Political Science II Notes | B.A. LL.B. (Five Year Course) Semester 3 | Mumbai University | munotes

In one line

Power is the ability to make somebody do what you want, even when they would rather not.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: power is the capacity of a person or a group to affect the behaviour of another person or group in a way the second would not have chosen, whether by force, by the threat of force, by reward, by persuasion or by control of the situation in which the second has to act.

Why political science begins here

Every other idea in this subject is built out of this one. Authority is power that people accept as rightful. Legitimacy is the belief that makes them accept it. Political obligation is the duty that belief is supposed to produce. Resistance is what happens when the belief fails. An ideology is an argument about who should have power and for what. Democracy is one answer to the question of who should hold it. Take power out and the syllabus has nothing left standing.

It also explains why a law student is taught this at all. Law is the most organised form of power a society possesses. A statute is a command that changes what millions of people may lawfully do. A decree is an order backed by the machinery of the state. A lawyer who does not understand power understands only the words on the face of the instrument, and not what the instrument is.

The words you need before we start

These six words are used on every page that follows, and they are not interchangeable. Fix them now.

The state. A community of people occupying a definite territory, having a government that is obeyed by the bulk of that community, and independent of the control of any other state. Four elements, and all four are required: population, territory, government and sovereignty. India is a state. The Republic of India came into existence on 26 January 1950; the territory, the people and something recognisable as government existed long before.

Government. The machinery through which the state acts: the legislature that makes law, the executive that carries it out, and the judiciary that applies it to disputes. The state is permanent and abstract; a government is temporary and concrete. Governments in India change every few years and the state does not change with them. Confusing the two is the commonest first-year error in this subject.

Sovereignty. The supreme law-making power within a territory, subject to no higher legal authority. Internal sovereignty is supremacy over everybody inside; external sovereignty is independence of everybody outside.

Political system. Everything that takes part in the making of binding decisions for a society, which is wider than the government: parties, interest groups, the press, the courts, the electorate, and the rules by which they all operate.

In one line

There is no single agreed definition of power, and the disagreements between the definitions are not verbal: each one puts the searchlight on a different part of political life, and a student who knows three definitions can answer a question three ways.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: political scientists have defined power variously as the probability of carrying out one's own will against resistance (Weber), as the production of intended effects (Russell), as participation in the making of decisions (Lasswell and Kaplan), and as the ability to make another do something they would not otherwise do (Dahl). Bachrach and Baratz added that power also operates by keeping issues off the agenda altogether, which they called the second face of power.

Why the definitions differ

An answer that simply lists definitions gets few marks. What gets marks is knowing why the list is a list. Each definition is built around the case its author found most important.

Weber was writing a general sociology and wanted a definition wide enough to cover a landlord, a bishop and an army. Russell was writing after the First World War and was interested in the deliberate exercise of will. Lasswell and Kaplan, and later Dahl, were American political scientists who wanted a definition they could measure: something you could go and observe in a city council. Bachrach and Baratz were answering Dahl, and their objection was that a definition you can measure will only find the power that shows.

The definitions, one at a time

Max Weber

Weber's is the definition to quote if you quote only one, because everything else in this module descends from it. In section 16 of the first part of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft he writes that Macht means every chance, within a social relationship, of carrying through one's own will even against resistance, no matter what that chance rests on. The words are his; the English is our rendering.

Three things in that sentence do the work.

"Every chance." Weber says jede Chance, a probability, not an act. Power is the likelihood of prevailing, which is why it exists without being used.

"Even against resistance." The test case of power is opposition. Where there is no resistance there is nothing to measure, which is why this definition is easy to state and hard to apply.

"No matter what that chance rests on." Weber immediately adds that the concept of power is, in sociological terms, amorphous: any quality of a person and any configuration of circumstances may put someone in a position to prevail. Money, office, beauty, knowledge, a gun, a caste, a majority in a legislature. This is not vagueness; it is the point. Power has no single source.

In one line

Power, force, coercion, influence, authority, manipulation and control are seven different things, and the examiner's favourite question is whether you can tell them apart.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: power is the general capacity to affect the behaviour of others; force is the physical application of harm or restraint; coercion is the threat of it; influence is the ability to affect behaviour without any sanction at all; authority is power accepted as rightful; manipulation is influence exercised without the subject's knowledge; and control is power so complete that the subject's compliance is habitual.

Why the words have to be kept apart

Ordinary speech treats them as synonyms. A newspaper will say a minister is "powerful", "influential" and "an authority on the subject" in one paragraph and mean roughly the same thing three times. Political science cannot afford that, for a reason that becomes obvious in Module II.

The whole question of political obligation is: why should anybody obey? If power and authority were the same word, the question would answer itself, because obedience would be nothing but the effect of superior strength, and there would be no such thing as an unjust law to disobey. Every argument in this book about resistance, dissent and satyagraha depends on the distinction between the officer who is entitled to give you an order and the man who is merely able to enforce one.

The seven, one at a time

Power

The genus. Everything else on this list is a species of it, an ingredient of it, or its limiting case. Power is the capacity to affect another's behaviour in a way that other would not have chosen, whatever the capacity rests on.

Force

The physical application of harm or restraint to a person or a thing. Its distinguishing feature is that the subject does not choose. When four constables carry a protester off a road, the protester is not obeying, complying or submitting; the protester is being moved. That is why force is the crudest form of power and, oddly, the weakest evidence of it.

Force is also self-limiting. It has to be applied to each person separately, it costs money and manpower, and it produces resentment that raises the cost of the next application. A government that must use force routinely is not demonstrating strength; it is demonstrating that everything cheaper has failed.

Coercion

The threat of force or of some other serious harm. The subject still chooses, but the alternatives have been arranged so that only one is bearable. "Vacate the premises or be evicted" is coercion. "Pay the penalty or be prosecuted" is coercion.

The distinction from force matters in law as well as in political theory. A confession obtained by beating is obtained by force; a confession obtained by telling a suspect his brother will be arrested is obtained by coercion. Indian criminal law treats both as vitiating consent, but they are not the same fact and are not proved by the same evidence.

In one line

Political power is exercised through institutions: it is distributed among them by a constitution, it moves between them in practice, and it is limited by other institutions rather than by good intentions.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the exercise of political power in a modern state is the process by which binding decisions are made and enforced for the whole society, through the legislature, the executive and the judiciary, distributed between levels of government by a constitution, conditioned by parties, bureaucracies, courts and public opinion, and limited by the requirement that every exercise of power be traceable to a legal authority.

What makes power political

Not every exercise of power is political. A parent, an employer and a moneylender all exercise power. Political power has three features that mark it off.

It is exercised for the whole society. A political decision binds everyone within the territory, including those who opposed it and those who never heard of it. A company's decision binds its shareholders; a legislature's binds the shareholders, the customers, the competitors and the passers-by.

It is backed by the state's monopoly of legitimate force. Weber's definition of the state is the human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Every other body that uses force does so either unlawfully or on the state's permission.

It claims to be authoritative. A political decision is not put forward as one opinion among many. It is put forward as binding.

Where the power sits

The three organs

The legislature makes law. In India that is Parliament for the Union and the Legislature of each State, and law made by them is enforceable by every court and every officer in the territory to which it extends.

The executive carries law into effect. Formally this is the President or the Governor; in reality it is the Council of Ministers headed by the Prime Minister or the Chief Minister, advised and implemented by the permanent civil services.

The judiciary applies law to disputes and, in India, decides whether the other two have kept within their powers.

Separation of powers is the doctrine that these three should be kept in different hands, so that no one body both makes the rule and judges the breach. India does not follow it rigidly: ministers sit in the legislature, and the executive makes delegated legislation by the crore. What India does have is checks and balances: each organ can stop the others at defined points.

The vertical division

Power is divided not only between organs but between levels: the Union, the States and, since 1993, a constitutionally guaranteed tier of local government. The subjects on which each may legislate are listed, and disputes about the boundary are decided by the courts.

In one line

A government decision is not a moment when somebody chooses; it is a process with stages, and the models of decision making are competing accounts of what actually happens in that process.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the government's role in decision making is to convert demands arising in society into binding public decisions, through a policy cycle of agenda setting, formulation, adoption, implementation and evaluation; and how far that process is genuinely rational is contested between the rational, incremental, bureaucratic, garbage-can and mixed-scanning models.

The policy cycle

The stages are worth learning in order, because a question about the government's role can be answered by walking down them.

1. Agenda setting. Out of the thousands of problems in a society, a few become things the government is going to do something about. This is the stage the second face of power operates on, and it is decided as much by what is kept off the list as by what goes on it.

2. Formulation. Options are worked out, usually by officials, sometimes by an expert committee, a commission or a law commission, and increasingly by consultants.

3. Adoption. The choice is made and given legal form: a statute, an ordinance, a notification, a scheme, a budget line.

4. Implementation. The decision is carried out by an administrative machine that has its own interests, capacities and shortages. Most policy failures are failures here.

5. Evaluation. What happened is measured against what was intended, by the audit institution, by parliamentary committees, by courts, by the press and by researchers.

6. Feedback. Evaluation changes the agenda, and the cycle starts again.

The models, and what each one claims

The rational model

Also called the synoptic or comprehensive model. The decision maker defines the goal, lists all the alternatives, works out the consequences of each, and picks the one that best achieves the goal at least cost.

Its virtue. It is the standard against which everything else is measured, and it is the model a court applies when it asks whether a decision was reasonable and whether relevant considerations were taken into account.

Its problem. No government can do this. Nobody knows all the alternatives, the consequences cannot be fully calculated, goals conflict with each other, and time and money run out. Herbert Simon called the result bounded rationality: decision makers work within limits of information, capacity and time, and therefore do not maximise but satisfice, taking the first option that is good enough rather than searching for the best.

The incremental model

Charles Lindblom's answer, and its nickname is the whole argument: the science of muddling through. Governments do not start from first principles. They start from what is already being done and change it a little. Last year's budget plus five per cent. The existing scheme with an extra category added.

In one line

A government never decides in a vacuum: outside the formal machinery of the state, organised groups, the press, business, courts, foreign governments and public opinion all press on the decision, and the pressing is itself an exercise of power.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: external influences on the exercise of political power are the forces outside the constitutional organs of government which shape what those organs decide, principally interest and pressure groups, the media, business and finance, trade unions, religious and caste organisations, civil society and social movements, foreign states and international organisations, and public opinion itself.

Why the topic exists

The last two chapters described power flowing down: the state deciding, the administration implementing. That picture is only half true, and a student who leaves it there cannot explain why governments so often do things their own analysis says are unwise, or fail to do things everybody agrees are necessary.

Power also flows upward and sideways, from society into the state. The decision the Council of Ministers takes has already been shaped, before it reaches the meeting, by who was consulted, whose data was used, which newspaper ran which story, which association met which minister, and what the government believes the electorate will tolerate. That shaping is the subject of this chapter.

A word to fix: "external" here means outside the formal organs of government, not outside the country. A domestic trade association is an external influence; so is a foreign government. Students routinely read "external" as "foreign" and answer the wrong question.

The influences, by kind

Interest groups and pressure groups

Organised bodies that seek to influence public policy without seeking office themselves. They are the most important of the external influences and get the next chapter.

The media

Newspapers, television and now digital platforms shape the exercise of power in three distinct ways, and an answer that separates them reads better than one that says "the media is powerful".

Agenda setting. The press cannot tell people what to think, but it is very effective at telling them what to think about. A story run for a week makes a subject unavoidable for a government.

Framing. How an issue is described settles what counts as a solution. The same fact is a law and order problem, an economic problem or a human rights problem depending on the frame, and each frame has a different set of remedies attached.

Scrutiny. Investigation exposes what the government would not have disclosed, which is why press freedom is treated as a structural feature of a democracy rather than a private right of journalists.

Business and finance

Business influences policy through three channels that should be distinguished. Representation, through chambers of commerce and industry associations. Structural power, which requires no lobbying at all: a government that needs investment, employment and tax revenue adjusts its policy in anticipation of what capital will accept. And finance, through political contributions, which is where the influence becomes a legal question.

In one line

An interest group is an organised body of people who share a concern and try to get the government to act on it, without ever trying to run the government themselves.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: an interest group, also called a pressure group, is an organised association of persons who hold a common interest or opinion and who seek to influence the formation and administration of public policy in its favour, without seeking to capture governmental office or to accept the responsibility of governing.

The two names, and whether there is a difference

The syllabus says "interest groups"; most Indian textbooks say "pressure groups"; the terms are used interchangeably and a student may use either. Where writers do distinguish them, the distinction is this. Interest group describes what the body is, a group united by an interest. Pressure group describes what it does, apply pressure. Every pressure group is an interest group; an interest group that has never tried to influence anybody is not yet a pressure group. If a question uses one term, use that one.

What makes a body an interest group

Four features, and all four are needed. A body with three of them is something else.

1. A shared interest or concern. It may be material, like the price of sugarcane, or it may be a cause with no material stake at all, like the abolition of the death penalty.
2. Organisation. Some structure, however loose: a name, officers, a way of deciding what to demand.
3. An attempt to influence public policy. A group that only serves its own members, and never asks government for anything, is an association, not an interest group.
4. It does not seek office. This is the decisive one. The moment a group contests elections in order to govern, it has become a party.

The kinds of interest group

Every classification in the textbooks is one of these three cuts, and the safest answer uses all three.

By what they represent: sectional and promotional

Sectional groups, also called protective or interest groups in the narrow sense, represent a section of society and pursue its material interests. A trade union, an industry chamber, a farmers' association, a bar association. Membership is limited to the section, benefits go to the section, and the group's authority rests on how much of the section it can speak for.

Promotional groups, also called cause or attitude groups, promote a cause that need not benefit the members at all. An environmental campaign, a civil liberties organisation, a group working against child marriage. Membership is open to anybody who agrees, and the group's authority rests on the strength of its argument and its public support.

In one line

Lobbying is the technique of persuading people who hold public power to use it your way, by going to them directly and giving them reasons, information and, where it is lawful, support.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: lobbying is the practice of communicating directly with legislators, ministers or officials, on behalf of an identified interest, with the object of influencing the framing, passage, administration or repeal of a law, rule, policy or decision.

Where the word comes from, and why it matters

The word comes from the lobby, the ante-room of a legislature where members can be met on their way to the chamber. The etymology carries the essential idea: lobbying happens outside the formal proceeding, in the space around the decision rather than at the moment of it. A speech in a debate is not lobbying. A memorandum handed to a member before the debate is.

This is why lobbying is difficult to regulate and easy to misunderstand. It is not a stage in the constitutional process, so no constitution provides for it; and it is not an offence, so no penal code prohibits it. It occupies the ground between the two, which is exactly where regulation everywhere tries to reach.

Lobbying is a technique, not a kind of body

An interest group is a body. Lobbying is a method, and it is used by bodies of many kinds, which is worth saying explicitly because students often treat the two words as synonyms.

Who lobbies: interest groups and industry associations; individual companies; professional lobbying firms retained for a fee; law firms and public affairs consultancies; non-governmental organisations and campaigns; trade unions; State governments lobbying the Union; foreign governments; and public sector undertakings lobbying the ministries that own them.

The methods

Direct lobbying

Contact with the decision maker.

Meetings and representations. The core of the activity. A delegation meets a minister, a secretary or a member.

Written submissions. Memoranda, position papers and responses to consultation.

Supplying draft language. The most effective and least visible technique of all. A group that supplies the actual words of a clause, a rule or an exception has done more than a hundred meetings could, because everything afterwards is an argument about amending its text rather than about whether to adopt its idea.

Evidence to committees. In India, appearing before a Parliamentary Standing Committee, a Select Committee or a commission.

Technical assistance. Providing data, models and impact assessments that a department does not have the capacity to produce.

Indirect or grassroots lobbying

Contact with the public, in order to reach the decision maker through them.

Public campaigns and advertising, media briefing, opinion pieces, and now coordinated activity on social platforms.

In one line

The United States regulates lobbying by making lobbyists register and file public reports four times a year; India regulates it not at all, and reaches only the far end of the spectrum, where influence has become an offence.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: in the United States lobbying is a lawful, registered and disclosed profession, governed principally by the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 as strengthened in 2007 and, for agents of foreign principals, by the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938; in India there is no statute that registers lobbyists or requires any disclosure of lobbying, so the same activity is carried on informally and is reached by the law only when it crosses into bribery or breach of parliamentary privilege.

The United States

Why the American system looks the way it does

Two features of the American constitution shape everything else. The First Amendment protects the right of the people to petition the government for a redress of grievances, so lobbying cannot simply be prohibited. And the American legislature is genuinely independent of the executive: a member of Congress votes as they choose, and there is no whip that can compel a vote in the Indian sense. That makes each individual legislator worth persuading, which is why professional lobbying grew there first and grew largest.

The Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995

The Act does not limit lobbying. It compels it into the open, by four mechanisms.

A definition. Section 1602 defines a lobbyist as an individual employed or retained by a client for financial or other compensation, for services that include more than one lobbying contact, excluding an individual whose lobbying activities are less than twenty per cent of the time they spend on services for that client over a three-month period. Two things follow. The occasional approach is not caught, and a professional whose lobbying is a small part of a wider practice is not caught either, which is the gap most criticised.

Registration. Section 1603 requires registration, subject to money thresholds in subsection (a)(3): a lobbying firm whose total income from a particular client does not and is not expected to exceed two thousand five hundred dollars, and an organisation whose total lobbying expenses do not and are not expected to exceed ten thousand dollars, in the quarterly period, are exempt. Small activity is left alone; sustained activity must be registered.

Reports. Section 1604 requires registered lobbyists to file reports quarterly, naming the client, the issues, the chambers and agencies contacted, and the money.

Publication and enforcement. Section 1605 puts the filings on the public record and provides the machinery for enforcing them.

In one line

Elite theory says that in every society, however it describes itself, a small organised minority rules and the large disorganised majority is ruled, and that this is not an accident of any particular system but a permanent feature of organised human life.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the elite theory of power holds that political power in every society is concentrated in the hands of a small minority, the elite, who owe their position to superior organisation, capacity or resources; that the majority, however numerous, cannot rule because it cannot organise; and that democracy therefore does not abolish minority rule but changes the way the ruling minority is recruited.

The claim, and what it is aimed at

Elite theory was built as an answer to two other accounts of power that were dominant at the end of the nineteenth century.

Against democratic theory, it says that popular rule is impossible, not merely difficult. A mass cannot deliberate, cannot decide and cannot act, so it must delegate; and delegation creates leaders; and leaders acquire interests of their own.

Against Marxism, it says that the division between rulers and ruled is more fundamental than the division between classes. Abolish private property and you do not abolish the elite; you change its composition. This is the sharpest disagreement in the whole of topic 1.1.4 and is the point on which the next chapter turns.

Gaetano Mosca and the ruling class

Mosca's Elementi di scienza politica (Turin, 1896) is the founding statement. His proposition is that in all societies two classes of people appear: a class that rules and a class that is ruled. The first is always the less numerous, performs all political functions, monopolises power and enjoys its advantages. The second is directed and controlled by the first.

