights, feminism and ecology.

Landmark: John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971), followed by Nozick, Walzer, Sandel, Taylor and Sen, restored grand normative theory.

Today political theory flourishes in debates on multiculturalism, global justice, recognition and deliberative democracy, and Indian thinkers such as Bhikhu Parekh and Rajeev Bhargava contribute to it.

Example 14 (UPSC 2023, 10 marks): Decline of political theory

Paper and question: Paper I, Q1(e)

Approach: State the decline thesis and who advanced it, explain its causes, and note the counter-view that it was a temporary eclipse.

The decline of political theory refers to the claim, made in the 1950s, that classical normative political theory had stagnated or died. David Easton (‘The Decline of Modern Political Theory’, 1951) and Alfred Cobban (‘The Decline of Political Theory’, 1953) made the case, and Peter Laslett wrote in 1956 that political philosophy was, for the moment, dead.

Causes: Easton blamed historicism, the habit of merely retelling the history of ideas, and moral relativism. Logical positivism held that value statements cannot be verified and so are meaningless. The rise of behaviouralism favoured empirical science, and Daniel Bell’s ‘end of ideology’ thesis (1960) suggested that the big ideological debates were over. Cobban also pointed to the growth of totalitarian states that left little room for theory.

Counter-view: Isaiah Berlin and Leo Strauss argued that theory never died, since disagreement about ends persists. Rawls’s work in 1971 proved them right.

The ‘decline’ was therefore an eclipse caused by positivism, not a death.

Example 15 (UPSC 2019, 10 marks): Resurgence of political theory.

Paper and question: Paper I, Q1(a)

Approach: Briefly recall the decline, then explain the factors and thinkers behind the resurgence, and its new themes.

After being declared dead by positivists and behaviouralists in the 1950s, normative political theory revived from the 1960s; this is called the resurgence of political theory.

Factors: behaviouralism’s failure to address the Vietnam war, racial injustice and poverty; Easton’s own post-behavioural Credo of Relevance (1969), which readmitted values; and new social movements that raised questions of rights and recognition.

Thinkers: Isaiah Berlin’s ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ (1958) and ‘Does Political Theory Still Exist?’ (1962), Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss kept theory alive. The decisive moment was John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971), followed by Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) and the communitarian replies of Sandel, MacIntyre, Taylor and Walzer.

New themes: justice, multiculturalism, feminism, environmentalism, global justice and deliberative democracy (Habermas).

In India, debates on secularism, affirmative action and minority rights show that theory is alive and relevant to public life.

Example 16 (UPSC 2018, 10 marks): Decline of Political Theory

Paper and question: Paper I, Q1(b)

Approach: Explain what the decline thesis meant, who proposed it and why, and then show its limits.

The thesis of the decline of political theory held that political theory had lost its creative vitality after the great classics from Plato to Marx. It was advanced in the 1950s by David Easton, Alfred Cobban and Peter Laslett, who wrote in 1956 that, for the moment, political philosophy was dead.

Easton’s explanation (The Political System, 1953): political theorists had become mere historians of ideas, retelling the classics instead of building new theory, and moral relativism had robbed them of confidence.

Other causes: logical positivism dismissed value judgements as meaningless; behaviouralism promoted value-free empirical science; and Cobban saw theory being replaced by ideology in an age of totalitarianism and mass politics.

Limits of the thesis: Berlin, Strauss, Arendt and Oakeshott were producing major theory in the same period, and Rawls’s 1971 work showed that normative questions are unavoidable.

The decline was thus partial and temporary, and it stimulated the later resurgence.

Example 17 (UPSC 2014, 10 marks): “... political theory is not an escape mechanism but an arduous calling.” (John Plamenatz)

Paper and question: Paper I, Q1(a)

Approach: Explain the context of Plamenatz’s statement (his defence against the decline thesis), what he meant by an ‘arduous calling’, and why the claim is valid today.

John Plamenatz defended political theory against positivists and behaviouralists who called it meaningless or dead, a case he made in his essay ‘The Use of Political Theory’ (1960). Critics saw theory as an escape from the hard world of facts into speculation.

Not an escape: Plamenatz argued that political theory is a practical activity. People need a coherent philosophy of life to make choices, and theory supplies the criteria for judging governments, laws and policies. Science can tell us how institutions work, but not which ends are worth pursuing.