Three parts of Mosca's account are worth carrying into an answer.

The minority rules because it is organised. Mosca's explanation is not that the rulers are better people. It is that a hundred people who act together will always defeat a thousand who act separately, and that the hundred can act together because they are few.

The political formula. Every ruling class justifies itself by a formula that the ruled accept: divine right, the will of the people, the mandate of history, scientific expertise. The formula is not a lie exactly; it is the story a society tells itself about why these people are in charge, and it is what turns power into authority. A student who has read the legitimacy chapters will recognise the idea.

Circulation, not abolition. Ruling classes change, decay and are replaced. There is never a moment when nobody rules.

In one line

The Marxist theory of power says that political power is not a thing in itself but a reflection of economic power: whoever owns the means by which a society produces its living will control its state, its law and even its ideas.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the Marxist theory holds that every society beyond the most primitive is divided into classes defined by their relation to the means of production; that the class which owns those means is the ruling class; that the state is not a neutral arbiter but an instrument by which that class maintains its dominance; and that political power will therefore change hands only when the ownership of the means of production changes hands.

The vocabulary, defined before it is used

Means of production. Everything used to produce goods other than labour itself: land, factories, machinery, raw materials, capital.

Mode of production. The means of production together with the social relations of ownership that go with them. Marx's historical sequence runs primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism, communism.

Class. A group defined by its relation to the means of production, not by income or status. Under capitalism the two principal classes are the bourgeoisie, who own the means of production, and the proletariat, who own nothing but their labour power and must sell it.

Base and superstructure. The economic structure of a society is the base; law, politics, religion, morality and art are the superstructure that rises on it and, in the main, reflects it.

Class struggle. The conflict between classes over the surplus, which for Marx and Engels is the motor of historical change.

The four propositions

1. Economic power is the source of political power

This is the foundation and everything else follows from it. Political power is not held because someone won an election or wears a crown; it is held because someone owns. Whoever controls the means of production controls the livelihoods of everyone else, and control of livelihood is control of behaviour. Elections, constitutions and offices distribute the appearance of power; ownership distributes the substance.

2. The state is an instrument of class rule

This is the sentence to quote. In the Manifesto of the Communist Party Marx and Engels write that the bourgeoisie has conquered for itself exclusive political sway in the modern representative State, and that "the executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie."

Read the sentence carefully, because two things in it are usually missed.

"A committee for managing the common affairs." Not a puppet taking orders from individual capitalists. It manages the common affairs, which means it may act against a particular capitalist, or a particular industry, to preserve the system as a whole. A Marxist can therefore explain factory legislation, a minimum wage or a bank rescue without embarrassment: each protects capitalism from capitalists.

In one line

Both theories say that a small minority rules; they disagree about what makes the minority a minority, about whether minority rule can ever be ended, and about what the state is.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the elite theory and the Marxist theory agree that political power is always concentrated in few hands and that the appearance of popular rule conceals it, but they differ fundamentally in that the elite theorists locate the source of concentration in organisation and capacity, which are permanent features of social life, while Marxists locate it in the ownership of the means of production, which is historically specific and can be changed, so that for the first minority rule is inevitable and for the second it is transitory.

What they agree about

An answer that starts with the disagreements is weaker than one that establishes the common ground first, because the disagreements are only interesting once the agreement is clear.

Power is concentrated. Both reject the pluralist picture of many groups bargaining on a level field.

Democratic forms conceal it. Both hold that elections, constitutions and formal equality do not describe where power actually lies. Michels calls a party an oligarchical power grounded on a democratic basis; Marx calls the modern representative state the instrument through which the bourgeoisie holds exclusive political sway.

The rulers justify themselves with an idea. Mosca's political formula and the Marxist claim that the ruling ideas of an age are the ideas of its ruling class are recognisably the same observation, arrived at independently.

Power is not primarily about who wins a vote. Both look past the visible decision to the structure that produced it.

The three real disagreements

1. What defines the ruling minority

Marxists: ownership of the means of production. The ruling class is the class that owns, and it rules because it owns. Change the ownership and you change the ruling class.

Elite theorists: organisation, capacity and position. Mosca's minority rules because it is organised; Pareto's because it has the psychological qualities that suit government; Michels's because organisation itself produces leaders; Mills's because certain institutional positions carry power whoever occupies them.

Why the difference bites. On the Marxist account, a state-owned economy abolishes the ruling class. On the elite account, it merely moves the elite from the boardroom to the ministry, because the new managers are as few, as organised and as indispensable as the old owners were.

2. Whether minority rule can end

Marxists: yes. Class rule is a stage of history and will end when the material conditions that produce classes end. The state then dies out.

Elite theorists: no, and this is their central claim. Pareto: history is a graveyard of aristocracies, and one elite always replaces another. Michels: any organisation whatever will produce an oligarchy, so an organised movement against oligarchy will itself be an oligarchy.

In one line

Authority is power that the people subject to it accept as rightful, so that they obey because of who gave the order and not because of what will happen if they do not.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: authority is the right to command and the corresponding duty to obey, resting not on the capacity to compel but on the acceptance by those subject to it that the person or office commanding is entitled to do so, so that obedience is given voluntarily and the exercise of force becomes unnecessary in the normal case.

Why this is the most important idea in the module

The difference between power and authority is the difference between the dacoit and the tax officer, and everything in Modules II and IV depends on it.

If there were only power, then political obligation would be an empty question: you obey the strongest, and that is all there is to say. There would be no such thing as an unjust law, because "unjust" would add nothing to "one I dislike". There would be nothing for legitimacy to explain, because nothing would need explaining. And civil disobedience would be indistinguishable from crime.

The moment you say that some commands are entitled to be obeyed, all of those questions open at once. That is the work the concept of authority does.

Weber's definition

In section 16 of the first part of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, Weber defines three things in a single passage, and the relations between them are what a student must hold on to.

Macht, power, is every chance within a social relationship of carrying through one's own will even against resistance, no matter what that chance rests on.

Herrschaft, which we render as authority or domination, is the chance of finding obedience, among specifiable persons, for a command of a given content.

Disziplin, discipline, is the chance of finding prompt, automatic and unthinking obedience among a specifiable number of people, by force of a practised attitude.

Three features of the middle definition matter.

"A command of a given content." Authority is exercised through commands, which are addressed to somebody and tell them to do something. This distinguishes authority from mere influence, which need not command at all.

"Among specifiable persons." Authority has a scope. A Collector's authority runs in the district; a Vice Chancellor's in the university. Nobody has authority over everybody in everything.

"The chance of finding obedience." Like power, authority is a probability. It exists in the expectation of obedience, not in the act of obeying.

A translation note worth carrying. Herrschaft is usually rendered "authority" in Indian textbooks and "domination" in the scholarly literature, and the two English words do not feel the same. The German carries both senses. If a question quotes "legitimate domination", it is quoting the same concept this chapter calls authority.

In one line

Authority is always attached to a position rather than a person, limited in what it may reach, exercised by commands, accepted rather than imposed, capable of being delegated, and dependent on a belief that can be withdrawn.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the essential features of authority are that it is relational, legitimate, impersonal in the sense of attaching to an office, limited in scope, hierarchical, exercised through commands, voluntarily obeyed, delegable, backed by sanctions that it seldom needs, and revocable.

The features

1. It is relational

Authority exists between people. There is one who commands and one who obeys, and the question is always "authority over whom".

2. It is legitimate

This is the feature that makes it authority and not power. Those subject to it accept that the holder is entitled to command. If that acceptance is absent, what remains is coercion wearing the same uniform.

3. It attaches to the office, not to the person

The most important feature for a law student, and the one students state least clearly.

A District Magistrate has authority; the individual who is District Magistrate today has authority only while they hold the post. On transfer, the authority stays with the office and the person leaves without it. This is why an order signed by a Magistrate remains valid after that Magistrate retires, and why the successor may vary it.

Weber called this the impersonal character of legal authority and treated it as the mark of a modern state. Where authority attaches to a person rather than an office, as it does under charismatic and to some extent traditional authority, succession becomes a crisis every time.

4. It is limited in scope

Every authority has boundaries of three kinds: over whom it runs, over what subject matter, and for how long. A command outside those boundaries is not an authoritative command at all. In administrative law this is the rule that an authority may act only within the power conferred and that an act beyond it is void, and a student should notice that the political concept and the legal doctrine are the same thing.

5. It is hierarchical

Authority is normally arranged in a ladder, so that each holder is subject to a higher one and there is a route by which a decision can be questioned. This is what makes appeal, revision and review possible, and it is why an authority that answers to nobody is regarded as a defect in a system rather than as its strongest point.

6. It is exercised through commands

Authority operates by directions addressed to somebody, telling them what to do or not to do. This distinguishes it from influence, which changes behaviour without commanding.

In one line

De jure authority is authority somebody is legally entitled to; de facto authority is authority somebody actually has, whether or not the law says they should.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: de jure authority, meaning authority in law, is that which is conferred by and exercised in accordance with the legal or constitutional rules of the system; de facto authority, meaning authority in fact, is that which is actually exercised and actually obeyed, irrespective of whether the holder has a lawful title to it. The two normally coincide, and the interesting cases are those in which they come apart.

The two Latin phrases

De jure is Latin for "of law" or "by right". It describes what the legal rules say ought to be.

De facto is Latin for "of fact" or "in fact". It describes what actually is, whatever the rules say.

The pair is used all over law: a de facto director, a de facto guardian, a de facto marriage, de facto and de jure recognition of a state. In every use the same contrast is being drawn between title and reality.

The four combinations

The clearest way to hold this is to see that authority in law and authority in fact are two independent questions, so there are four possible answers.

Both de jure and de facto. The ordinary case, and the one a stable political system aims at. A Collector who is validly appointed and whose directions are obeyed.

De jure but not de facto. Somebody has the lawful title and nobody obeys. A government in exile. A court whose orders are systematically ignored. A local body that exists on paper but whose functions are performed by somebody else.

De facto but not de jure. Somebody is obeyed but has no lawful title. A regime that came to power by a coup and is running the country. A person exercising an office whose appointment is later found invalid. In some parts of India at some periods, an armed group whose writ ran in a district while the lawful administration existed on the map.

Neither. Not authority at all.

An answer that sets out those four gets the whole topic in a paragraph.

Why the distinction matters

Because obedience has to be settled somehow. If a person is obeyed but is not entitled to be, what is the position of somebody who obeys them? Every legal system has had to answer this, and the answer is usually that acts done under an apparent authority stand.

Because recognition is a political act. In international law, states recognise other states and governments either de facto, acknowledging that a body is in control, or de jure, acknowledging that it is entitled to be. The distinction lets a state deal with a regime without endorsing it.

In one line

Weber said there are exactly three pure ways in which people come to accept that somebody is entitled to command them: because it has always been so, because of the extraordinary personal quality of the commander, and because a rule made the commander competent.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: Weber classified legitimate authority into three pure types according to the ground on which its claim to legitimacy rests: traditional authority, resting on the everyday belief in the sanctity of immemorial traditions and the legitimacy of those called to authority by them; charismatic authority, resting on devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplary character of a person and of the order they reveal or create; and legal or rational authority, resting on belief in the legality of enacted rules and in the right to command of those raised to authority under them.

Weber's own statement

Weber writes, in the part of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft dealing with the types of domination, that there are three pure types of legitimate domination, and that their claim to legitimacy may rest primarily on one of three characters.

Rational in character, resting on the belief in the legality of enacted orders and in the right to give directions of those called to exercise authority under them. Weber's own bracket for this is legale Herrschaft, legal domination.

Traditional in character, resting on the everyday belief in the sanctity of traditions valid from time immemorial and in the legitimacy of those called to authority by them: traditionale Herrschaft.

Charismatic in character, resting on the extraordinary devotion to the sanctity, or the heroic force, or the exemplary quality of a person and of the order revealed or created by that person: charismatische Herrschaft.

He then adds a second passage that students almost never quote and that is worth more than the first, because it says in each case what is being obeyed.

Under legal domination, obedience is given to the legally established impersonal order, and to the superior determined by it, by virtue of the formal legality of the directions and within their scope.

Under traditional domination, obedience is given to the person of the master who is called by tradition and himself bound by it, out of Pietät, a word meaning reverence or dutiful respect, and only within the circle of what is customary.

Under charismatic domination, obedience is given to the charismatically qualified leader as such, out of personal trust in revelation, heroism or exemplary quality, and only so far as the belief in that charisma holds.

Read the three together and the classification stops being a list. In one the rule is obeyed, in another the person as heir of a custom, in the third the person as an extraordinary individual. That is the whole of Weber's answer to the question of why people obey.

In one line

Traditional authority is obeyed because it has always been obeyed: the ruler holds power by inheriting a position that custom created, and the customs that put him there also limit what he may do.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: traditional authority is the type of legitimate domination which rests on the everyday belief in the sanctity of traditions valid from time immemorial and in the legitimacy of those called to authority by them; obedience is owed to the person of the master, out of reverence, and only within the circle of what custom sanctions.

The ground of obedience

Weber's own account is precise on a point that summaries lose. Under traditional domination, obedience is given to the person of the master, and the master is both called by tradition and bound by tradition. Obedience is given out of Pietät, a word best rendered as reverence or dutiful respect, and it is owed only within the circle of what is customary.

Four consequences follow, and they are the chapter.

The person, not the office. A subject obeys the king, not the crown as an abstraction. The relationship is personal, which is why traditional systems are held together by loyalty and why disloyalty is treated as a moral betrayal rather than as a breach of a rule.

The master is bound too. This is the feature students forget. Custom is not a licence; it is a boundary in both directions. A traditional ruler who violates custom is not exercising authority at all, and this is one of the classical grounds of resistance.

The scope is what custom covers. Where custom is silent, the ruler acts on personal discretion, and Weber notes that this is where arbitrariness enters a traditional system: not in defiance of custom but in the space custom does not reach.

Change is illegitimate by definition. A traditional system cannot say "we shall now do it differently" without undermining the reason it is obeyed. Reforms are therefore presented as restorations of an older and purer practice.

Weber's forms of traditional domination

Gerontocracy. Rule by the elders of a group, exercised because age is believed to carry the tradition. There is no separate administrative staff.

Patriarchalism. Rule by the head of a household or clan, inherited by a fixed rule of succession, again without a separate staff. The household is the model on which the whole political relationship is built.

Patrimonialism. The stage at which the master acquires a personal administrative and military staff. The staff are personal retainers, recruited from kin, favourites, slaves or clients, and they hold their positions at the master's pleasure. The realm is treated as an extension of the household, which is why the ruler's revenue and the state's revenue are not distinguished.

In one line

Charismatic authority is obeyed because of who the leader is: an extraordinary person is believed to have qualities nobody else has, and the belief itself is the only thing holding the authority up.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: charismatic authority is the type of legitimate domination which rests on the extraordinary devotion of followers to the sanctity, heroism or exemplary character of an individual person and of the order revealed or created by that person; obedience is owed to the leader as such, out of personal trust, and lasts only so long as the belief in the leader's charisma lasts.

What the word means

Charisma comes from the Greek for a gift of grace, and Weber says so expressly: it is an early Christian term, used for the gifts believed to be conferred by the spirit. Weber takes it out of theology and uses it for any quality of an individual by which they are set apart from ordinary people and treated as endowed with exceptional powers or qualities.

Two cautions follow, and both are commonly failed.

Charisma is not charm, popularity or good speaking. A leader may be a poor speaker and still hold charismatic authority; a very attractive celebrity may hold none.

Charisma is in the eyes of the followers, not in the person. Weber's test is not whether the leader really has extraordinary powers. It is whether the followers believe it and act on the belief. This is why the same person can be charismatic to one group and nobody at all to another, and why charisma can be lost overnight without the person changing.

The ground of obedience

Weber's second passage on the three types says that under charismatic domination obedience is given to the charismatically qualified leader as such, by virtue of personal trust in revelation, heroic quality or exemplary character, and only within the sphere in which the belief in that charisma holds.

Every feature of the type comes out of that sentence.

It attaches to the person, not to an office or a custom. There is no post to inherit and no rule to invoke.

It is proved by results. A charismatic leader must keep demonstrating the quality. Weber is explicit that if the leader's mission fails, if the followers cease to prosper, if the promised deliverance does not come, the charisma is regarded as having departed and the authority collapses. Nothing else in Weber's scheme has this property: a Collector who makes a bad decision is still a Collector.

It is revolutionary. Traditional authority says "it has always been so"; legal authority says "the rule says so"; charismatic authority says, in effect, "you have heard it said, but I say to you". It is the only one of the three types capable of overturning an established order from the inside, which is why every great social upheaval has a charismatic figure at the front of it.

In one line

Legal rational authority is obeyed because a rule says so: the command binds not because of who gave it but because the giver held an office to which a rule attached the power, and the rule binds the giver too.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: legal or rational authority is the type of legitimate domination which rests on belief in the legality of enacted rules and in the right of those raised to authority under such rules to issue commands; obedience is owed not to any person but to the legally established impersonal order and to the superior determined by it, by virtue of the formal legality of the command, and only within the scope the rule confers.

The ground of obedience

Weber's second passage says that under legal domination obedience is given to the legally established impersonal order, and to the superior determined by that order, by virtue of the formal legality of the directions, and within their scope.

Four things are packed into that.

Impersonal. The order is obeyed, not a person. The officer is obeyed only as the occupant of a position the order created.

The superior is determined by the order. The rule decides who commands. Nobody commands by birth, by inspiration or by strength of will.

Formal legality is the whole ground. The question is not whether the command is wise, popular or just; it is whether it was made in the manner and by the person the rule prescribes. This is the feature that most offends a student's moral sense, and it is exactly what makes the type work: authority that depended on each subject's agreement with each command would not be authority.

Within the scope. The rule that gives the power also fixes its limits, and a command outside them is not binding at all.

The features Weber gives it

1. A consistent system of abstract rules, applied to particular cases.
2. Every holder of authority is subject to the same order. The superior is bound by the rules that empower them, which is the sentence a law student should underline. There is no point in the hierarchy at which somebody escapes into personal discretion.
3. The person obeys as a member of the corporate group, and only within its jurisdiction. A citizen obeys the officer, not the individual.
4. Obedience is owed to the impersonal order, not to the individual who happens to hold the office today.

Bureaucracy, its administrative form

Weber treats bureaucracy as the purest administrative expression of legal rational authority, and its features are frequently asked as a separate question.

Fixed and official jurisdictional areas, ordered by rules.

In one line

Power becomes authority when it can be traced back, step by step, to something the society accepts as the ultimate source of the right to command; in India that something is the Constitution, and every lawful order in the country is the bottom of a chain that ends there.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the sources of authority are those grounds from which a right to command is derived and by reference to which it is accepted, principally the constitution and law, tradition and custom, popular consent expressed through elections, personal qualities, expertise, office, and religion; and power is legalised when it is conferred by, exercised in accordance with, and confined within a rule which is itself valid under a higher rule, up to the constitution, which rests on acceptance rather than on any further rule.

The general sources

Constitution and law. The dominant source in a modern state. The right to command is created by a written instrument and by the statutes made under it.

Tradition and custom. Authority derived from what has always been done, which Weber's traditional type describes.

Consent, expressed through election. The claim that the holder was chosen by those they command. This is the distinctively democratic source and the one Module IV is about.

Personal qualities. Weber's charisma.

Expertise. The specialist's authority within their field, which modern administration relies on heavily.

Office. The position itself, whoever holds it. This is derivative, because an office is created by a rule or a custom, but it is worth naming separately because it is what a citizen actually encounters.

Religion. Authority claimed as conferred by, or exercised on behalf of, a divine source. Historically the most widespread of all and still operative in personal law, in religious institutions and in community life.

Force, which is the honest addition to the list. Conquest, coup and occupation produce power that is obeyed. It is not yet authority; it becomes authority only if it is legalised, and the process by which regimes born of force acquire a constitution, an election and a court to validate them is exactly the subject of the second half of this chapter.

How power is legalised: the chain

A written constitution answers MU's question with a chain, and the value of the chain is that any exercise of power in the country can be tested against it.

Step 1: the ultimate source

Every legal system rests, in the end, on something not itself derived from a higher rule. Jurists have two well-known names for this and a student meets both in jurisprudence.

Kelsen's Grundnorm, or basic norm: the presupposed norm that gives the first constitution its validity. It is not itself enacted by anybody; it is presupposed, because otherwise the chain of validity has no beginning.

In one line

Power is the ability to make somebody comply; authority is the right to require it. The dacoit and the tax officer both take your money, and only one of them can expect you to think they were entitled to.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: power is the capacity to affect the behaviour of others in a way they would not have chosen, resting on any basis whatever, whereas authority is that species of power which those subject to it accept as rightful, so that obedience is rendered voluntarily by reason of the commander's title rather than by reason of the consequences of refusal.

The relation between them

Before the differences, the relation, because students state it wrongly in two opposite ways.

Authority is a species of power, not its opposite. Every authority is power: the subject's behaviour is being affected. What distinguishes authority is the ground on which the subject complies.

But power is not a lesser form of authority. Power without authority is complete in itself. It works. It is simply expensive, unstable and resented.

The correct picture is two overlapping circles. There is power without authority, which is coercion. There is authority without much raw power, as with a court that commands nothing but a bailiff. And there is the overlap, where most stable government lives.

The differences

1. The ground of compliance

Power: the subject complies because of what will happen otherwise. Authority: the subject complies because of who gave the order.

This is the master difference and every other difference follows from it. It also gives the test to apply to any case: ask why the person complied.

2. Legitimacy

Power may be legitimate or not. It is a fact about capacity. Authority is legitimate by definition. Remove the acceptance and there is no authority left, only power.

3. The source

Power comes from resources: wealth, weapons, numbers, information, organisation, position. Authority comes from the belief of those subject to it, however that belief was produced, whether by custom, by charisma or by rule.

4. Direction

Power is exercised downward, from the one who has the resources. Authority is exercised downward and conferred upward. The judge commands the litigant; the litigant's acceptance is what makes it a command.

5. Scope

Power extends as far as the resource reaches. Authority has defined boundaries: over whom, over what, and for how long. A command outside them is not authority at all.

6. Cost

Power is expensive. Each subject must be separately compelled, and compulsion generates resentment that raises the cost of the next application. Authority is cheap. Compliance is general and voluntary, and the sanction stays in the background.

In one line

Legitimacy is the quality that makes people believe a ruler, a rule or an institution is entitled to be obeyed; it is what turns power into authority.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: legitimacy is the quality of rightfulness attributed to a political order, an institution, a rule or a command by those subject to it, in virtue of which they accept a duty to comply that is independent of the consequences of non-compliance; it is the ground on which authority rests and the resource by which power is converted into authority.

The word

Legitimacy comes from the Latin legitimus, lawful, from lex, law. The etymology is a trap, because in political science legitimacy means considerably more than lawfulness. A law may be perfectly valid and thoroughly illegitimate. What the word now names is rightfulness accepted, and the legal sense is only one of the grounds on which the acceptance may rest.

The two senses, and why the difference matters

This is the single distinction to get right, because a question on legitimacy is often really a question about which sense is being used.

The descriptive or sociological sense, associated with Weber. Legitimacy is a belief. A regime is legitimate if those subject to it believe it is entitled to rule. The question is empirical: do they believe it? The answer says nothing at all about whether they ought to.

The normative sense, associated with political philosophy. Legitimacy is a justification. A regime is legitimate if it actually satisfies the standards that entitle a government to be obeyed, whether or not anybody believes it does. The question is moral: is the belief warranted?

Why the two must be kept apart. On the descriptive test, a regime that has persuaded a population to believe in it is legitimate however it treats them, and a just government that nobody trusts is illegitimate. Most students find that intolerable, and the reason they find it intolerable is that they are using the normative sense. Weber's answer is that he is describing a fact about societies and not endorsing it, and that a sociologist who defined legitimacy by justice would be unable to study the regimes that were plainly obeyed and plainly unjust.

The mature position, and the one to write, is that both senses are needed and they ask different questions. The descriptive sense explains why a regime is stable; the normative sense tells you whether it deserves to be.

Beetham's three conditions

David Beetham's account is the most useful single framework for an answer, because it repairs the weakness of the purely descriptive approach without collapsing into pure philosophy. Power is legitimate, he argues, when three conditions are satisfied.

In one line

Legitimacy is what makes power cheap, durable and effective, so a government that has it can do things no amount of force could achieve, and a government losing it cannot govern however much force it has.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: legitimacy is relevant to the exercise of political power because it converts power into authority and so secures voluntary compliance; because it reduces the cost of governing to a level at which a modern state is possible at all; because it enables a government to impose burdens and survive unpopular decisions; because it makes the peaceful transfer of power possible; and because its loss produces a crisis that no exercise of power can resolve.

The seven things legitimacy does

1. It converts power into authority

A regime with legitimacy is obeyed because it is thought entitled. A regime without it is obeyed only when somebody is watching. This is the master function and the rest follow from it.

2. It makes government affordable

Consider the arithmetic. India has a population of well over a hundred crore and a few tens of lakhs of police and armed forces. If even five per cent of the population had to be individually compelled to comply with the ordinary law, the machinery would be overwhelmed within a week. Government at scale is possible only because almost everybody complies almost all the time, without anybody being sent to make them.

3. It lets a government impose burdens

Any government must sometimes do things people dislike: raise taxes, acquire land, restrict movement in an epidemic, conscript, ration. A legitimate government can do these and survive; an illegitimate one cannot attempt them.

4. It allows unpopular decisions to be accepted

A legitimate authority is obeyed by people who disagree with the particular decision. That gap between compliance and agreement is what makes a plural society governable, because in any large society some substantial group disagrees with every decision.

5. It makes the transfer of power peaceful

This is the achievement people notice least and would miss most. A defeated government hands over office to its opponents, and the machinery of the state, which was entirely under its control the day before, transfers with it. Nothing compels this. It happens because the office is accepted as belonging to whoever the process selects.

6. It stabilises the system across crises

Legitimacy is held by the constitutional order, not only by the government of the day. A war lost, a currency collapsed or a scandal exposed brings down governments in a legitimate system and brings down the system itself in an illegitimate one.

In one line

Political obligation is the duty to obey the state, and the question is not whether the state can make you obey but whether you ought to.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: political obligation is the moral duty of a citizen to obey the laws and commands of the state to which they belong, and the problem of political obligation is the question whether such a duty exists at all, on what ground it rests, to whom it is owed, how far it extends, and what may be done when it conflicts with the citizen's other duties.

Why the question is worth asking

A student's first reaction is that the question answers itself: you obey because it is the law and because there are consequences if you do not. Neither answer touches the problem.

"There are consequences" is not an obligation. A robber who points a gun at you creates consequences, and nobody says you have a duty to hand over your money. If the state's claim on you were nothing more than the ability to punish, then the state would be a very large robber, and the words "ought" and "duty" would have no work to do. This is exactly why Module I spent so long separating power from authority: the distinction was made in order to make this question possible.

"Because it is the law" is circular. Asking why you should obey the law is not answered by saying that the law says you must. The question is precisely why that saying binds you.

So the problem stands, and it is a real one. A law student will meet it in the first week of jurisprudence and will meet it again every time a client asks whether a rule must be complied with while a challenge to it is pending.

Three duties that are not the same

This is where marks are lost, so it is worth being slow.

Legal duty. What the law requires, enforceable by the courts. Whether you have a legal duty is settled by reading the statute.

Moral duty. What you ought to do, all things considered. Whether you have a moral duty is settled by argument, not by a statute.

Political obligation. The moral duty to comply with legal duties because they are imposed by the state you belong to. It sits across the other two, and that is its whole difficulty.

Take a rule requiring helmets. The legal duty comes from the statute. There may be an independent moral duty not to endanger yourself and your dependants, which would exist whether or not any statute said so. Political obligation is neither of those. It is the further claim that even if you thought the rule pointless you ought to comply, because your state enacted it.

In one line

The oldest account of law says that a law is a command issued by a sovereign to a subject, backed by a threat, and that obedience is what a subject owes; the most influential criticism of that account is that it describes a gunman and not a legal system.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the command and obedience relationship is the model of political authority in which the state, as sovereign, issues general commands to its subjects and the subjects are under a duty of habitual obedience enforced by sanctions; it was stated systematically by John Austin, and H. L. A. Hart's criticism of it is the standard starting point of modern jurisprudence.

The relationship, stated plainly

At its simplest the political relationship has two ends. At one end somebody issues a direction. At the other somebody complies. Everything in this module is about what joins the two.

Three elements make it a command relationship rather than a request or a suggestion.

A superior and an inferior. The relationship is asymmetrical: one party is in a position to require, the other to comply.

An expression of a wish, addressed to the other, that they do or not do something.

A sanction, that is, the power and the intention to inflict some evil if the wish is not complied with.

Austin's own formulation binds the three together: wherever a wish is expressed by a party who will visit an evil on you if you do not comply, the expression is a command, and you lie under a duty to obey it. Duty, command and sanction are, on this view, three names for one relationship looked at from three sides.

John Austin's command theory

Austin's account, from the early nineteenth century, is the classical statement and every later theory is a reaction to it.

Law is the command of the sovereign. A law properly so called is a general command issued by a sovereign to those subject to that sovereign.

Who is the sovereign? The person or body that receives habitual obedience from the bulk of a society and is not itself in the habit of obeying anybody else. Both halves matter: habitual obedience from below, and independence from above.

Sanction. Every law carries the threat of an evil for disobedience. Without a sanction, on this account, there is no duty and therefore no law.

Sovereignty is illimitable and indivisible. The sovereign cannot be legally limited, because a limit would require a superior to impose it, and then that superior would be the sovereign.

Consequences Austin accepted. Constitutional law, on his account, is not law properly so called but positive morality, because it purports to bind the sovereign. International law is not law either, for the same reason. And a bad law is still a law, which is Austin's famous separation of law from morals: the existence of a law is one thing, its merit or demerit another.

In one line

People obey the law for reasons that are mostly not moral at all, and the grounds that would justify obedience are a different list from the causes that produce it.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the causes of obedience are fear of sanction, habit, self-interest, ignorance of alternatives and social pressure, none of which creates a duty; the grounds of political obligation, which purport to justify obedience, are consent, gratitude, fair play, the natural duty of justice, associative membership and the common good, each of which is a distinct theory and each of which has a distinct weakness.

Why the two lists must be kept apart

A regime that is universally obeyed may have no claim on anybody, and a regime with an excellent claim may be widely disobeyed. If the reasons people actually obey were the same as the reasons they ought to, then the most feared government would be the most legitimate one, which nobody believes.

So: causes explain, and grounds justify. Answer both, label both, and never offer one as the other.

Why people DO obey: the causes

Fear of the sanction. The most obvious and the least important. Most people go their whole lives without calculating the penalty for most offences, and the penalty for the great majority of rules is never applied to anybody they know.

Habit and socialisation. People obey because they have always obeyed, because their parents did, and because obeying is what one does. Austin built his sovereign on exactly this, calling it habitual obedience.

Self-interest. Compliance often pays. Registering a document, paying a tax on time, obtaining a licence: each buys something the person wants.

Convenience and coordination. For a large class of rules the content does not matter and the coordination does. Driving on the left, standard weights, the side of the platform a train arrives at. Once a rule exists it is in nobody's interest to deviate.

Social pressure. The opinion of neighbours, colleagues and family enforces more rules than any inspectorate.

Ignorance of any alternative. A great deal of obedience is the absence of the thought that things could be otherwise. This is the third face of power in Module I, seen from below.

Belief in legitimacy. Some people obey because they think the state is entitled to be obeyed, which is where the causes and the grounds finally touch.

Studies of compliance repeatedly find that the belief that authorities are entitled and act fairly predicts obedience better than the perceived probability of punishment. That finding, which is what Module I meant by saying authority is cheap and power expensive, is worth a line in an answer.

In one line

Raphael's contribution to this subject is not a new theory of why we must obey; it is a way of putting the question that separates two things students run together, the problem of political obligation and the problem of political authority.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: D. D. Raphael treats political obligation as one of the central problems of political philosophy, distinguishing the question of the citizen's duty to obey from the question of the state's right to command, and examining the classical grounds of that duty, consent, general will, gratitude, utility and the common good, and finding each of them insufficient to justify obedience without qualification, so that obedience to law is a strong but defeasible duty rather than an absolute one.

Why MU names him, and how to write about him

Raphael, who taught philosophy at Glasgow and later at Imperial College London, wrote Problems of Political Philosophy, first published in 1970 and revised in 1990. It is one of the standard short introductions used in Indian syllabuses, and MU has followed his arrangement of the subject: the chapter you are reading exists because his book has a chapter on political obligation that sets the problem out in the way this module then works through it.

An examiner asking about "Raphael's views on political obligation" is testing whether you can do three things.

State the problem precisely, in the way a philosopher would rather than in the way a newspaper would.

Separate obligation from authority, which is the distinction his treatment turns on.

Run the classical grounds against the problem and say why each is insufficient by itself.

Those three are what the rest of this chapter gives you, and every one of them is taught in this book from sources that were read.

The distinction the topic turns on

The problem of political obligation is about the citizen. Why should I obey?

The problem of political authority, sometimes called political power or the right to rule, is about the state. What entitles it to command me and to enforce its commands?

These look like the same question from two ends, and they are not. They can come apart in both directions.

Authority without obligation. A state may be entitled to make and enforce law and yet no citizen have a duty to obey it. That is exactly the position of the philosophical anarchist described in chapter 240: the state may permissibly govern, and the citizen owes it nothing.

Obligation without authority. A citizen may have a duty to comply with a rule for reasons of fairness or of the common good even where the body issuing it has no title to command at all, as where an unrecognised body's traffic directions prevent accidents.

In one line

Five theories, five answers to one question, and they can be arranged in a single line running from "obey because God said so" to "obey because it has always been so".

In the wording a student can write in an exam: MU sets five theories of political obligation, the divine right theory of kings, the social contract or consent theory, the theory of force, the theory of prescriptive possession, and the Marxist view; the first four are attempts to justify the duty to obey and the fifth denies that any such general duty exists.

The five, in one sentence each

Divine right of kings. The ruler holds power from God, so disobedience to the ruler is disobedience to God. Chapter 290.

Social contract and consent. People agreed, expressly or by implication, to be governed, and are bound by their own agreement. Chapters 300 to 340, which take Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau separately because they contract for different things on different terms.

Force. The state arose from conquest and rests on superior strength; obedience is owed to whoever can compel it. Chapter 350.

Prescriptive possession. The arrangement has stood so long that its origins may no longer be questioned, and long possession itself confers title. Chapter 360.

Marx. The state is an instrument of one class against another, so there is no general duty to obey it at all. Chapter 370.

The line they can be arranged on

Set them out by where the obligation comes from, and the whole module becomes one argument rather than five.

From outside the human world. Divine right. The duty exists because a source above all human beings placed the ruler there.

From the citizen's own act. Social contract and consent. The duty exists because you did something, promised or accepted or took a benefit.

From nothing at all except superior strength. Force. Strictly this is not a theory of obligation but a denial that one is needed, and saying so is worth a mark.

From time. Prescription. The duty exists because the arrangement is old, and its age is what makes questioning it improper.

Nowhere. Marx. There is no general duty; there is a class that rules and a class that is ruled, and calling the relation a duty is part of how it is maintained.

Notice that the middle three answer the four problems from chapter 240 quite differently. Contract explains particularity best, because you contracted with this state. Prescription explains generality best, because age covers the whole arrangement. Force explains none of them, which is its defect. And Marx explains why the question keeps being asked, which is a different kind of contribution.

In one line

The divine right theory says the king holds his crown directly from God, so resisting the king is resisting God, and no subject may judge him.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the divine right of kings is the doctrine that monarchical authority is derived immediately from God, that the king is accountable to God alone and to no earthly authority, that the crown descends by hereditary and indefeasible right, and that the subject's duty of obedience is therefore absolute and non-resistance is a religious as well as a political obligation.

The four propositions

Every version of the theory contains these four, and an answer that lists them has the doctrine.

1. Monarchy is divinely ordained. Kingship is not a human invention or a convenience but an institution appointed by God.

2. Hereditary and indefeasible right. The crown descends by birth, and no act of the king and no decision of any body can defeat the right of the lawful heir. This is what "indefeasible" means and it is the proposition that did most work politically, because it made the succession unarguable.

3. The king is accountable to God alone. No earthly body, no parliament and no court may judge him. He may be a bad king and answer for it in the next world, and nowhere else.

4. Non-resistance and passive obedience. The subject may not resist by force. The most the theory allows is what its own writers called passive obedience: where the king commands something forbidden by God, the subject may decline to perform it and must then submit to the punishment without resistance.

That fourth proposition is the answer to the University's question about the sanction. The sanction behind the obligation is divine: disobedience is sin, and the penalty is God's, not merely the king's. This is what makes the theory so powerful, because the subject cannot escape by escaping the king's officers.

Where it came from

The theory was not medieval in the form set out above. In the Middle Ages the standard European view gave the Church a role in conferring or confirming royal authority, and the Pope claimed to be able to release subjects from their allegiance. The fully developed divine right theory was an early modern doctrine, forged in exactly that quarrel: it was designed to cut out the Church as an intermediary.

James VI and I stated it for England, arguing in his own writings that kings are God's lieutenants on earth and sit upon God's throne, and that to dispute what a king may do is sedition.

Sir Robert Filmer gave it its systematic form in Patriarcha, published in 1680 after his death. His argument is patriarchal: God gave Adam authority over his family and over the earth; that authority descended to the patriarchs and from them to kings; so royal authority is fatherly authority, and every subject stands to the king as a child to a father. This is why the theory needs no contract and no consent: a child does not consent to a father.