An arduous calling: it demands rigorous conceptual analysis, careful reading of the classics in their context, and honest weighing of competing values such as liberty and equality. It is harder than empirical work because there is no easy test of truth.

Relevance: Rawls’s theory of justice and Sen’s capability approach shaped welfare policy, and Indian debates on reservation, secularism or privacy depend on such reasoning.

Plamenatz’s view anticipated the resurgence of political theory and remains its best defence.

4. Liberal and Neo-liberal Theories of the State

Example 18 (UPSC 2023, 20 marks): Success of contemporary democracies lies in the State limiting its own power. Explain.

Paper and question: Paper I, Q2(a)

Approach: Explain the liberal idea of self-limiting state power (constitutionalism), show the mechanisms through which states limit themselves with Indian examples, and qualify the claim by noting that success also needs state capacity.

A democracy rests on popular sovereignty, but an elected majority can itself become a tyranny, as J.S. Mill and Tocqueville warned. Its success therefore depends on constitutionalism: a state that binds its own power by law. Lord Acton’s maxim that power tends to corrupt expresses the liberal fear behind this idea.

Liberal foundations: Locke (Two Treatises of Government, 1689) made government a trust limited by natural rights; Montesquieu (The Spirit of the Laws, 1748) proposed the separation of powers; Madison in The Federalist argued that ambition must be made to counteract ambition through checks and balances; Dicey defined the rule of law.

Mechanisms of self-limitation: a written constitution and fundamental rights; judicial review; independent institutions such as the Election Commission, CAG and an independent judiciary; federalism and local self-government; periodic free elections; and a free press and civil society. In India, the basic structure doctrine (Kesavananda Bharati, 1973) limits even Parliament’s power to amend the Constitution.

Evidence: the Emergency of 1975–77 showed what happens when the state removes limits; the 44th Amendment (1978) restored safeguards. Fareed Zakaria’s warning about ‘illiberal democracy’ (1997) and Levitsky and Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die (2018) show that modern democracies decay when elected leaders capture referees and weaken restraints.

Qualification: a weak state is no guarantee of freedom. Francis Fukuyama argues that successful democracies combine a strong, capable state with rule of law and accountability. Welfare, security and the protection of rights need an active state.

The success of democracy thus lies in a state that is strong in capacity but limited in its use of power: effective, yet answerable to law and to the people.

Example 19 (UPSC 2022, 20 marks): Factors like community, culture and nation weaken the hegemony of neo-liberalism today. Discuss.

Paper and question: Paper I, Q2(a)

Approach: Define neo-liberal hegemony, then show how community, culture and nation have challenged it with thinkers and examples, and conclude that neo-liberalism has been weakened and adapted rather than replaced.

Since the 1980s, neo-liberalism, the ideas of Hayek and Friedman put into practice by Thatcher, Reagan and the Washington Consensus, became a hegemony in Gramsci’s sense: free markets, deregulation and a minimal state came to look like common sense. It treats individuals as rational, self-interested market actors. This abstraction from social bonds has provoked a backlash.

Community: communitarians such as Michael Sandel, Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor and Michael Walzer argue that the self is embedded in communities and that markets corrode civic virtue; Sandel (What Money Can’t Buy, 2012) warns against a market society. Karl Polanyi (The Great Transformation, 1944) had shown that society protects itself against disembedded markets in a ‘double movement’.

Culture: identity and recognition (Taylor, Nancy Fraser) have displaced purely economic interests in politics; religious and cultural movements reject the homogenising consumer culture of globalisation.

Nation: economic nationalism has returned: Brexit (2016), US tariffs and trade wars, reshoring of supply chains after COVID-19 and industrial policy such as the US CHIPS Act. Dani Rodrik’s globalisation trilemma explains why democracies resist deep economic integration. India’s Atmanirbhar Bharat (2020) and production-linked incentives reflect the same turn.

Limits of the claim: markets, privatisation and fiscal discipline remain central; populist nationalists often combine nationalist rhetoric with pro-market policies. Neo-liberalism has adapted rather than collapsed.

Community, culture and nation have thus weakened neo-liberal hegemony by reasserting the social and political embeddedness of markets, pointing towards a more balanced relationship between state, market and society.

Example 20 (UPSC 2022, 20 marks): Examine the liberal theory of State in contemporary politics.