In one line

The social contract says that political authority is a human creation: people who were not under any government agreed to set one up, and the duty to obey is nothing more mysterious than the duty to keep your own agreement.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the social contract theory holds that political authority and the duty of obedience arise from an agreement, made by individuals in a pre-political condition called the state of nature, to leave that condition and submit to a common authority; the theory therefore founds obligation on the consent of the governed rather than on divine appointment, superior force or immemorial custom.

The machinery, common to every version

Every social contract theory has the same four parts. Learn them once and the three thinkers become variations rather than three separate systems.

1. The state of nature

A condition without government, used to ask what political authority is for. It is not, in these writers, a claim about prehistory. It is a device: strip away the state and see what is missing.

The three answers differ sharply, and the difference decides everything that follows. If the state of nature is intolerable, the contract must buy security at any price. If it is inconvenient but tolerable, the contract can be a limited grant with conditions attached.

2. Natural law and natural rights

What people have before any government: rules binding on them without any legislator, and rights they hold without any state to confer them. This is the part of the theory a law student should attend to most, because a right that exists before the state can be asserted against the state, and the whole apparatus of fundamental rights descends from this idea.

3. The contract itself

The act by which the condition is left. Two questions decide the shape of the whole theory.

Who are the parties? Each with all the others, or the people with a ruler? A contract among the people leaves the ruler outside it and therefore not bound by it, which is Hobbes's route to absolutism. A contract that includes the ruler makes the ruler a party who can breach.

What is transferred? Everything, or only what is needed for the purpose? Total surrender produces a sovereign with no limits. A limited grant produces a government with defined powers.

4. The obligation that results

Because you agreed, you are bound. The duty to obey is the duty to keep a promise, which is the most familiar moral duty there is, and that familiarity is the theory's great attraction.

What consent explains that nothing else does

Particularity. You are bound to this state because it was this agreement you made.

In one line

Hobbes says life without government is so unbearable that rational people would hand over everything to a sovereign with no limits, and having handed it over they can never take it back.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: Hobbes holds that in the state of nature, where there is no common power to keep men in awe, there is a war of every man against every man in which life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short; that reason therefore dictates a covenant by which every man surrenders his right of governing himself to a sovereign, on condition that every other man does the same; and that since the sovereign is not a party to that covenant, the sovereign's power is absolute, indivisible and irrevocable, and the subject has no right of resistance except where life itself is directly threatened.

The state of nature

Hobbes begins from human nature rather than from history. Men are roughly equal in body and mind, so that even the weakest can kill the strongest by stealth or by combining with others. From equality comes equality of hope; from equality of hope, competition for the same things; and from competition, war.

He identifies three causes of quarrel: competition, for gain; diffidence, meaning distrust, for safety; and glory, for reputation.

The result is the condition he calls warre, and he is careful about the word: war does not consist only in fighting but in the known disposition to it, as foul weather lies not in a shower or two but in an inclination to rain over many days.

What is lost in that condition is the famous passage. There is no place for industry, because the fruit is uncertain; no cultivation of the earth, no navigation, no building, no arts, no letters, no society; and, worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death. And, in Hobbes's own words, the life of man is "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short."

Is it a historical claim? Hobbes anticipates the objection and answers it in the same passage: a man who doubts the inference from the passions should consider his own conduct, arming himself when he takes a journey and locking his doors at night, and ask what opinion he has of his fellow subjects when he rides armed. The state of nature is a claim about what people are, evidenced by what they do inside a state.

Natural right and natural law

The right of nature, in Hobbes, is the liberty of each to use their own power for the preservation of their own life, and to do anything they judge necessary to it. In that condition every man has a right to everything, including to another's body, which is why the right is worthless: a right everybody has to everything secures nothing to anybody.

In one line

Locke says people set up government to fix the three things missing in an otherwise tolerable state of nature, that they hand over only what is needed to fix them, and that a government which breaks that trust may be replaced.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: Locke holds that the state of nature is a state of perfect freedom and equality governed by a law of nature which teaches that no one ought to harm another in life, health, liberty or possessions; that it lacks an established law, an impartial judge and a power to execute judgment, and is therefore inconvenient rather than intolerable; that men therefore consent to form a political society and entrust it with a limited power, held as a trust for their preservation; and that when the trust is broken the power reverts to the people, who may resume it and establish a new government.

The state of nature, and why the difference from Hobbes decides everything

Locke's state of nature is a state of perfect freedom to order one's actions and dispose of one's possessions as one thinks fit, and a state of equality, in which no one has more power or jurisdiction than another.

It is not a state of licence. It is governed by the law of nature, which is reason, and which teaches that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in their life, health, liberty or possessions.

Two features of that condition matter enormously.

Property exists before government. Locke's account is that a person owns their own person and therefore their labour, so that by mixing their labour with what nature has left in common they make it theirs. Property is thus a natural right, not a creation of the state. This is why a Lockean government cannot simply take property: it did not create it, and it was set up to protect it.

Everybody may enforce the law of nature. In the state of nature each person may punish a transgressor. Locke calls this a strange doctrine and defends it: without it the law of nature would be vain.

The three inconveniences

Locke's state of nature is defective, but not in Hobbes's way. There are exactly three defects, and they are worth memorising because the powers of government correspond to them one for one.

1. There is no established, settled, known law, received by common consent as the standard of right and wrong.

2. There is no known and indifferent judge with authority to determine disputes according to that law.

3. There is no power to back and support the sentence and to give it due execution.

In one line

Rousseau says you can be governed and still be free, if the law you obey is a law you helped make and which aims at the good of everybody including you.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: Rousseau seeks a form of association which defends the person and goods of each member with the whole common force, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone and remain as free as before; his solution is the total alienation of each associate with all his rights to the whole community, so that sovereignty rests permanently in the people acting as a body, and the law they make expresses the general will, which aims always at the common interest.

The problem he sets himself

Rousseau's book opens with the sentence everybody quotes and few can place: "Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains." Read the next lines, because they contain the actual project. He says one who thinks himself the master of others remains a greater slave than they; that he does not know how the change came about; but that he thinks he can answer the question what can make it legitimate.

That is the whole book in one sentence. Rousseau is not asking how the state arose. He is asking what would make it rightful.

He rejects two answers immediately.

Force cannot make right. If force alone justified obedience, then the moment a people could shake off the yoke and did so, it would do still better, since it would be regaining its liberty by the same right by which it was taken. An obligation that disappears when the strength behind it disappears was never an obligation.

Nobody can contract into slavery. To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, and an agreement which gives everything on one side and nothing on the other is void for want of any equivalent.

The contract

Rousseau states the terms of the compact himself, and this is the passage to quote: "Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole."

Three features of that formula do all the work.

The alienation is total. Everybody gives everything. This sounds worse than Hobbes and is not, for the reason in the next point.

Everybody gives to everybody, so nobody gives to anybody. Rousseau's own argument is that in giving himself to all, each man gives himself to nobody, and since there is no associate over whom he does not acquire the same right as he yields others over himself, he gains an equivalent for everything he loses, with more force to preserve what he has.

In one line

Consent is the most attractive ground of political obligation and the one that most obviously did not happen, and the whole argument is about what may be substituted for it.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: consent theory holds that political authority is legitimate and obedience is owed only where those subject to it have agreed to be governed; the difficulty is that express consent is given by almost nobody, tacit consent must be inferred from conduct that has other explanations, and hypothetical consent is not consent at all but a claim that the arrangement is reasonable, so that consent theory either binds very few people or ceases to be about consent.

Why consent is so attractive

It is the clearest source of duty we know. Nobody disputes that a person who undertakes something is bound by it. Consent theory borrows that certainty.

It respects the person. If authority requires my agreement, then I am not merely material to be governed. This is the moral heart of the theory and it survives every technical objection.

It explains particularity effortlessly. I am bound to this state because it was with this state that the undertaking was made.

It generates limits automatically. If I agreed to a government for certain purposes, it has authority for those purposes and no others.

It makes the state's coercion intelligible. Enforcing a rule against somebody who agreed to be bound by it is very different from enforcing it against somebody who never did.

Express consent

What it is. An actual, identifiable undertaking: an oath of allegiance, an oath of office, a naturalisation ceremony, enlistment in the armed forces.

Its strength. Where it exists, the obligation is beyond argument. A person who has sworn to uphold the Constitution has an obligation of exactly the kind consent theory describes.

Its weakness. Almost nobody gives it. In any population, the overwhelming majority are citizens by birth and have never been asked to agree to anything. If express consent were required, most people would owe nothing.

Notice a further problem that is worth marks: the people who do give express consent are officials, soldiers and naturalised citizens. On a strict express consent theory the state has authority over precisely those it employs, and none over ordinary citizens, which inverts what the theory was meant to establish.

Tacit consent

What it is. Consent inferred from conduct rather than declared in words. Locke relies on it: a person who enjoys any part of the dominions of a government, he says, gives their tacit consent and is obliged to obedience.

The conduct usually relied on. Continuing to reside in the territory, voting, using public services, accepting the protection of the courts, holding property.

In one line

The theory of force says the state was born of conquest and lives by superior strength, so obedience is owed to whoever is strong enough to compel it.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the force theory holds that the state originated in the subjugation of the weak by the strong, that its essential characteristic is the possession of coercive power, and that political authority rests on the capacity to compel obedience rather than on any agreement, divine appointment or moral title.

The two claims inside it, which must be separated

Almost every mistake in answering this topic comes from running these together.

The historical claim. States actually arose by force. War, conquest and subjugation produced the earliest political units, and continued to produce them afterwards.

The normative claim. Force is what makes obedience owed. Might, in the slogan, makes right.

The first is largely true. The second is almost universally rejected. A good answer says so in its opening paragraph.

Who argued it

The ancient version. The claim that justice is nothing but the interest of the stronger is put in Plato's Republic by Thrasymachus, and answering it is much of what the dialogue is about.

The historical school. Nineteenth century writers, of whom Ludwig Gumplowicz and Franz Oppenheimer are the ones usually named, argued that the state arose from the conquest of one group by another and is essentially an organisation by which a victorious group exploits a defeated one.

The German account of the state and war. Writers in that tradition treated war as the means by which states are made and remade, and force as the state's defining attribute.

Anarchists, from the other side. Anarchist writers accepted the description entirely and drew the opposite conclusion: if the state is founded on force, it deserves no obedience at all.

Notice that the last group agree with the theory's premise and reject its conclusion, which is the fastest way to see that the premise does not carry the conclusion.

What is right in it

An answer that only refutes the theory misses several marks.

Historically it is well supported. Very few states were founded by agreement. Conquest, annexation, partition and revolution are how the political map was actually made.

Force is a real element of every state. Weber's own definition of the state is the human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Force is not incidental to the state; it is part of what the state is.

It corrects a sentimental picture. Contract theories can make the state sound like a club that members joined. Force theory is a useful reminder that boundaries were drawn by armies and that consent had nothing to do with where most people were born.

In one line

The theory of prescription says that an arrangement which has lasted long enough acquires a title from its own duration, so that asking how it began is no longer a permitted question.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the theory of prescriptive possession holds that political authority is legitimated by long, uninterrupted and unchallenged enjoyment, so that a constitution or a government which has been accepted and obeyed over many generations acquires a title which does not depend on the manner of its origin, and which the present generation is not entitled to reopen.

The idea, and the word

Prescription, in law, is the acquisition of a right by long use, and its mirror image is limitation, the extinction of a right by long failure to assert it. A person who occupies land openly and continuously, as of right, for the period the law prescribes, acquires a title good against the world, and the true owner's right is extinguished. Nobody thinks this is an endorsement of trespass. It is a rule about what happens when a state of affairs has lasted long enough that unsettling it would do more harm than leaving it.

The political theory is the same idea applied to constitutions. If a government has been obeyed for centuries, its title comes from that, and the question how the first ruler acquired power is no longer a live one.

Edmund Burke, the theory's great exponent

Burke is the name to give, and his argument in the Reflections on the Revolution in France has four parts a student should be able to reproduce.

Society is a partnership across generations. It is a partnership not only between those living, but between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are to be born. That is why the present generation cannot simply cancel the arrangement: it holds the estate for others.

Prescription is the most solid of all titles. Long possession is not merely evidence of a title; it is a title, and Burke says it is the soundest one there is, precisely because it has been tested by time in a way that a paper theory has not.

Institutions carry latent wisdom. An arrangement that has worked for centuries encodes solutions to problems nobody now remembers, discovered by trial and error across many lifetimes. An individual reformer's reason, however brilliant, is a small stock compared with the accumulated stock of the ages.

Therefore reform, not reconstruction. Burke is not opposed to change; he supported the American colonists and attacked misgovernment in India. His objection is to demolishing an inherited constitution on the strength of an abstract theory, because the theorist can see what is wrong and cannot see what the arrangement was quietly doing.

In one line

Marx's answer to "why should I obey the state?" is that the question has been asked the wrong way round: the state is an instrument by which one class holds another down, so there is no general duty to obey it, and the belief that there is one is part of how the arrangement is maintained.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: Marx offers no theory of political obligation but a rejection of the question; since political power is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another, and law and morality form a superstructure serving the class that owns the means of production, obedience to the state is not a moral duty owed by citizens but a condition of class rule, which will disappear along with classes and with the state itself.

Why Marx is not answering the same question

Every other theory in this module takes the question at face value and offers a ground: God, agreement, force, time. Marx does something different, and an answer that misses this misses the point.

He treats the question itself as a symptom. Asking "what obliges me to obey the state?" presupposes that the state is a neutral body standing above society, whose claim on me needs explaining. Marx denies the presupposition. The state is not above society; it is one part of society organised against another. Once that is seen, the question changes from "why must I obey?" to "whose interest does my obeying serve?".

In the vocabulary of chapter 240, Marx does not answer the four problems of generality, particularity, content independence and universality. He denies that there is anything there to be explained, which is why he belongs in a list of theories of obligation while being of a different kind from the rest.

The argument, in four steps

1. The state is an instrument of class rule

The proposition is stated in the Manifesto in the sentence to quote: "The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie." And more generally: "Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another."

If that is what political power is, then obedience to it is not a relation between a citizen and a public authority. It is a relation between a subordinate class and the organised power of a dominant one.

2. Law is part of the same apparatus

Law defines and protects property, enforces contracts between parties of very unequal strength, and calls the arrangement freedom. The Manifesto addresses the bourgeois reader directly on this point, saying that his very ideas are products of the conditions of bourgeois production and property, and that his jurisprudence is but the will of his class made into a law for all.

In one line

An unjust law is one that is validly made and ought not to have been made, and the tests for identifying one are that it treats people unequally without reason, that it takes away what it may not take away, that it was made or applied without fairness, or that its own purpose could not be stated in public.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: an unjust law is a rule which satisfies the formal requirements for validity in its legal system but violates the standards by which the content of law is judged, principally equality, the protection of basic interests, procedural fairness and the possibility of public justification; whether such a rule remains law is disputed between natural law theory, which holds that a sufficiently unjust rule is no law at all, and legal positivism, which holds that it is law and ought not to be obeyed.

The prior question: can a law be unjust at all?

Before you can ask what an unjust law is, you must be able to say that a law can be unjust, and two traditions answer differently.

Natural law. There is a standard above enacted law by which enacted law is judged, and a rule that fails badly enough is not law at all. The tradition's slogan is lex iniusta non est lex, an unjust law is not a law. On this view the citizen faced with such a rule is not facing a law and so faces no question of obedience.

Legal positivism. The existence of a law is one thing, its merit or demerit another. A rule enacted by a competent authority in the prescribed manner is law however wicked it is, and it should be described as law and then condemned.

Why the positivist position is the more useful one here, and Hart's reason for it. If a monstrous rule is said not to be law, the citizen's problem disappears by definition and the question of what to do about it is never asked. Saying "this is law, and it is too iniquitous to obey" states the problem accurately and keeps it open. A student who makes this point has understood the whole topic, and the point matters practically: a court in India does not say that section 377 was never law; it says the section was law and is now void.

Notice that Indian constitutional practice is a third thing, and is closer to natural law in effect while remaining positivist in form. A statute inconsistent with the Fundamental Rights is void, but it is void because a higher enacted rule says so, not because of a standard outside all enacted law.

In one line

Resistance, revolution, civil disobedience and dissent are four different responses to an unjust law, they differ in what is broken, whether force is used and whether punishment is accepted, and the five men MU names chose differently between them.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the right of resistance is the claim that a citizen is entitled, and in some accounts obliged, to refuse obedience to a government that has exceeded or betrayed the purpose for which authority was conferred; it ranges from dissent, which uses lawful means to oppose, through civil disobedience, which breaks the law openly and non-violently and accepts the penalty, to revolution, which seeks to replace the government by force.

The four things, kept apart

This is the whole value of the chapter, and the table at the end is what an answer should reproduce.

Dissent. Disagreement expressed by lawful means: speech, writing, assembly, petition, voting, litigation, a strike within the law. No law is broken. In India dissent is not merely tolerated; it is a fundamental right under article 19(1)(a) and 19(1)(b), and the courts have repeatedly said that the space for it is what distinguishes a democracy.

Conscientious refusal. A person refuses to do a particular thing because their conscience forbids it: a doctor who will not perform a procedure, a person who will not take an oath in a particular form, a soldier who will not fire on a crowd. It is personal rather than persuasive: the object is to keep one's own hands clean, not to change public policy.

Civil disobedience. A public, non-violent and conscientious breach of law, undertaken to change a law or policy, by a person who accepts the legal consequences. Each of those four features is doing work, and dropping any one of them turns it into something else. It is not secret, or it could not persuade. It is not violent, or it destroys the moral advantage it depends on. It is not self interested. And the penalty is accepted, which is what demonstrates that the disobedient still accepts the legal order as a whole while rejecting one part of it.

Revolution or rebellion. An attempt to overthrow the government or the constitutional order itself, usually by force. The target is not one law but the regime.

The single most useful distinction for an examination. Civil disobedience breaks a law and accepts the system. Revolution rejects the system. That is why civil disobedience can be argued for inside a constitutional order and revolution cannot.

Where the right of resistance comes from

Every theory of obligation in chapter 280 produces a different answer, and the differences are worth a paragraph.

In one line

Green says the state rests on will and not on force, that a citizen obeys because the state maintains the conditions in which people can live a moral life, and that where a law attacks those conditions the ground of obedience is gone.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: T. H. Green holds that political obligation rests not on force or on a contract but on the common recognition of a common good; that the state exists to maintain the conditions under which its members can realise their moral capacities, which he describes as hindering the hindrances to the good life; that rights are powers recognised by society as necessary to that end; and that a right of resistance therefore exists where the sovereign's command destroys the very conditions the state exists to secure, subject always to the effect of resistance on the social fabric as a whole.

The position Green is arguing from

Green is an idealist, which in this context means something precise: he thinks the state is not an external machine standing over individuals but the arrangement through which individuals become what they are capable of being. Everything in his account follows from that.