Paper and question: Paper I, Q3(a)

Approach: Outline the liberal theory of the state and its evolution, then examine how it fares in contemporary politics (strengths and challenges), and conclude on its resilience.

The liberal theory of the state sees the state as an artificial creation of individuals, based on consent, existing to protect rights and acting as a neutral umpire among competing interests. It rests on individualism, limited government, rule of law and constitutionalism.

Evolution: classical liberals (Locke, Adam Smith) wanted a minimal, ‘night-watchman’ state; welfare liberals (T.H. Green, Hobhouse, Keynes, Rawls) accepted an enabling state that secures positive freedom and fair equality of opportunity; neo-liberals (Hayek, Friedman, Nozick) returned to the minimal state from the 1980s.

Strengths in contemporary politics: liberal democracy remains the dominant model and the standard of legitimacy; human rights, independent courts and free elections are global norms. Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ thesis (1989–92) expressed this confidence. India’s Constitution combines liberal rights with a welfare commitment.

Challenges: first, populism and ‘illiberal democracy’ in Hungary, Turkey and elsewhere hollow out liberal institutions. Second, inequality after neo-liberal globalisation and the 2008 crisis undermines the neutrality claim, as Marxists argue. Third, communitarians and multiculturalists (Taylor, Parekh) say liberal neutrality ignores community and culture. Fourth, the rise of China offers a non-liberal model of effective governance. Fifth, security states after 9/11 and digital surveillance threaten liberties.

Adaptation: liberalism has responded with Rawls’s political liberalism, Kymlicka’s multicultural citizenship and new welfare measures during COVID-19.

The liberal state is under strain but remains resilient because no rival offers a better combination of freedom, accountability and peaceful change.

Example 21 (UPSC 2018, 20 marks): Critically examine the neo-liberal theory of State.

Paper and question: Paper I, Q2(a)

Approach: Critically examine: set out the neo-liberal theory of the state (origins, thinkers, features, practice), then its merits and the criticisms, ending with a balanced judgement.

The neo-liberal theory of the state revived classical liberalism in reaction to the Keynesian welfare state and the stagflation of the 1970s. It holds that markets allocate resources better than governments, so the state should be minimal.

Thinkers: Friedrich Hayek (The Road to Serfdom, 1944; The Constitution of Liberty, 1960) argued that central planning destroys liberty and that no planner can possess the dispersed knowledge of the market. Milton Friedman (Capitalism and Freedom, 1962) linked economic freedom to political freedom. Robert Nozick (Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 1974) defended the minimal state as the only one that respects self-ownership; redistribution through taxation is on a par with forced labour. Public choice theorists (Buchanan) exposed government failure.

Features and practice: privatisation, deregulation, tax cuts, fiscal discipline, free trade and the rolling back of welfare, as under Thatcher and Reagan and in the Washington Consensus. India’s 1991 reforms adopted elements of it.

Merits: it encouraged efficiency, growth and innovation, reduced bureaucratic controls (India’s ‘licence raj’), and stressed individual choice.

Criticisms: it increased inequality and weakened labour, as David Harvey (A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 2005) argues; Joseph Stiglitz criticised IMF-led structural adjustment; the 2008 financial crisis exposed the dangers of deregulation; it reduced citizens to consumers. Paradoxically it needs a strong state to create and police markets. Rawlsians and Marxists reject its view of justice.

Neo-liberalism rightly warned against the overextended state, but a just society needs markets embedded in a state that guarantees welfare and regulation.

Example 22 (UPSC 2017, 10 marks): Neo-liberal perspective of State

Paper and question: Paper I, Q1(b)

Approach: Define the neo-liberal perspective of the state, state its main thinkers and features, and note its criticisms with an Indian reference.

The neo-liberal perspective treats the state as a necessary but dangerous institution whose role should be confined to protecting property, enforcing contracts, maintaining order and securing the conditions for free markets. It emerged as a reaction to the welfare state and Keynesian planning.

Thinkers: Hayek (The Road to Serfdom, 1944) warned that planning leads to serfdom; Friedman (Capitalism and Freedom, 1962) saw markets as a guarantee of freedom; Nozick (Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 1974) defended the minimal state on grounds of self-ownership.