"Will, not force, is the basis of the state." This is the heading of section 113, and it is the sentence every Indian textbook attributes to Green without saying where it is. His point is not that states never use force; it is that force cannot explain why they hold together. What holds a state together is the common recognition, by its members, of a common good.

The contract theorists went wrong in the same way as the force theorists. Green's own criticism, in the same section, is that theories explaining political obligation by contract treat sovereign and subject apart, whereas the two are correlative: there is no sovereign without subjects who recognise the sovereign, and no subject except in relation to a recognised sovereign. A contract between two pre-existing parties gets the relation the wrong way round.

But the contract theorists were groping at something true. Green says the theory of contract expresses, in a confused way, the truth that it is only through the common recognition of a common good that political society exists at all. That generosity is characteristic and is worth reproducing in an answer: Green does not simply refute his predecessors, he says what they were reaching for.

Freedom, and why it is not being left alone

This is Green's most influential contribution and it returns at topic 3.1.1.

Freedom is positive. It is not the absence of restraint but the positive power or capacity of doing or enjoying something worth doing or enjoying, and doing it in common with others.

In one line

Laski says the state has to earn obedience: we obey it because of what it achieves, we are the judges of whether it is achieving it, and where it is being used for ends incompatible with its nature we are under a duty to resist.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: Harold Laski holds that the state is not an end in itself but an organisation for enabling its members to realise themselves at their best; that power is always a trust held upon conditions, so that our obligation to obey depends on the degree to which the state achieves its purpose and we are the judges of that achievement; and that where the state's power is exercised for ends incompatible with its nature the civic outcome is a duty of resistance, exercisable only at the margins of political conduct and only where there is reasonable ground to believe the change sought will produce the end desired.

The starting point: the state is judged by what it does

Laski's whole position is contained in a passage a student should be able to state closely.

He argues that there is a difference between the purpose institutions embody and the substance they give to that purpose, and that our obligation to obey the State is, law apart, an obligation dependent upon the degree to which the State achieves its purpose. Then the sentence that makes him famous: "We are the judges of that achievement." We must obey the state, he says, not because its theoretic purpose is a splendid one, but because of our conviction that it is genuinely pursuing it.

Three things are packed in there.

Obligation is conditional. It is not owed to the state as such, and it does not follow from the state's existence. It follows from performance.

The condition is the state's purpose, which for Laski is that each member, in common with their fellows, may be themselves at their best.

The citizen is the judge. Not the government, not the courts, and not a theorist. The person subject to the decision assesses whether the state is doing its job.

Power is a trust, and scrutiny is a duty

Laski's second key passage develops this and adds an obligation most writers do not.

He says that power is always a trust, and it is always held upon conditions; that the will of the state is subject to the scrutiny of all who come within the ambit of its decisions; and that because it moulds the substance of their lives they have the right to pass judgment on the quality of its effort. Then he goes further: "They have, indeed, the duty so to pass judgment", because it is the plain lesson of the historic record that the wants of men will only secure recognition to the point that they are forcibly articulate.

In one line

Gandhi's answer is that obeying an unjust law is itself a form of taking part in the injustice, and that the way out is to disobey openly and take the punishment, which he calls using soul-force instead of body-force.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: Gandhi holds that a law is not entitled to obedience merely because a legislature made it; that a citizen who complies with a law repugnant to conscience is a partner in the wrong it does; that the remedy is passive resistance, which he defines as a method of securing rights by personal suffering and describes as the reverse of resistance by arms; and that the disobedient must accept the penalty for the breach, since it is the willingness to suffer, and not the breach itself, that constitutes the force of the method.

The passage that carries the topic

In chapter 17 of Hind Swaraj the Reader asks the Editor to explain passive resistance, and the answer is the text to know.

"Passive resistance is a method of securing rights by personal suffering; it is the reverse of resistance by arms."

Then the worked distinction, in Gandhi's own words. When I refuse to do a thing that is repugnant to my conscience, I use soul-force. Suppose the Government of the day has passed a law which is applicable to me, and I do not like it. If by using violence I force the Government to repeal the law, I am employing what may be termed body-force. If I do not obey the law and accept the penalty for its breach, I use soul-force. It involves sacrifice of self.

Read that carefully, because it contains the entire doctrine and students routinely lose half of it. There are two ways of not complying, and only one of them is Gandhi's. Forcing the repeal is body-force. Disobeying and taking the punishment is soul-force. The penalty is not an unfortunate consequence of the method; it is the method.

The four propositions

1. A law's provenance does not settle its claim. Gandhi rejects the idea that a legislature's enactment is by itself a reason for a person to act against conscience. The law's claim on me is not established by the fact that somebody with power passed it.

2. Obedience to an unjust law is participation in it. This is the moral premise. A tax paid to an unjust regime funds it; a rule complied with is a rule that works. The person who obeys quietly is not neutral, and cannot regard the injustice as somebody else's doing.

3. The remedy is refusal plus suffering. Refusal alone is defiance; refusal with acceptance of the penalty is soul-force. The suffering is what communicates, because it demonstrates that the resister is not acting out of self-interest and that they have counted the cost.

In one line

King's contribution is a test for telling a just law from an unjust one, and a defence of breaking the unjust one openly while professing the highest respect for law itself.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: Martin Luther King Jr defended civil disobedience on the ground that an unjust law is no law in the moral sense, offering a test by which a just law uplifts human personality while an unjust law degrades it, that an unjust law is one a majority imposes on a minority which it does not make binding on itself, and that a law is unjust where those bound by it had no part in enacting it; and he insisted that one who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly and with a willingness to accept the penalty, which is the highest respect for law.

The situation the argument arose in

King wrote in April 1963 from a cell in Birmingham, Alabama, where he had been arrested for taking part in a demonstration against racial segregation in breach of a court injunction. The letter answers a public statement by eight local clergymen who agreed that segregation was wrong but urged that the campaign was untimely, that the courts should be used instead of the streets, and that outsiders should not have come.

That is worth stating, because it explains the shape of the argument. King is not answering a defender of segregation. He is answering people who agreed with his goal and objected to his method, which is exactly the objection every student instinctively makes, and it is why the letter is on so many syllabuses.

The four steps of a campaign

King describes non-violent direct action as a disciplined sequence, and this is the part most easily reproduced accurately.

1. Collection of the facts to determine whether injustices are alive.

2. Negotiation with those in a position to remedy them.

3. Self-purification, in which those who will take part train themselves, ask whether they can endure being struck without striking back and being jailed without bitterness, and withdraw if they cannot.

4. Direct action, only after the first three have been done.

Notice the resemblance to Gandhi's conditions, which is not accidental: King had studied Gandhi's campaigns closely and said so. The differences are that King's sequence is stated as an organisational method for a movement, and that self-purification is a formal stage with a test attached.

The tests for an unjust law

This is the most examinable material in the chapter, and there are four tests.

1. The moral test. A just law squares with the moral law; an unjust law is out of harmony with it. Any law that uplifts human personality is just; any law that degrades human personality is unjust.

In one line

Mandela's argument is that non-violence is a tactic rather than a principle, that a government which answers peaceful protest with force and closes every lawful channel leaves its opponents no other means, and that the responsibility for the turn to force lies with the government that closed the channels.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: Nelson Mandela defended the decision to abandon exclusively non-violent methods on the ground that fifty years of constitutional and peaceful struggle had produced only more repressive legislation and fewer rights; that the government met peaceful demands with force and outlawed the organisations pressing them; that in those conditions continued non-violence would have been a passive submission to a permanent state of inferiority; and that violence directed at property and at the machinery of the state, and calculated to avoid loss of life, was the least destructive of the alternatives remaining.

The situation

Mandela was tried at Rivonia in 1963 and 1964 with others, on charges arising from sabotage and from the activities of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the organisation formed to carry it out. He faced the death penalty. Rather than deny the acts, he made a long statement from the dock in which he set out why the decision had been taken and accepted personal responsibility for it. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and served twenty-seven years.

The context that matters for this topic is the legal one. Apartheid was not lawlessness. It was a comprehensive body of legislation: statutes classifying people by race, allocating land by race, requiring passes, prohibiting mixed marriages, reserving occupations, and removing the franchise. That is what makes the case central to a module on unjust laws. Everything Mandela objected to had been validly enacted by a parliament.

The argument, in five steps

1. The struggle began, and long remained, non-violent. Mandela's account emphasises that the movement had for decades used petitions, deputations, strikes, boycotts and defiance campaigns in which volunteers deliberately broke unjust laws and submitted to arrest, which is exactly the technique of the two previous chapters.

2. Peaceful methods were met with force and with more law. Demonstrations were fired on; leaders were banned, restricted and imprisoned; and the response to each campaign was fresh legislation making the next one an offence. The organisations themselves were declared unlawful, which removed even the possibility of lawful political activity.

3. Non-violence was a tactic, not a creed. This is the point on which Mandela differs from Gandhi and the point an answer must state clearly. For Gandhi, non-violence is a principle bound up with truth and with the relation of means to ends. For Mandela it was a method, adopted because it was thought effective, and to be reconsidered when it ceased to be. When the government's response made peaceful protest impossible, continuing it would have been not a moral stand but an acceptance of permanent subjection.

In one line

Satyagraha is the technique of holding to the truth by accepting suffering rather than inflicting it, conducted in a disciplined sequence, in which the resister breaks an unjust law openly and takes the punishment.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: satyagraha, from satya meaning truth and agraha meaning firmness or holding fast, is the Gandhian technique of resisting injustice by refusing to comply with it while accepting the suffering that the refusal brings, without violence and without hatred of the opponent, the object being not to defeat the opponent but to convert them.

The word, and why Gandhi coined it

Gandhi first used the English phrase passive resistance, and came to dislike it for two reasons: it suggested weakness, and it suggested the method was for those too weak to fight. He wanted a word for a method requiring more courage than fighting, so the term was coined from satya, truth, and agraha, firmness or holding fast.

Two things follow from the etymology and both are examinable.

Truth is the object, not victory. A satyagrahi who discovers that their own case is wrong is required to abandon it. This is what distinguishes the technique from a strategy of moral pressure.

Firmness, not passivity. The satyagrahi initiates. They break the law, publish their intention and bear the consequence. Nothing about it is passive except the refusal to strike back.

The three foundations

Satya, truth. The case must be true and must be stated truthfully, including what tells against it. The opponent must never be misled.

Ahimsa, non-violence. Not merely refraining from physical harm, but the absence of ill-will in act, word and thought. Gandhi's positive formulation is that it is love of the opponent, extended to those who wrong you.

Tapasya, self-suffering. The willingness to accept the consequence of the refusal, including imprisonment, loss of property and physical injury, without retaliation. This is the operative element: as Hind Swaraj puts it, if I do not obey the law and accept the penalty for its breach, I use soul-force, and it involves sacrifice of self.

How the three work together. Truth supplies the case; non-violence removes the opponent's justification and preserves the possibility of reconciliation; and self-suffering is what communicates, because a person who accepts loss rather than inflicts it cannot easily be accused of self-interest.

The rules of a satyagraha campaign

Gandhi's own discipline, and an answer that gives it in sequence is a strong answer.

Before the campaign.

1. Exhaust every other means: petition, negotiation, arbitration, and appeal to the authority concerned.
2. State the demand precisely and make it minimal, so that the opponent knows exactly what would end the campaign.
3. Give notice to the authority, saying what will be done and when. Nothing is secret.
4. Prepare the participants: training, a pledge, and the withdrawal of anybody who cannot maintain non-violence under provocation.

In one line

Punishment is the deliberate infliction of suffering by the state on somebody it has found guilty, and because that is what it is, it needs a justification that ordinary state action does not.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: punishment is the intentional imposition of a hardship or deprivation on a person for a breach of a rule, by an authority constituted for the purpose and against the offender's will, and it requires justification because the state is doing to a person, deliberately, the very kind of thing the criminal law exists to prevent private persons doing to each other.

What punishment is

The standard analysis gives five elements, and an answer that lists them handles almost any question in this block.

1. It involves hardship or deprivation. Something the person would not choose: liberty, money, reputation, and at the limit life.

2. It is imposed for an offence against a rule.

3. It is imposed on an actual or supposed offender for that offence.

4. It is intentionally administered by human beings other than the offender.

5. It is imposed by an authority constituted by the legal system against which the offence was committed.

Every element is doing work. Remove the second and you have arbitrary harm; remove the third and you have punishing the innocent; remove the fifth and you have a lynching. When a question asks you to distinguish punishment from something else, it is one of these five that has been dropped.

What it is not

It is not compensation. Compensation looks at the victim's loss and restores it; punishment looks at the offender's wrong and imposes a deprivation. The same act may attract both, and they are different in aim, in measure and in who receives the benefit.

It is not a tax or a fee. A fee is a price for a permitted activity; a penalty marks the activity as forbidden. Two identical payments may be either, and which they are depends on whether the conduct is being priced or condemned.

It is not treatment. Treatment is directed at curing a condition, is measured by what the patient needs, and can be given to somebody who has committed no offence. Punishment is measured by what was done. The reformative theory at chapter 510 pulls hard on this line and the line still exists.

It is not preventive detention. Detention to stop a future harm is imposed on the basis of what somebody may do, not what they have done, and it lacks elements 2 and 3. Whether it can be justified at all is a separate constitutional question.

It is not revenge. Revenge is personal, unlimited, need not be inflicted by an authority, and need not be deserved. Punishment is imposed by a body with jurisdiction, is limited by rules, and requires guilt. The distinction between retribution and revenge is chapter 470's job and it is the distinction students most often collapse.

In one line

Kant says punishment is owed to the guilty because they are guilty, that it may never be inflicted as a means of producing some benefit, and that the measure of it is what the offender did.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: Kant holds that juridical punishment can never be administered merely as a means of promoting another good, whether for the criminal himself or for civil society, but must in all cases be imposed only because the individual on whom it is inflicted has committed a crime; that the principle of equality determines both the quality and the quantity of punishment, which he calls the right of retaliation or ius talionis; and that this is the only principle which, in regulating a public court as distinguished from private judgment, can definitely assign the kind and degree of punishment.

The moral foundation

Kant's theory of punishment is not a separate doctrine bolted on to his ethics. It follows from two propositions that run through everything he wrote.

A person must never be treated merely as a means. Human beings possess dignity, which is a worth beyond price, and to use a person as an instrument for producing some result is to deny that worth. This is why the utilitarian theory of the next chapter is, for Kant, not merely mistaken but a wrong done to the person punished.

Punishment must be deserved, and desert is backward looking. The question is what the offender did, not what will follow from punishing them. Consequences are irrelevant to whether punishment is owed, and can be relevant only within the limits desert has already fixed.

The consequence students find hardest. On Kant's account, punishing a guilty person is not a regrettable necessity to be minimised. It is required. A society that let a murderer go free because nothing would be gained by punishing him would, in Kant's language, be a party to the wrong.

The two passages

The right of retaliation

Kant's own text puts the principle plainly. Whatever undeserved evil you inflict upon another within the people, that you inflict upon yourself: if you strike yourself, you strike another; if you kill another, you kill yourself. This, he says, is the Right of Retaliation, in his Latin the ius talionis, and, properly understood, it is the only principle which, in regulating a public court as distinguished from mere private judgment, can definitely assign both the quality and the quantity of a just penalty.

Three things to notice.

It is a principle of measurement, not of vengeance. Kant's claim is not that the victim's family are entitled to satisfaction. It is that the offence itself supplies the standard by which a court can fix a sentence, and that no other principle can.

In one line

Bentham says punishment is itself an evil, so it can never be justified by what the offender deserves, but only by the greater evil it prevents, and where it prevents nothing it must not be inflicted.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: Bentham holds that the business of government is to promote the happiness of society by punishing and rewarding; that punishment is mischief and all punishment in itself is evil, so that upon the principle of utility it ought to be admitted only in so far as it promises to exclude some greater evil; and that punishment is therefore improper in four classes of case, where it is groundless, inefficacious, unprofitable or needless.

The starting point

Bentham's whole system rests on the principle of utility, which approves or disapproves of every action according to its tendency to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question. The legislator's business is to promote the happiness of the society, and to exclude, as far as may be, everything that tends to subtract from that happiness, which is to say, to exclude mischief.

Then comes the sentence on which this chapter turns. But punishment is mischief: all punishment in itself is evil. Upon the principle of utility, if it ought at all to be admitted, it ought only to be admitted in as far as it promises to exclude some greater evil.

Read that against Kant and the whole disagreement appears in two lines. For Kant, punishing the guilty is required. For Bentham, punishing anybody is a harm which needs to buy something, and if it buys nothing it is simply harm added to harm.

The ends of punishment

On the utilitarian account, punishment is instrumental, and four purposes are recognised.

General prevention, which later writers call general deterrence: the example made of this offender deters others. Bentham regards this as the chief end, because it operates on the whole population rather than on one person.

Particular prevention, or special deterrence: the offender is deterred from repeating.

Incapacitation: while confined, the offender cannot offend against the public.

Reformation: the offender's disposition is changed.

Bentham also stresses that the profit of the offence must be outweighed. Punishment must be so calibrated that the expected evil of the punishment exceeds the expected profit of the offence, allowing for the probability of detection, which is why he treats certainty as more important than severity: a small penalty that is certain deters better than a heavy one that is unlikely.

The four classes of case in which punishment must not be inflicted

This is Bentham's most distinctive contribution and the part of him a student should be able to reproduce. Punishment ought not to be admitted where it is groundless, inefficacious, unprofitable, or needless.

In one line

There are five classical justifications of punishment, none of them is sufficient by itself, and the position modern law has reached is that a forward looking aim may be pursued only within limits fixed by what the offender deserves.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the justifications of punishment are the retributive, which looks backward to desert; the deterrent, which looks forward to the prevention of offences by others and by the offender; the preventive or incapacitative, which removes the offender's opportunity to offend; the reformative, which seeks to change the offender; and the expiatory, which treats punishment as atonement; and the prevailing modern position is a combined theory in which the general justifying aim is forward looking while the distribution and the amount of punishment are limited by desert.

The five theories

Retributive

Punishment is deserved. The offender has done wrong and the wrong itself is the reason for the punishment. Kant is the classical exponent, and chapter 470 sets him out in full. Its answer to "how much" is the offence itself.

Strength. It is the only theory that explains why we may punish only the guilty and only in proportion, and it treats the offender as a responsible agent.

Weakness. It requires punishment even where nothing is gained, and it cannot measure non-violent offences without help.

Deterrent

Punishment prevents future offences by making the prospect unattractive, to the offender and to others watching. Bentham is the classical exponent. Chapter 500 works it in detail.

Strength. It gives a reason for punishing that is intelligible to somebody who does not accept desert.

Weakness. It permits punishing the innocent if that would deter, and it permits disproportionate sentences where they would deter more.