Features: privatisation, deregulation, low taxes, fiscal discipline, free trade and a market-friendly state, applied by Thatcher, Reagan and the Washington Consensus. India’s 1991 economic reforms and the phrase ‘minimum government, maximum governance’ reflect this influence.

Criticism: it widens inequality, commodifies public goods such as health and education, and was discredited by the 2008 crisis; David Harvey sees it as a project to restore class power.

A balanced view accepts market efficiency but insists on a regulatory, welfare-oriented state.

Example 23 (UPSC 2015, 20 marks): Examine the challenges to sovereignty of the State in the contemporary world.

Paper and question: Paper I, Q2(a)

Approach: Define sovereignty in its classical sense, examine the external and internal challenges to it in the contemporary world with examples, and conclude that sovereignty is being transformed rather than eroded.

Sovereignty is the supreme, final authority of the state within its territory and its independence outside it. Jean Bodin (Six Books of the Commonwealth, 1576), Hobbes and John Austin described it as absolute, indivisible and inalienable, and the Westphalian order (1648) made it the basis of international relations.

Economic globalisation: multinational corporations, global capital flows and credit rating agencies constrain national policy; WTO rules limit trade policy and IMF conditionality shaped reforms in many countries. Kenichi Ohmae spoke of a ‘borderless world’ and Susan Strange of the ‘retreat of the state’ (1996).

International law and institutions: human rights regimes, the International Criminal Court and the Responsibility to Protect (2005) make sovereignty conditional on how a state treats its people. Supranational bodies such as the European Union pool sovereignty.

Non-state actors and new threats: terrorism, transnational crime, cyber attacks and climate change cross borders and cannot be handled by one state. Global media and social networks bypass state control of information.

Internal challenges: pluralists such as Laski argued that authority is shared with associations; secessionist and ethnic movements and federal demands also test sovereignty.

Counter-view: states remain the main actors. During COVID-19 they closed borders, and great powers act unilaterally. Stephen Krasner calls sovereignty ‘organized hypocrisy’, always compromised in practice. India has used its sovereignty to protect strategic autonomy in trade and climate negotiations.

Sovereignty is therefore not disappearing but being reshaped into shared and responsible sovereignty in an interdependent world.

5. Marxist and Pluralist Theories of the State

Example 24 (UPSC 2025, 20 marks): What is the Marxist and liberal approach towards the state? On what grounds the theoretical differences between them are premised? Explain.

Paper and question: Paper I, Q2(a)

Approach: Two parts: set out the Marxist and the liberal approaches to the state, then explain the premises (view of society, human nature, origin, role, neutrality, future of the state) on which they differ.

The state is the central concept of political science, but liberals and Marxists explain its nature and purpose in opposite ways.

Liberal approach: the state is created by individuals through a social contract (Hobbes, Locke) to protect life, liberty and property. It is a neutral arbiter among competing interests, limited by a constitution and rights. Its form has changed from Locke’s night-watchman state to the welfare state of Green and Keynes and back to the neo-liberal minimal state.

Marxist approach: the state arises when society splits into classes. Engels (The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, 1884) called it a product of irreconcilable class antagonisms; the Communist Manifesto (1848) called the executive of the modern state a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. After a proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat, the state will wither away. Later Marxists refined this: Gramsci’s hegemony, Miliband’s instrumentalism and Poulantzas’s relative autonomy.

Premises of difference: (1) Unit of analysis: liberals start from the individual, Marxists from class. (2) Origin: consent versus class conflict and property. (3) Nature: neutral umpire versus instrument of the dominant class. (4) Freedom: liberals see the state as protecting freedom, Marxists see formal rights masking economic exploitation. (5) Method: liberal idealism and contract theory versus historical materialism. (6) Future: the state is permanent for liberals, transitional for Marxists.

Indian illustration: liberals read the Indian state as a constitutional democracy; Marxist scholars such as Pranab Bardhan identify a coalition of dominant proprietary classes shaping it.

Both have insights: liberals guard against the abuse of power, Marxists expose the economic roots of power.

Example 25 (UPSC 2024, 10 marks): Pluralist theory of State

Paper and question: Paper I, Q1(b)

Approach: Define the pluralist theory, distinguish its British and American versions with thinkers, and give its critique.

The pluralist theory of the state rejects the monistic idea of a single, absolute and indivisible sovereignty. It holds that society consists of many associations, churches, trade unions, professions, and that power is and ought to be dispersed among them.