Preventive or incapacitative

Punishment removes the offender's ability to offend, by imprisonment, disqualification, forfeiture or, at the limit, death. Chapter 500 also covers this.

Strength. It works whether or not anybody is deterred, since the incapacitated person simply cannot offend against the public.

Weakness. It looks to what the person may do rather than to what they did, so taken alone it leads to detention on prediction, which is punishment without an offence.

Reformative

Punishment should change the offender so that they do not offend again, and should be measured by what will achieve that. Chapter 510 works it, with the Gandhian version and the Indian cases.

Strength. It is the only theory that treats the sentence as an opportunity, and it produces the whole apparatus of probation, parole, remission, open prisons and juvenile justice.

Weakness. Its measure is need rather than desert, so it can justify detaining a minor offender until they are cured, and it has no answer to the offender who is not in need of reform.

In one line

The deterrent approach punishes in order to frighten people out of offending; the preventive approach punishes in order to take away the offender's ability to offend, and the two are constantly confused because a prison sentence does both.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the deterrent approach justifies punishment by its effect on the will, holding that the prospect of the penalty will dissuade the offender and others from committing the offence, and it is divided into general deterrence, aimed at the public, and special or particular deterrence, aimed at the offender; the preventive or incapacitative approach justifies punishment by its effect on the capacity to offend, holding that a person imprisoned, disqualified or executed is thereby prevented from committing further offences against the public.

Deterrence

The two kinds

General deterrence operates on everybody except the offender. The sentence is a public message: this is what happens. Bentham regarded this as the principal end of punishment, because it operates on the whole population rather than on one person.

Special or particular deterrence operates on the offender, who is expected to weigh the experience and decline to repeat it.

What deterrence assumes

The assumptions are what an examiner is testing, because each one can fail.

A rational calculator. The person weighs the expected gain against the expected cost before acting.

Knowledge of the penalty. They must know roughly what the punishment is.

Belief in the risk of detection. They must think there is a real chance of being caught, since a penalty that will never be applied costs nothing.

Capacity to act on the calculation. They must be in a state in which the calculation can operate, which excludes offences committed in rage, under intoxication, under compulsion, or by the very young.

Alternatives. A person with no lawful means of subsistence is not choosing between two options in the way the theory requires.

The three variables

The expected cost of an offence is the product of three things, and the ranking between them is the most useful thing in this chapter.

Certainty, the probability of being caught and convicted.

Severity, the size of the penalty.

Celerity, the speed with which it follows.

Bentham's own conclusion, and the modern evidence agree. Certainty matters most. A modest penalty that is very likely deters better than a heavy one that is unlikely, because the offender's expected cost is severity discounted by probability, and the probability of detection for most offences is low. This has a direct practical consequence in India, where conviction rates for many offences are low and delays are long: raising sentences in such a system adds severity to an expectation that is already close to zero, while investment in investigation and in speed changes the multiplier.

In one line

Gandhi's view is that the offender is a person to be healed rather than an enemy to be crushed, that one may hate the offence and not the offender, and that a prison should work as a hospital works.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the reformative approach holds that the object of punishment is to change the offender so that they do not offend again, and the Gandhian version of it treats crime as a disease of society as much as of the individual, the offender as a patient rather than an enemy, and the prison as a place of treatment; its Indian legal expression is the requirement that a court hear the offender before sentence and consider the circumstances of the criminal and not only the gravity of the crime.

Gandhi's position

Hate the offence and not the offender. Gandhi's formulation is that one should hate the sin and not the sinner, and he treated the distinction as a practical rule and not a pious sentiment: a person who is treated as an enemy will behave as one, and a society that treats offenders as enemies produces more of them.

Crime is a symptom. For Gandhi much offending is produced by poverty, by unemployment, by the destruction of village occupations and by the loss of a moral community. A society that creates those conditions and then punishes the results is punishing its own product.

The offender is capable of change. This follows from his general position that human beings are capable of being reached, which is the same premise that underlies satyagraha at chapter 450: the technique works because the opponent has a conscience, and so does the offender.

Punishment must not degrade. Whatever else is done to a person, they are not to be dehumanised. A punishment that destroys self respect makes reform impossible and is a wrong of the same kind as the offence.

The community is implicated and must act. Gandhi's constructive programme is relevant here: reform of the offender is meaningless if there is nothing to return to.

Self-suffering rather than the infliction of suffering. The pattern of satyagraha applied to wrongdoing generally: the response to a wrong is to take suffering on oneself rather than to inflict it, which is why Gandhi undertook fasts as penance for the failings of his own side.

What the reformative theory means in practice

The theory is not merely an attitude, and an answer that lists its institutional consequences is stronger than one that describes a sentiment.

Individualised sentencing. The sentence is fixed after looking at the offender and not only at the offence, which requires the court to have material about them.

In one line

Implicit bias is an association a person carries without being aware of it, which influences their decisions while they believe they are being impartial, and a justice system made of such decisions can produce unequal outcomes without anybody in it being prejudiced.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: implicit bias is an unconscious association between a social group and an attribute, acquired from the surrounding culture, which operates automatically on perception, memory and judgment; it is distinguished from explicit bias, which is consciously held and can be reported, and its significance for the justice delivery system is that it can produce systematically unequal treatment through the ordinary, honest and well-intentioned decisions of individual officers, prosecutors and judges.

The concept, defined precisely

Explicit bias is a belief or attitude a person holds and can state: they know they have it, and they may act on it or restrain it.

Implicit bias is an association operating below awareness. The person does not know it is there, would sincerely deny holding it, and may hold the opposite belief consciously.

Three features follow, and each is examinable.

It is acquired from the environment. Implicit associations reflect the patterns a person has been exposed to, in language, in media, in family and in institutions, rather than anything they decided.

Sincerity is no defence and no evidence. A decision maker who honestly reports having no prejudice may still be affected, which is exactly why the concept exists. Asking officials whether they are biased tests explicit bias only.

It operates hardest where information is thin and time is short. A judgment made quickly, on incomplete facts, with discretion, is where automatic associations fill the gaps. This is precisely the shape of most criminal justice decisions.

Where it can enter a criminal process

Listing the decision points is what turns a general observation into an answer, because each point is a place where discretion exists.

Whether an incident is treated as a crime at all, which is often decided informally at a police station.

Whether a complaint is recorded. A refusal to register is invisible in every subsequent statistic.

Who is stopped, questioned and searched.

Whether a person is arrested or released, and how force is used during arrest.

How witnesses perceive and identify, since perception itself is affected by expectation, and cross-group identification is known to be less reliable.

Whether bail is opposed and granted, where much turns on assessments of respectability, roots in the community and likelihood of absconding, all of which are judgments about a person's social position.

The quality of representation, which depends on means.

Charging decisions, including which of several available offences is charged.

In one line

Even a system with no biased person in it will punish the poor more than the rich, because almost every stage of a criminal process costs money, time and standing, and those are exactly what the poor do not have.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: social inequality affects punishment not only through the prejudices of individuals but structurally, because criminal procedure at every stage distributes advantages according to wealth, literacy, social standing and access to representation, so that formally equal rules produce systematically unequal outcomes, and because the conduct that is defined and enforced as crime is itself shaped by who has the power to define it.

The structural argument, in five steps

1. Formal equality is not substantive equality

The law is the same for everybody, and that is the problem rather than the answer. Anatole France's observation is the classic statement of the point: the law in its majestic equality forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread. A rule that applies identically to unequal people produces unequal results.

2. Every stage of a criminal process has a price

Being stopped. Policing is concentrated where it is visible and cheap, which is public space, and people who live and work in public space are poor.

Bail. Release before trial commonly depends on a surety, on proof of a permanent address and on documented employment. Each of those is a proxy for property and settled work rather than for the risk of absconding. A person who cannot furnish them remains in custody though the law grants them bail.

Representation. Article 39A of the Constitution directs the State to secure that the operation of the legal system promotes justice on a basis of equal opportunity and, in particular, to provide free legal aid so that opportunities for securing justice are not denied to any citizen by reason of economic or other disabilities. The gap between that direction and the quality actually available is where much of this topic lives.

Time. A trial requires attendance on many dates. A salaried person takes leave; a daily wage earner loses the day's wage each time, and after several dates may prefer to plead guilty to a minor offence rather than continue.

Fines. A fixed fine is a trivial sum for one person and a month's food for another, which is why day-fine systems, calibrated to income, exist elsewhere.

Appeal. An appeal costs money and requires somebody to conduct it.

3. Custody before conviction does the work of punishment

The most important structural fact in the Indian criminal process, and it needs no bias at all. A person who cannot obtain bail undergoes confinement, loss of employment, loss of housing and damage to reputation, all before any finding of guilt, and often for longer than the sentence the offence would carry. Every justification in chapter 460 is unavailable, because there is no conviction, no finding, and often in the end no offence.

In one line

Ethnic profiling is the use of a person's race, ethnicity, religion or national origin, rather than their individual behaviour, as a ground for stopping, searching or investigating them, and the objection to it is that it is unlawful discrimination and that it does not work.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: ethnic profiling is the reliance by law enforcement or other authorities on race, ethnicity, religion, national origin or language, without objective and reasonable justification, as a basis for decisions to stop, question, search, detain or investigate; it is prohibited as direct or indirect discrimination under European Union and Council of Europe instruments, and it is criticised as ineffective, because it lowers the accuracy of policing, and as counterproductive, because it destroys the cooperation on which policing depends.

What profiling is, and what it is not

Criminal profiling is lawful and ordinary. A description of a suspect from a witness, an assessment of behaviour, or an intelligence-led operation based on evidence about a particular group of offenders are all normal policing.

Ethnic profiling is the use of a group characteristic as a proxy for individual suspicion. The officer's ground for acting is not what this person did but which category they belong to.

The distinguishing question is therefore individual behaviour. If the reason for the stop would survive the removal of the person's ethnicity from the description, it is not ethnic profiling. If it would not, it is.

A hard case worth stating, because examiners like it. Where a witness describes a specific offender by, among other things, their appearance, using that description is not profiling: it is identification of an individual. Where officers stop members of a group because offenders of that description have committed offences in the area, it is profiling, because the ground is category membership.

Why it is unlawful in the European Union

The clearest anchor is the Union's own legislation, and it is worth quoting because it captures profiling precisely.

Council Directive 2000/43/EC of 29 June 2000 implements the principle of equal treatment between persons irrespective of racial or ethnic origin.

Article 2 defines both kinds of discrimination. Direct discrimination occurs where one person is treated less favourably than another is, has been or would be treated in a comparable situation on grounds of racial or ethnic origin. And indirect discrimination is taken to occur where an apparently neutral provision, criterion or practice would put persons of a racial or ethnic origin at a particular disadvantage compared with other persons, unless that provision, criterion or practice is objectively justified by a legitimate aim and the means of achieving that aim are appropriate and necessary.

Why the second definition matters most for this topic. A police force will rarely have a written instruction to stop members of a particular group. What it will have is a practice, neutral on its face, which in operation falls overwhelmingly on one group. The Directive's definition reaches exactly that, and it puts the burden on the authority to show a legitimate aim and means that are appropriate and necessary. Necessity is the demanding word: it is not enough that profiling helps a little; it must be shown that no less discriminatory means would do.

In one line

Black Lives Matter is a movement that arose from the deaths of Black people in encounters with police in the United States, and its importance for this syllabus is that it puts every question in Module II at once: whether the law is just, what a citizen owes it, how they may resist, and whether punishment is being administered equally.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: Black Lives Matter is a decentralised social movement that began in the United States in 2013 and grew internationally, which asserts that Black people are subjected to disproportionate and often lethal force by the police, that the criminal justice system enforces the law unequally against them, and that the remedy requires structural change in policing rather than the discipline of individual officers; it is significant for political theory because it raises the problem of obedience to a legal order that a section of the population experiences as unjust in its operation rather than in its terms.

What happened

The origin. The movement's name and organisation date from 2013, arising from the acquittal of the man who had shot an unarmed Black teenager, Trayvon Martin, in Florida in 2012. It became a national movement in 2014 after the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York, and the decisions of grand juries not to indict the officers involved.

The expansion. In May 2020 the death of George Floyd during an arrest in Minneapolis, recorded on video by a bystander, produced protests across the United States and in many other countries, including large demonstrations in Europe where the local grievances were about local policing rather than American policing.

The form of the movement. It is decentralised, with no single leadership, organised largely through networks and social platforms, and it has repeatedly produced local campaigns with different demands. That structure is itself a subject for analysis and appears in the criticisms below.

What is claimed

An answer must state the claims precisely, because they are different in kind and are supported by different sorts of evidence.

Disproportionate use of force, including lethal force, in police encounters with Black people.

Unequal enforcement, so that the same conduct is more likely to be detected, charged and punished when the person is Black. This is chapter 530's structural argument with ethnicity as the axis.

Profiling, which is chapter 540 exactly: stops made on the ground of appearance rather than behaviour.

Failure of accountability, meaning that officers are rarely prosecuted and still more rarely convicted, so the ordinary mechanism by which a legal system corrects itself does not operate.

And a claim about the structure rather than the individuals: that the pattern is produced by rules, training, incentives and legal doctrines, so that disciplining individual officers cannot correct it.

In one line

An ideology is a connected set of beliefs about how society is, how it ought to be, and how to get from one to the other, held by a group and used to justify or to challenge power.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: a political ideology is a more or less coherent set of ideas which provides an account of the existing social and political order, a model of a desired future, and an indication of how political change can and should be brought about; it is distinguished from a political philosophy by being action oriented and held by groups rather than argued by individuals, and from a mere opinion by being systematic.

The three parts every ideology has

This is the framework, and it is what makes the four ideologies comparable.

1. A description. An account of how things are, and what is wrong with them. Liberalism describes a world of individuals; socialism describes a world of classes and cooperation; communism describes a world of class conflict driven by ownership.

2. A prescription. A picture of how things ought to be. This is where the ideology's central value sits: liberty for liberalism, the greatest happiness for utilitarianism, equality and community for socialism, a classless society for communism.

3. A programme. A route from the first to the second. This is the part most often left out of student answers, and it is where two ideologies that share a goal can differ completely: socialism and communism both want common ownership and disagree about whether to get there by election or by revolution, which is topic 3.4.2 exactly.

What an ideology is not

It is not a political philosophy. A philosophy asks whether a proposition is true and is argued by individuals. An ideology is held by groups and its function is to guide and justify action. The two overlap: Mill wrote philosophy that became liberal ideology, and Marx wrote analysis that became communist ideology.

It is not a party programme. A manifesto is a list of promises for one election; an ideology is the set of ideas from which such lists are generated.

It is not necessarily false. The word acquired a pejorative sense from Marx, for whom ideology meant the distorted consciousness produced by a society's material conditions, and from Napoleon, who used it as an insult. That sense is worth knowing and is not the sense used in this module.

It is not the same as a religion, though the two can occupy the same space, because an ideology's claims are about how society should be organised rather than about the ultimate nature of things.

In one line

Liberalism is the belief that the individual comes first, that the individual's liberty is the highest political value, and that any power exercised over a person has to be justified to them.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: liberalism is the political ideology which takes the individual human being as the basic unit of society and the possessor of rights that exist independently of the state; which holds liberty to be the supreme political value; which insists that all political authority requires justification and consent, and must therefore be limited, constitutional and accountable; and which regards toleration, equality before the law and the use of reason as the necessary conditions of a free society.

The word, and the two things it names

Liberalism comes from the Latin liber, free. The word entered political use in Spain in the early nineteenth century and spread from there.

It names two different things and students should say which they mean.

A historical movement. The struggle against absolute monarchy, religious compulsion, hereditary privilege and restrictions on trade, running from the seventeenth century.

A body of ideas, which is what this module examines, and which has since divided into the classical and modern strands of the next chapter.

The basic principles

The basic principles of liberalism are eight, and the meaning of liberalism is best conveyed by working through them rather than by any single sentence: a definition of liberalism that omits toleration or limited government has left out something the doctrine cannot do without.

Each of these is a claim, and each has a consequence in law that an Indian student will recognise.

1. Individualism

The individual is the basic unit of political analysis and the ultimate bearer of value. Groups, classes, nations and communities matter because of what they do for the individuals who compose them.

Its consequence. Rights are held by persons rather than by groups, and the person is entitled to be treated as an end. Every fundamental right in Part III of the Indian Constitution is drafted this way.

What it denies. That a person's identity is exhausted by their membership of a caste, a religion or a family, and that a group's interest can override an individual's rights.

2. Liberty as the supreme political value

Liberty comes first among political values, and other goods are pursued so far as they are compatible with it.

Its consequence. Restrictions require justification, and the burden lies on whoever restricts. This is exactly the structure of article 19 of the Indian Constitution, which states freedoms and then requires that any restriction be reasonable and made on stated grounds.

3. Reason

Human beings are capable of reasoning about their own interests and about public questions, so problems are to be solved by argument, evidence and debate rather than by authority, tradition or force.

In one line

Classical liberalism wants the state to leave people alone; modern liberalism came to see that leaving people alone is worth very little to somebody with nothing, and asked the state to supply the conditions in which liberty can actually be used.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: classical liberalism, dominant from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, conceives liberty negatively as the absence of interference, treats the state as a necessary evil to be confined to the protection of life, liberty and property, and favours free markets and minimal regulation; modern liberalism, developing from the late nineteenth century, conceives liberty positively as the capacity to make effective use of one's freedom, and accordingly accepts an enabling state which removes obstacles such as poverty, ignorance and disease through welfare provision and regulation.

Classical liberalism

Its period and setting. From Locke in the seventeenth century through the nineteenth, formed in a struggle against absolute monarchy, established religion, hereditary privilege and restrictions on trade. Every one of its doctrines is aimed at a form of power that then existed.

Its core commitments.

Negative liberty. Freedom is the absence of external constraint. A person is free to the extent that nobody is stopping them.

A minimal state. Its functions are defence, the maintenance of order, the enforcement of contracts and the protection of property, and little else. The image often used is a night watchman.

Natural rights, especially property. Locke's account at chapter 320 makes property a natural right existing before government, so the state finds property already there and may not take it without consent.

Free markets. Exchange between willing parties produces prosperity, and interference distorts it.

Equality of opportunity and not of outcome. Careers open to talent; results are the individual's own.

Its assumption about human beings. Rational, self-interested and self-directing adults, capable of looking after themselves if left unobstructed.

What went wrong with the assumption

An answer that explains the transition is much stronger than one that describes the two phases side by side. The transition happened because the assumption failed in a particular set of conditions.

The conditions. Industrialisation produced a working population in cities, without land, dependent on wages, working long hours in dangerous conditions, living in insanitary housing, without education, and without any means of subsistence when unemployed, injured or old.

Why the classical answer did not work. These people were, in the classical sense, free: nobody was legally stopping them from doing anything. The employment contract was voluntary. And their situation was not remotely one of liberty in any sense that mattered to them.

The three observations that produced modern liberalism.

Freedom without capacity is empty. A right to educate one's children is worth nothing to a person who cannot pay a fee.

In one line

Negative liberty is freedom from interference, positive liberty is freedom to actually do something, and the whole argument is about whether the second is a genuine kind of freedom or a licence for somebody else to decide what you really want.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: negative liberty is the absence of external obstacles, coercion or interference, so that a person is free to the extent that others do not prevent them from acting; positive liberty is the presence of the capacity, resources and self-mastery required to act effectively on one's own purposes, so that a person is free to the extent that they are actually able to determine and pursue their own life; and the shift from the first conception to the second is what transformed classical liberalism into modern liberalism and what supplies the theoretical basis for the welfare state.

The two conceptions

The classic statement of the distinction is Isaiah Berlin's, in a lecture of 1958, and it is put as two different questions.

Negative liberty answers: what is the area within which I am left to do what I want, without interference by others?

Positive liberty answers: who or what is the source of control that determines what I do?

They are not opposites and they are not two names for one thing. They are answers to different questions, and a person can have a great deal of one and almost none of the other.

Negative liberty

Freedom is the absence of obstacles placed by other people. A prisoner is unfree because a person locks the door. A person who cannot fly is not unfree, because no one is preventing them.

Its characteristic questions. How wide is the area? Who may narrow it, and on what justification?

Its characteristic institutions. Rights against the state, limits on power, the requirement that restrictions be justified.

Its advocates. Hobbes, Locke, Bentham, Mill and Berlin himself, who thought this the safer conception.

Its blind spot. It counts only obstacles that people put there. A person who is starving, illiterate and ill is, on this conception, perfectly free, because nobody is stopping them.

Positive liberty

Freedom is the capacity to act on one's own purposes. It has two related senses, and separating them is what makes an answer good.

Freedom as capacity. Having the means, education, health and resources to do the things one has a formal right to do. This is Green's sense at chapter 400.

Freedom as self-mastery. Being governed by one's own reason rather than by impulse, addiction, ignorance or manipulation. This is the older philosophical sense, and it is where the trouble starts.

Its characteristic questions. What can this person actually do? What prevents them?

In one line

Liberalism is defended as the only doctrine that takes each person seriously and the only one that has reliably limited power, and it is attacked from four directions: for producing atomised individuals, for protecting formal freedoms while ignoring real ones, for pretending to be neutral when it is not, and for exporting a Western model as though it were universal.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: liberalism is supported on the grounds that it protects the individual against arbitrary power, that it alone has produced constitutional and limited government, that toleration is the only workable arrangement in a plural society, and that free discussion is the condition of finding out anything; and it is criticised by conservatives for dissolving the social fabric, by socialists for protecting formal liberties while permitting substantive inequality, by communitarians and feminists for resting on an abstract individual who does not exist, and by postcolonial critics for universalising a particular Western experience.

The arguments in favour

1. It protects the individual against power. The historical record is the strongest thing liberalism has. The institutions that actually limit governments, constitutions, enforceable rights, independent courts, free elections, a free press, are liberal in origin, and they exist in no other tradition in that combination.

2. It takes each person seriously. On no other account is it true that a person may not be sacrificed for a larger benefit. Utilitarianism permits it, chapter 660 shows how, and collective doctrines permit it more readily.

3. It is the only workable arrangement in a plural society. Where people disagree deeply about religion and about how to live, the alternatives to toleration are suppression or civil conflict. India, with several religions, many languages and a deep caste hierarchy, is the case that makes the argument concrete rather than abstract.

4. Free discussion is how anything is found out. Mill's argument at chapter 610: a silenced opinion may be true; if false it may contain part of the truth; and even a wholly false opinion keeps a true one from becoming dead dogma.

5. It is self-correcting. Liberalism's own commitments to criticism and to evidence let it change, which is what the shift to modern liberalism at chapter 580 actually was. Ideologies that treat their own doctrine as settled cannot do that.

6. It has delivered. The societies that adopted liberal constitutional arrangements have generally produced higher standards of living, longer lives, and fewer people killed by their own governments than those that did not. That is a claim about the record, and it is the argument that persuades people who are unmoved by the philosophy.

The arguments against

From conservatism

It dissolves the fabric it depends on. Liberalism inherits a society held together by family, religion, custom and shared obligation, treats all of these as optional attachments, and then relies on the social trust they produced. Chapter 360's Burke is the classical statement.

In one line

Mill says the only reason for which power may rightfully be used against a person against their will is to prevent harm to others, and that their own good is never a sufficient reason.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the object of Mill's essay is to assert one very simple principle as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual by way of compulsion and control, whether by legal penalty or by the moral coercion of public opinion, namely that the sole end for which mankind are warranted in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number is self-protection, and that the only purpose for which power can rightfully be exercised over any member of a civilised community against his will is to prevent harm to others.

The principle, in Mill's own words

Mill states it in a single passage and it repays reading slowly.

The object of the essay, he says, is to assert one very simple principle, entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties, or the moral coercion of public opinion.

That principle is that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number is self-protection; that the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.

His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. A person cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, or because in the opinion of others it would be wise or even right. These, Mill says, are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him or visiting him with any evil in case he does otherwise.

And the conclusion: in the part of his conduct which merely concerns himself, his independence is of right absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

What each part of that is doing

"One very simple principle." Mill is offering a single test, not a list of protected activities. That is what makes it usable.

"Compulsion and control ... or the moral coercion of public opinion." The principle limits society and not only the state. Mill was as worried about social pressure, respectability and the tyranny of majority opinion as about law, and in some passages more so, because law can be resisted in court and opinion cannot.

In one line

The Indian Constitution takes Mill's structure, freedoms first and restrictions requiring justification, and then permits restrictions on grounds Mill's principle would not allow.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: Mill's influence on the Indian Constitution is structural rather than textual: article 19 confers the freedoms of speech, assembly, association, movement, residence and occupation on all citizens and permits the State to restrict them only by law and only by reasonable restrictions imposed for stated purposes, which places the burden of justification on the State exactly as Mill's principle requires; but the stated purposes include public order, decency or morality, defamation and contempt of court, which are grounds wider than harm to others, so the Constitution adopts Mill's method and departs from his test.

What article 19 actually says

Clause (1) confers on all citizens the right (a) to freedom of speech and expression; (b) to assemble peaceably and without arms; (c) to form associations or unions, and since 2012 co-operative societies; (d) to move freely throughout the territory of India; (e) to reside and settle in any part of the territory of India; and (g) to practise any profession, or to carry on any occupation, trade or business.

Sub-clause (f), the right to acquire, hold and dispose of property, was omitted by the Constitution (Forty-fourth Amendment) Act 1978 with effect from 20 June 1979, and property became a constitutional right under article 300A instead. That removal is itself the classical to modern liberal shift of chapter 580, made in the text.

Clause (2) permits reasonable restrictions on freedom of speech and expression in the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality, or in relation to contempt of court, defamation or incitement to an offence. The words "sovereignty and integrity of India" were inserted by the Sixteenth Amendment in 1963, and the clause as a whole was substituted with retrospective effect by the First Amendment in 1951.

Clause (3) permits reasonable restrictions on assembly in the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India or public order.

Clause (4) permits reasonable restrictions on association in the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India, public order or morality.

Clause (5) permits reasonable restrictions on movement and residence in the interests of the general public or for the protection of the interests of any Scheduled Tribe.

Clause (6) permits reasonable restrictions on profession, occupation, trade or business in the interests of the general public.

What is Millian about it

The structure is exactly Mill's. The freedom is stated first and without qualification; the power to restrict is an exception; and the exception must be justified. That is the arrangement Mill's principle demands, and it is not the only arrangement a constitution could have adopted.

In one line

Utilitarianism says the right action is the one that produces the most happiness, counting everybody's happiness equally, and nothing else matters at all.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: utilitarianism is the moral and political doctrine that the rightness of an action, a law or an institution is determined solely by its consequences for the happiness of all those affected, the standard being the greatest happiness of the greatest number, each person's happiness counting equally; its distinguishing features are therefore consequentialism, hedonism, aggregation and impartiality.

The principle of utility

Bentham defines the principle of utility as that principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever according to the tendency it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question. He notes that the principle was latterly called the greatest happiness principle, and Mill uses that name.

Mill's own observation about how widely it operates is worth having: since men's sentiments of approval and aversion are greatly influenced by what they suppose to be the effects of things on their happiness, the principle of utility has had a large share in forming the moral doctrines even of those who most scornfully reject its authority, and no school of thought denies that the influence of actions on happiness is a material and often predominant consideration.

The four components

The meaning of utilitarianism is exhausted by four propositions, and any definition of utilitarianism that drops one of them is describing something else.

Every question on utilitarianism can be answered by taking these apart, because every criticism attacks one of them.

1. Consequentialism

The rightness of an act depends entirely on its consequences. Nothing about the act itself, no promise given, no right violated, no duty owed, counts except through its effects.

What this excludes. Desert, rights, promises and duties as independent considerations. They matter only if and so far as respecting them produces good consequences.

2. Hedonism, or welfarism

The consequence that counts is happiness, understood by Bentham as pleasure and the absence of pain. Later utilitarians substituted preference satisfaction or wellbeing, which avoids some objections and keeps the structure.

3. Aggregation

The happiness of everybody affected is added together, and the option with the largest total is the right one. Gains to some are offset against losses to others.

What this permits. Imposing a loss on a few to produce a larger gain for many, which is the source of nearly every objection at chapter 660.

4. Impartiality

Each person's happiness counts equally. Bentham's formula, as reported by Mill, is that everybody is to count for one and nobody for more than one.

The fourth component is why utilitarianism was a radical doctrine and not a conservative one. In a society organised by rank, caste, sex and property, the proposition that a labourer's pain counts exactly as much as a landowner's was an attack on the whole arrangement, and Bentham's followers used it to argue for legal reform, prison reform, the extension of the franchise and the equal treatment of women.

In one line

Bentham says pleasure and pain govern everything we do and everything we ought to do, and that morals and legislation can therefore be put on a footing as exact as arithmetic.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: Bentham holds that nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure, which alone point out what we ought to do and determine what we shall do; that the principle of utility, which approves or disapproves of every action according to its tendency to augment or diminish happiness, is therefore the only defensible standard of right and wrong; and that the value of any pleasure or pain can be estimated by seven measurable dimensions, so that legislation can be made a matter of calculation rather than of custom, sentiment or authority.

The opening, in Bentham's own words

The first sentence of chapter I is the whole doctrine compressed.

Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think; every effort we can make to throw off our subjection will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it. In words a man may pretend to abjure their empire, but in reality he will remain subject to it all the while.

Two claims are packed into that and they must be separated, because a student who runs them together cannot answer the standard objection.

A psychological claim. People are in fact moved by pleasure and pain. This is psychological hedonism.

A moral claim. Pleasure and pain are also the standard of right and wrong. This is ethical hedonism.

The standard objection is that the second does not follow from the first: that people are moved by something does not show it is what they ought to pursue. That is the naturalistic objection and Bentham does not answer it.

What Bentham was against

His doctrine is best understood by what he rejected, and each rejection is a target he names.

Natural rights. Bentham regarded them as nonsense, and imprescriptible natural rights as nonsense upon stilts. A right, for him, is the creature of law: to say that a right exists before any law confers it is to mistake what one wants for what is.

The social contract. A fiction. What the state actually rests on is the habit of obedience, and the question is whether obedience produces more happiness than resistance.

In one line

Mill accepted Bentham's principle and added that pleasures differ in kind as well as in amount, that the judges of which kind is better are those who know both, and that individual liberty and justice must be protected even by a utilitarian.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: Mill modified Bentham's utilitarianism in four respects: he introduced a distinction between higher and lower pleasures, holding that quality as well as quantity is to be considered and that the test of quality is the decided preference of those who have experience of both; he broadened happiness beyond sensation to include the development of the higher faculties; he grounded individual liberty in a principle of its own; and he treated justice and rights as founded on the most vital of all interests, security, so that they may not be traded away against ordinary gains.

The problem Mill was answering

Bentham's doctrine had been attacked as a pig philosophy: if pleasure is the only good and pleasures differ only in quantity, then a life of simple sensual satisfaction is as good as any other provided the quantity is equal, and the doctrine is fit for swine rather than for human beings.

Mill's answer is the first and most famous of the modifications, and he begins by conceding that the objection would be fatal if the premise were true and then denying the premise.

The first modification: quality of pleasures

Mill's own statement. It is, he says, quite compatible with the principle of utility to recognise the fact that some kinds of pleasure are more desirable and more valuable than others. It would be absurd, he adds, that while in estimating all other things quality is considered as well as quantity, the estimation of pleasures should be supposed to depend on quantity alone.

The test of quality, which is what students most often leave out. If asked what makes one pleasure more valuable than another merely as a pleasure, he says there is but one possible answer: of two pleasures, if there is one to which all or almost all who have experience of both give a decided preference, irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, that is the more desirable pleasure.

The judges. Those qualified by knowledge of both, or, if they differ, the majority among them, and Mill calls their verdict that of the only competent judges, from which he says there can be no appeal. He adds a point that is often missed: there is the less hesitation in accepting this judgment about quality, since there is no other tribunal to be referred to even on the question of quantity.

In one line

Utilitarianism is defended because it is simple, impartial, secular, practical and demanding, and it is attacked because counting only the total permits sacrificing a person, and because it can require you to do what everybody knows is monstrous.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: utilitarianism is supported on the grounds that it supplies a single, clear and secular standard applicable to any question, that it counts every person equally and so has been a force for reform, that it takes consequences seriously where rival theories do not, and that it is the working method of modern public policy; and it is criticised on the grounds that consequences cannot be predicted or measured, that pleasure is not the only good, that aggregation permits the sacrifice of individuals and ignores distribution, that it leaves no room for rights, promises, desert or special obligations, and that it is impartial to the point of being inhuman.

The arguments in favour

1. It has a single clear standard. One question, applicable to any decision, from a sentencing hearing to a highway alignment. No rival theory offers anything so usable.

2. It is impartial. Everybody counts for one and nobody for more than one, which is what made it an instrument of reform against rank, caste, sex and property, at chapter 630.

3. It is secular and public. Its reasons can be stated to anybody, without appeal to revelation, tradition or authority, which matters most in a society of several religions.

4. It takes consequences seriously. A theory that says a thing must be done though the heavens fall is not obviously superior to one that asks what will happen if they do. Insisting on a rule when following it produces avoidable suffering requires a justification, and utilitarianism at least demands one.

5. It is demanding, not permissive. Because one's own happiness counts for exactly one, the doctrine constantly requires personal sacrifice for others, and it is among the most exacting positions in ethics.

6. It is the working method of public policy. Cost benefit analysis, health measures such as quality adjusted life years, environmental impact assessment and every scheme evaluated by beneficiaries against cost are utilitarianism in operation, and a government has to make comparisons of exactly this kind.

7. It is progressive by construction. Because nothing is exempt from the question, no institution is protected by its age, which is the answer to prescription at chapter 360.

The arguments against, by which component they attack

Attacking consequentialism

Consequences cannot be known. Every calculation runs into the future, and effects ramify indefinitely. A decision maker knows a little about the near consequences and almost nothing about the remote ones.

In one line

Utilitarianism seeks the greatest good of the greatest number; Sarvodaya seeks the good of all, and Gandhi's objection is that the first will always be willing to sacrifice somebody and the second never is.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: Sarvodaya, meaning the rise or welfare of all, is Gandhi's social ideal, according to which the object of social and political arrangements is the good of every member of society without exception, beginning with the last and weakest, which he called Antyodaya; it is contrasted with utilitarianism, which seeks the greatest happiness of the greatest number and therefore accepts, in principle, the sacrifice of a minority whenever the aggregate is thereby increased.

The word and its source

Sarvodaya is formed from sarva, all, and udaya, rise or uplift: the rise of all.

Gandhi coined it as the title of his 1908 paraphrase in Gujarati of John Ruskin's Unto This Last, a book he read on a train journey in South Africa and which he said changed his life. He drew three lessons from it, and the first two are exactly the point of this chapter.

That the good of the individual is contained in the good of all.

That a lawyer's work has the same value as a barber's, since all have the same right of earning their livelihood from their work.

That the life of labour, that is, of the tiller of the soil and the handicraftsman, is the life worth living.

Notice that the first lesson is a denial of the very structure utilitarianism assumes. Utilitarianism assumes individual goods that can conflict and must be traded off. Gandhi's premise is that they cannot ultimately conflict, because one person's good is not separable from everybody's.

Antyodaya, and why it is the operative principle

Antyodaya means the rise of the last, and it is Gandhi's practical test.

His own formulation of it, often called the talisman, is a rule for decision: when in doubt, recall the face of the poorest and weakest person you have seen, and ask whether the step you contemplate will be of any use to them, whether it will restore to them control over their own life and destiny.

Why this is more than a sentiment. It is a decision rule, and it is the opposite of aggregation. Aggregation asks what the total is; Antyodaya asks what happens to the person at the bottom. A scheme that raises the total while leaving the poorest exactly where they were fails the test and passes the calculus.

The resemblance to Rawls is worth noticing and is a strong point in an answer. Rawls's difference principle permits inequalities only where they work to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, which is a very similar structure arrived at from an entirely different direction.

In one line

Socialism is the belief that human beings are cooperative rather than competitive by nature, that the great inequalities of a market society are produced by its institutions rather than by nature, and that production should be owned or controlled in common.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: socialism is the political ideology which holds that human beings are social by nature and cooperative rather than essentially competitive; that the inequalities of wealth and power in a market society arise from its institutions, and in particular from the private ownership of the means of production, rather than from unequal natural endowments; and that the remedy is the common ownership or social control of productive resources, together with distribution according to need, so as to secure equality, community and the fullest development of every person.

The word and its target

Socialism entered political use in the 1820s and 1830s, in England and France, as the name for a set of criticisms of the society that industrialisation had produced.

What it was formed against. Not feudalism, which liberalism had already attacked, but the new industrial order: large scale production, a propertyless working population, extreme inequality, insecurity of employment, and the doctrine that the market's outcomes were natural and beyond criticism.

This matters for the comparison with liberalism at chapter 570. Liberalism was a doctrine of a rising commercial class against aristocratic privilege. Socialism was a doctrine of a working population against the commercial order that liberalism had helped to create. They are successive answers to different enemies, which is why the second takes so much of the first for granted.

The basic principles

1. Community

Human beings are social creatures, bound together by a common humanity, and are best understood by reference to the groups and communities they belong to rather than as separate individuals. This is the direct denial of liberal individualism at chapter 570 and everything else follows from it.

2. Cooperation

People are naturally disposed to work together, and competition sets them against each other and wastes their capacities. Cooperation, socialists argue, moralises the individual and is also more efficient, since it removes duplication and the costs of conflict.

3. Equality

The central socialist value, and it is not equality of opportunity. Socialists argue that formal equality of opportunity is worthless where starting positions differ, and press instead for equality of outcome, or, in more moderate versions, the reduction of inequality to a level compatible with a common life.