British pluralism: F.W. Maitland, J.N. Figgis, G.D.H. Cole and early Harold Laski (A Grammar of Politics, 1925) argued that associations have their own real personality and that the state is only one association among many, coordinating rather than commanding them. Laski held that since society is federal, authority must also be federal.

American pluralism: Arthur Bentley, David Truman and Robert Dahl (Who Governs?, 1961) saw policy as the outcome of competition among groups; Dahl called such systems polyarchies.

Critique: C. Wright Mills (The Power Elite, 1956) found power concentrated; Schattschneider noted that the pluralist chorus has an upper-class accent; Marxists see business as privileged, which Lindblom later admitted.

In India, caste associations, farmers’ unions and NGOs show pluralist bargaining, though unequal.

Example 26 (UPSC 2019, 10 marks): Pluralist theory of the State.

Paper and question: Paper I, Q1(b)

Approach: Explain the pluralist view of sovereignty and the state, its main proponents and arguments, and its limitations.

Pluralism arose in early twentieth-century Britain as a revolt against the monistic theory of sovereignty of Bodin, Hobbes and Austin. It sees the state as one association among many rather than the sole source of authority.

Arguments: associations such as churches, guilds and trade unions arise naturally and command loyalty in their own right (Figgis, Maitland); sovereignty is therefore divided, and the state’s role is to coordinate them. Harold Laski (Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty, 1917; A Grammar of Politics, 1925) argued that the state’s claim to obedience must be earned by its performance.

Neo-pluralism: in the USA, Robert Dahl described democracy as competition among many groups, and later admitted, with Charles Lindblom, the privileged position of business.

Limitations: someone must arbitrate conflicts among associations, so pluralism quietly restores sovereignty to the state; Laski himself later moved towards Marxism. Elite theorists and Marxists argue that groups are unequal.

Pluralism nevertheless strengthened decentralisation and civil society, values visible in India’s 73rd and 74th Amendments.

6. Post-colonial and Feminist Theories of the State

Example 27 (UPSC 2026, 10 marks): Post-colonial theory of State

Paper and question: Paper I, Q1(b)

Approach: Explain the post-colonial theory of the state: its core argument, key theorists (Alavi, Chatterjee, Rudolphs, Myrdal), Indian application and a brief critique.

The post-colonial theory of the state argues that states in Asia and Africa cannot be understood through Western liberal or Marxist models, because they were shaped by colonial rule and inherited its institutions and social structures.

Overdeveloped state: Hamza Alavi (1972), studying Pakistan and Bangladesh, argued that the colonial state was built to dominate the whole society, so after independence the military-bureaucratic oligarchy enjoyed relative autonomy and mediated among three propertied classes.

Other views: Gunnar Myrdal (Asian Drama, 1968) called such states ‘soft states’ unable to enforce laws; Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph described India as both weak and strong; Partha Chatterjee (The Politics of the Governed, 2004) distinguishes civil society from ‘political society’, where the poor negotiate with the state through welfare and patronage.

Critique: it can overstate colonial continuity and underplay democratic agency and economic change.

It nonetheless explains features of the Indian state such as a powerful bureaucracy and developmental role.

Example 28 (UPSC 2023, 15 marks): Eurocentrism is both the target and the motive force of the post-colonial political theory. Discuss.

Paper and question: Paper I, Q3(c)

Approach: Discuss both halves of the statement: Eurocentrism as the target (critique of Western universalism) and as the motive force (post-colonial theory defined by and dependent on Europe), with thinkers, and end with an assessment.

Eurocentrism is the assumption that European history, institutions and ideas are the universal standard by which all societies are judged. Post-colonial political theory both attacks this assumption and is driven by it.

As the target: Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) showed how Western scholarship constructed the ‘Orient’ as backward to justify domination. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe (2000) argued that European categories are both indispensable and inadequate for understanding non-Western societies. Partha Chatterjee called Indian nationalism a ‘derivative discourse’ that borrowed European forms, and Spivak asked whether the subaltern can speak within Western frameworks.

As the motive force: the critique of Europe gives post-colonial theory its identity and energy; its project of recovering suppressed voices, Subaltern Studies under Ranajit Guha, Ashis Nandy’s The Intimate Enemy (1983), exists in response to Eurocentrism. Its tools themselves are European: Foucault, Derrida and Gramsci.

Assessment: Marxist critics such as Aijaz Ahmad (In Theory, 1992) and Vivek Chibber argue that this dependence traps it in Western debates and neglects capitalism. Yet its insistence on multiple modernities enriches political theory.

Thus Eurocentrism is both the adversary and the engine of post-colonial theory.

Example 29 (UPSC 2021, 10 marks): Feminist critique of the State

Paper and question: Paper I, Q1(a)

Approach: Explain the feminist critique of the state across liberal, radical, Marxist and post-colonial strands, with thinkers, and note an Indian illustration.

Feminists argue that mainstream theories treat the state as gender-neutral while it actually reflects and reinforces patriarchy, the systematic domination of men over women.

Public–private divide: liberal theory confines the state to the public sphere and leaves the family private; Carole Pateman (The Sexual Contract, 1988) showed that the social contract rests on a hidden sexual contract that subordinates women. Hence the slogan ‘the personal is political’.

Radical feminism: Catharine MacKinnon (Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, 1989) argued that the state is male in that its law sees and treats women as men see and treat women.

Marxist and socialist feminism: following Engels, they link women’s oppression to private property and unpaid domestic labour that the capitalist state relies on.

Liberal and post-colonial views: liberal feminists seek equality through the state; post-colonial feminists such as Chandra Talpade Mohanty warn against treating Third World women as passive victims.

In India, the Mathura case (1979) exposed patriarchal law, while the Vishaka guidelines (1997) show the state being used for change.

Example 30 (UPSC 2020, 10 marks): Post colonial theory of the state

Paper and question: Paper I, Q1(a)

Approach: Define the post-colonial theory of the state, explain the overdeveloped and relatively autonomous state (Alavi) and related Indian scholarship, and give a short evaluation.

The post-colonial theory of the state studies states that emerged from colonial rule. It holds that their character is shaped by the colonial legacy and cannot be explained by theories built on European experience.

Alavi’s thesis: Hamza Alavi (‘The State in Post-Colonial Societies: Pakistan and Bangladesh’, 1972) argued that the colonial state was ‘overdeveloped’ in relation to society, and that after independence its military-bureaucratic apparatus became relatively autonomous, mediating among the metropolitan bourgeoisie, the indigenous bourgeoisie and landed classes.

Indian scholarship: Pranab Bardhan identified a coalition of industrial capitalists, rich farmers and professionals; the Rudolphs saw a ‘weak-strong’ state; Partha Chatterjee showed nationalism borrowing the colonial state’s forms and later described ‘political society’. Subaltern Studies criticised elite-centred accounts.

Evaluation: the theory explains bureaucratic dominance and coercive laws inherited from colonial times, such as sedition (Section 124A IPC, held in abeyance in 2022). But India’s durable democracy and changing class structure show that colonial legacies are not destiny.

Example 31 (UPSC 2016, 15 marks): Discuss Feminist theory of the State.

Paper and question: Paper I, Q2(b)

Approach: Discuss the feminist theory of the state: the core claim, its main strands (liberal, radical, Marxist/socialist, post-structural and post-colonial) with thinkers, Indian examples, and an assessment.

The feminist theory of the state examines how the state is gendered: how it shapes, and is shaped by, relations between men and women. Feminists differ, however, on whether the state is an ally or an obstacle to women’s liberation.

Liberal feminism: from Mary Wollstonecraft to Betty Friedan, it sees the state as basically neutral and seeks equal rights, suffrage, education and anti-discrimination laws through it.

Radical feminism: Kate Millett (Sexual Politics, 1970) treated patriarchy as the basic form of domination; Catharine MacKinnon (Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, 1989) argued that the state is male because its law institutionalises the male point of view, for instance in rape and pornography law.

Marxist and socialist feminism: Engels linked women’s subordination to private property; socialist feminists show that the capitalist state depends on unpaid domestic labour.

Other strands: Carole Pateman exposed the sexual contract beneath the social contract; Scandinavian scholars spoke of ‘state feminism’ in the welfare state; post-colonial feminists stress the intersection of gender with race, caste and class.

India: laws on dowry, domestic violence (2005) and the Women’s Reservation Act (2023) show state action, while the Mathura case and marital rape debates show its limits.

The feminist theory thus exposes the gendered character of the state while showing it can be reshaped to serve gender justice.