Their argument for it. That inequality is largely produced by unequal circumstances rather than by unequal natural talent; that it is unjust to reward what a person did not earn; that inequality corrodes community; and that political equality cannot survive severe economic inequality.

In one line

Socialism is a family of doctrines that agree about what is wrong and disagree about how far to go and how to get there, and naming the branch you are discussing is the first requirement of a good answer.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: socialism divides principally into utopian and scientific socialism, a distinction drawn by Engels; into revolutionary socialism, which holds that the existing order must be overthrown, and evolutionary or democratic socialism, which holds that it can be transformed by constitutional means; and into further varieties distinguished by what is to be owned and by whom, including state socialism, Fabian socialism, guild socialism, syndicalism, market socialism and, in India, Gandhian socialism.

Utopian and scientific socialism

This is Engels's own distinction, drawn in a work whose title states it.

Utopian socialism describes the early socialists, chiefly Saint-Simon, Fourier and Robert Owen, who denounced the injustice of the new industrial order, designed model communities and appealed to the reason and the benevolence of the rich to bring them about.

Engels's criticism is not that they were wrong about the injustice but about the method. They treated socialism as a good idea that had merely to be explained persuasively, they appealed to all classes indifferently, and they did not see that the transformation depended on the development of the productive forces and on the class that industrial production had itself created.

Scientific socialism is Engels's name for the Marxist alternative: socialism derived from an analysis of the actual development of capitalism and of the class relations within it, rather than from an ideal invented in someone's head.

The word scientific should be handled carefully in an answer. It is a claim, not a description: the claim that the analysis is derived from observable historical development rather than from moral preference. Whether it is scientific in any stricter sense is exactly what critics dispute, and Popper's objection, that a theory which can accommodate any outcome is not testable, is directed at it.

Revolutionary and evolutionary socialism

The most important division in practice, and the one that produced the split between socialists and communists in the twentieth century.

Revolutionary socialism holds that the state is an instrument of the owning class, that it will not be surrendered by consent, and that a fundamental change of ownership therefore requires the existing order to be overthrown. Marx and Engels in most of their writing, Lenin definitively.

Evolutionary, democratic or parliamentary socialism holds that where there is universal suffrage the working class is a majority and can achieve its ends by winning elections, so that a revolution is unnecessary and, in a constitutional state, wrong. Eduard Bernstein's revisionism is the classical statement, and every social democratic party in the world is its descendant.

In one line

Socialism is defended because it identifies inequality as a product of institutions rather than of nature and proposes to change the institutions, and it is attacked because common ownership destroys the information and the incentives a modern economy runs on, and because the power required to bring it about is dangerous to hold.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: socialism is supported on the grounds that its account of the causes of inequality is more accurate than the liberal one, that formal freedom without material means is empty, that cooperation is both more humane and more efficient than competition, and that its record in producing welfare states, labour protection and public services is substantial; and it is criticised on the grounds that central planning cannot solve the problem of economic information, that common ownership destroys incentives, that the concentration of economic and political power in one set of hands threatens liberty, and that its account of human motivation is over-optimistic.

The arguments in favour

1. Its diagnosis is accurate. The claim that inequality is largely produced by institutions rather than by differences of natural talent is supported by the evidence that outcomes correlate far more strongly with the circumstances of birth than with anything a person did. That is a factual claim and it is the strongest thing socialism has.

2. Formal freedom without means is empty. Chapter 600 showed that this criticism of liberalism was strong enough to change liberalism itself.

3. Cooperation is undervalued. A great deal of what is most valuable is produced cooperatively, and the competitive model both misdescribes it and damages it.

4. Markets fail, systematically and predictably. Monopoly, information asymmetry, external harms such as pollution, public goods that nobody has an incentive to provide, and the exploitation of unequal bargaining power are not accidents but structural features, and each is a reason for collective provision or control.

5. Political equality does not survive economic inequality. Equal votes coexist with grossly unequal influence over what is decided, which is chapter 60's structural power and chapter 840's ethical decay.

6. Its record is substantial. The eight hour day, the prohibition of child labour, workplace safety, social insurance, public health services, universal schooling, pensions and paid leave were won by socialist and labour movements against opposition, and are now so completely accepted that their origin is forgotten.

7. It supplies an answer utilitarianism cannot. Because it attends to distribution rather than to totals, it addresses the defect chapter 660 identified as decisive.

The arguments against

The economic calculation problem

The most serious objection, and an answer that gives it properly is a strong answer. It is due to Mises and Hayek and it is not an objection about incentives.

In one line

The Indian Constitution was socialist in inspiration before the word was inserted and became explicitly socialist in 1976, but the word operates as a direction to the State and an aid to interpretation rather than as a rule that overrides rights.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: socialism influenced the Indian Constitution through the Directive Principles of State Policy, which direct the State to minimise inequalities of income, status, facilities and opportunities, to distribute the material resources of the community to subserve the common good, and to prevent the concentration of wealth to the common detriment; through the insertion of the word socialist in the Preamble by the Constitution (Forty-second Amendment) Act 1976; and through the removal of property from the fundamental rights by the Forty-fourth Amendment; but the Supreme Court has held that the word does not authorise the State to disregard the interests of private owners, while also treating it as a legitimate and effective aid to the construction of legislation and executive action.

Where socialism entered

Before the Constitution. The demand was made inside the national movement long before independence. The Karachi resolution of the Indian National Congress in 1931, on fundamental rights and economic policy, set out obligations about a living wage, limited hours, protection against sickness and old age, and state ownership or control of key industries, and it is the ancestor of Part IV.

In the Constituent Assembly. A proposal to describe India as socialist in the Preamble was made and was not accepted at the time, on the view that the economic structure was a matter for the people to decide from time to time and should not be fixed by the Constitution. That refusal is worth knowing, because it shows the 1976 insertion was a change and not a clarification.

What was adopted instead was Part IV, which is socialist in substance without using the word.

The Directive Principles

The provisions that carry the socialist content, and an answer should be able to name them.

Article 38 requires the State to secure a social order in which justice, social, economic and political, shall inform all the institutions of national life, and, by the clause added in 1978, to minimise inequalities in income, and to endeavour to eliminate inequalities in status, facilities and opportunities, not only among individuals but also among groups.

Article 39 directs that the State shall in particular direct its policy towards securing that citizens have an adequate means of livelihood; that the ownership and control of the material resources of the community are so distributed as best to subserve the common good; that the operation of the economic system does not result in the concentration of wealth and means of production to the common detriment; equal pay for equal work for men and women; that the health and strength of workers is not abused and that they are not forced by economic necessity into unsuited occupations; and that children are given opportunities to develop in conditions of freedom and dignity.

In one line

Communism says that history is driven by the conflict between classes created by who owns the means of production, that capitalism produces the class which will end it, and that the result is a society without classes, without private ownership of production, and eventually without a state.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: communism is the political and economic ideology, derived from Marx and Engels, which holds that the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles; that the mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life of a society; that capitalism produces its own gravedigger in the proletariat; that the proletariat must capture political power and abolish private ownership of the means of production; and that the outcome is a classless and stateless society distributing according to the principle from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

The seven principles

1. Historical materialism

The foundation. The way a society produces its material life, that is, its technology and its relations of ownership, conditions its social, political and intellectual life. Ideas, law, religion and morality form a superstructure on an economic base, and change in the base produces change in the superstructure.

What follows. History is not driven by ideas, by great men or by accident. It is driven by the development of the productive forces and by the conflict this produces with existing relations of ownership.

2. Class struggle

The Manifesto's opening proposition, that the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles, freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, in a word oppressor and oppressed, standing in constant opposition to one another. Under capitalism the classes have been simplified into two: bourgeoisie and proletariat.

3. The analysis of capitalism

Labour theory of value. The value of a commodity derives from the socially necessary labour required to produce it.

Surplus value. The worker is paid the value of their labour power, that is, what it costs to reproduce it, and produces more value than that. The difference is surplus value, appropriated by the owner. This is Marx's account of exploitation, and it is a structural claim rather than an accusation about wage rates: it holds even where wages are generous and the employer is decent.

Alienation. Under this system the worker is estranged from the product of their labour, which belongs to another; from the act of working, which is imposed and unfulfilling; from their own human capacities; and from other people, who become competitors.

Concentration and crisis. Capital concentrates in fewer hands, small producers are driven into the proletariat, and the system produces recurrent crises of overproduction.

In one line

Communism produced the most powerful analysis of how economic power shapes politics that anybody has written, and the states built on it destroyed the liberty it promised and failed at the economics it claimed to have solved.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: communism is to be evaluated on two levels, as an analysis and as a programme; as an analysis it made permanent contributions in showing that economic structure shapes law, politics and ideas, that formal equality can coexist with substantive domination, and that class is a real determinant of political outcomes; as a programme it failed, because the abolition of markets in the means of production destroyed the information the economy required, because the dictatorship of the proletariat became the dictatorship of a party, and because the state did not wither but grew.

What is right in it

1. The relation between economic structure and politics. That who owns and who works shapes the law, the political arrangements and the prevailing ideas of a society is now so widely accepted that its origin is forgotten. Every study of the influence of money on legislation, of who is prosecuted, of whose interests are consulted, is doing work Marx made available.

2. Formal equality can coexist with substantive domination. Chapter 530's structural argument about punishment, and chapter 600's socialist criticism of liberalism, are both Marxist in ancestry.

3. Class is real. Whatever else determines political behaviour, the position a person occupies in the production of goods affects their interests and their opportunities, and a political science that ignores it explains less.

4. Alienation. The account of work under industrial conditions, that a worker may be estranged from the product, from the act of working and from their own capacities, describes something that other traditions did not describe at all.

5. Ideology. The claim that prevailing ideas serve the interests of those who prevail is now a standard tool of analysis, and Gramsci's hegemony is its most useful form.

6. It compelled the reform of its opponent. Much of the twentieth century's labour legislation, social insurance and public provision was enacted by liberal and conservative governments who preferred reform to the alternative, and this is a real effect that an evaluation should count.

7. And in India, a specific achievement. Land reform in Kerala and West Bengal is the most substantial redistribution of land carried out anywhere in India, done by communist State governments through legislation within a constitutional democracy.

What is wrong in it

As economics

The calculation problem, from chapter 700. The abolition of markets in the means of production destroys the mechanism that generates the information about scarcity, want and cost, and no planner can collect it because it does not exist in collectible form. This is the decisive economic objection and it applies to honest and benevolent planners.

In one line

Communism and democratic socialism want a great deal of the same thing and disagree completely about how far to go and how to get there, and the disagreement about method is the one that has mattered.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: socialism and communism share the analysis that inequality is produced by the private ownership of the means of production and that production should be commonly owned or controlled, but they differ in the extent of common ownership sought, communism requiring the abolition of private ownership of production altogether while socialism in its democratic forms accepts a mixed economy; in method, communism holding that revolution is necessary because the owning class controls the state while democratic socialism works through elections and legislation; and in their attitude to the state, communism treating it as an instrument of class rule which will eventually wither away while democratic socialism treats it as a machine that can be captured and used.

First, which socialism

In Marxist usage socialism is the lower stage of communism, described at chapter 720: social ownership, classes abolished, distribution according to work contributed, the state withering. On that usage the comparison is between two stages of one process and the differences are of degree.

In ordinary political usage, and in this chapter unless otherwise stated, socialism means the wider family at chapter 690, most of whose branches reject revolution and accept a mixed economy. On that usage the comparison is between two ideologies, and the differences are fundamental.

An answer should open by saying this. It is the difference between a good answer and a confused one, and it takes two sentences.

What they agree about

The diagnosis. That the great inequalities of a market society are produced by its institutions and by private ownership of the means of production rather than by unequal natural talent.

That production should be commonly owned or socially controlled, though they disagree about how much and by whom.

That formal freedom without material means is empty.

That work should be a source of fulfilment rather than a commodity.

That the interests of the working population should be the object of policy, and both are movements that speak for it.

Where they differ

1. How far common ownership goes

Communism requires the abolition of private ownership of the means of production altogether.

Democratic socialism in practice has settled for a mixed economy: some sectors public, the rest private and regulated, with redistribution through taxation.

2. Method

The decisive difference.

Communism holds that the owning class controls the state, the law and the prevailing ideas, so it will not permit its own expropriation, and revolution is therefore necessary.

In one line

Gandhism and communism agree that the present arrangement of wealth is indefensible and disagree about almost everything else: about violence, about the state, about industry, about property, and about whether means and ends can be separated.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: Gandhism and communism share a rejection of the existing distribution of wealth, a concern for the poorest and a hostility to exploitation, but they differ fundamentally in that communism holds class conflict to be the motor of history and revolution the means of change, while Gandhism holds that means and ends are inseparable and that non-violence is therefore obligatory; that communism seeks the abolition of private property in the means of production while Gandhism seeks its retention under trusteeship; that communism is industrial and centralising while Gandhism is agrarian and decentralising; and that communism is materialist while Gandhism is founded on a spiritual conception of the person.

What they agree about

An answer that begins with the agreements is stronger, because the disagreements are only interesting once the common ground is clear.

That the existing distribution of wealth is indefensible. Both regard extreme inequality as a wrong requiring change and not as a natural fact.

That exploitation is real. Gandhi's language is different, but his objection to the mill owner who grows rich on the labour of the poor is an objection to the same relation.

That the poorest are the point. Antyodaya and the proletariat's centrality are different formulations of the same priority.

That the existing order will not reform itself. Both regard the beneficiaries as unlikely to give up what they hold voluntarily, which is why Gandhi organised strikes as well as appealing to conscience.

Hostility to colonialism, and both movements treated imperial rule as an economic relation and not only a political one.

And a shared final image. Both look forward to a society without coercive authority: Gandhi's ideal of enlightened anarchy, in which everyone is their own ruler, and Engels's withering away of the state, are strikingly similar destinations reached by opposite roads.

Where they differ

1. Means and ends

The deepest difference, and every other one follows from it.

Communism is consequentialist about method. The transformation is the end, and the means are chosen for their effectiveness, so revolutionary violence is justified by what it achieves.

Gandhism holds that means and ends are inseparable, with the same connection between them as between the seed and the tree. A society reached through violence will be a violent society, so the doctrine that the end justifies the means is exactly what he rejects.

2. Violence

Communism treats violence as sometimes necessary, and in the classical account as the midwife of the new society.

In one line

A political party is an organised group that seeks to capture governmental power through elections in order to carry out a programme, which is what separates it from every other kind of political organisation.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: a political party is an organised body of persons holding broadly similar political views who seek to obtain and exercise governmental power, ordinarily by contesting elections, in order to give effect to a programme; its defining features are organisation, a measure of ideological or programmatic coherence, the pursuit of governmental office rather than merely of influence, the claim to represent a national or general interest, and the acceptance of responsibility for governing.

The five features

1. Organisation. A structure, a membership, office bearers and a means of taking decisions. A crowd, a mood or a tendency is not a party.

2. Some coherence of views or programme. Not unanimity, which no large party has, but enough shared position for the party to mean something to a voter.

3. The pursuit of governmental power. The decisive feature. An interest group seeks to influence whoever governs; a party seeks to be the government.

4. A claim to speak for a general interest. A party asks for the votes of people whose interests differ, so it must present a programme for the whole and not for a section. This is why parties are broad and often internally inconsistent, and it is a consequence of the third feature rather than a defect.

5. The acceptance of responsibility. A party that wins must govern, must answer for what it does, and must face the electorate again. This is what disciplines it, and it is what an interest group never has to accept.

Where Indian law defines a party

The definition matters practically, because in India recognition confers real advantages, and a law student should know where the definitions sit.

Section 29A of the Representation of the People Act 1951 provides for the registration of political parties with the Election Commission. An association or body of individual citizens of India calling itself a political party applies to the Commission, and its memorandum or rules must contain a specific provision that it shall bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of India as by law established, and to the principles of socialism, secularism and democracy, and would uphold the sovereignty, unity and integrity of India.

Recognition as a State or a national party is a separate matter, governed by the Election Symbols (Reservation and Allotment) Order made by the Election Commission under article 324, and turns on performance at elections in terms of seats and vote share. Recognition brings a reserved symbol, free time on public broadcasting, and a larger number of proposers and star campaigners.

In one line

A party wants to be the government; an interest group wants to influence whoever the government is, and every other difference follows from that one.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: a political party seeks to capture governmental power by contesting elections and accepts responsibility for the whole range of policy and for governing, whereas an interest group seeks only to influence public policy in favour of the interest it represents, does not contest elections, takes no position on matters outside its concern, and accepts no responsibility for the consequences of what it demands.

The master difference

A party seeks office. A group seeks influence.

Every difference in the table is a consequence of this, and an answer that establishes it first and then derives the rest reads far better than one that lists ten unrelated differences.

Derive the consequences. Because a party seeks office it must contest elections; because it contests elections it must appeal beyond any single interest; because it appeals to everyone it must have a position on everything; because it may win it must accept responsibility; and because it may lose it is disciplined by the electorate. A group does none of these, and is therefore free to be single-minded, uncompromising and permanent in a way no party can be.

The differences

1. Object. Office against influence.

2. Elections. A party contests; a group does not, though it may support candidates, campaign on issues and mobilise voters.

3. Breadth of programme. A party must cover the whole of policy; a group covers its own concern and is silent elsewhere.

4. Membership. A party's membership is open and is meant to be as large as possible; a group's is defined by the interest, and in the case of a professional or sectional body may be closed.

5. Accountability. A party answers to the whole electorate at intervals; a group answers to its members alone, and to nobody else at all.

6. Responsibility. A party that wins must implement and must live with the consequences; a group may demand what it likes and is never asked to pay for it.

7. Continuity of position. A group can hold the same demand for fifty years; a party must adjust to remain electable, which is why groups regard parties as unprincipled and parties regard groups as unrealistic.

8. Legal status in India. A party registers under section 29A of the Representation of the People Act 1951, may be recognised under the Symbols Order, and binds its elected members through the Tenth Schedule. An interest group has no such status and no such power.

9. Compromise. A party is a machine for compromise, since it must hold together people who disagree; a group exists precisely in order not to compromise.

In one line

Parties matter in India because the Constitution's machinery cannot work without them and because, since 1985, a party's direction binds the member it elected on pain of losing the seat.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: political parties are significant in India because the parliamentary executive depends on a stable legislative majority which only parties can supply; because the electorate's choice of a government is made through party labels rather than through individual candidates; because parties recruit almost the whole political leadership; because they organise the opposition without which accountability is impossible; and because, since the Constitution (Fifty-second Amendment) Act 1985 inserted the Tenth Schedule, a legislator who votes against the direction of the party that returned them may be disqualified, which converts party discipline from a convention into a rule of law.

What parties supply that the Constitution assumes

The Constitution as adopted did not mention parties and cannot work without them, and setting out why is the strongest opening an answer on this topic can have.

A government that commands confidence. The Council of Ministers is collectively responsible to the House and holds office only while it commands a majority. Without parties there is no way to assemble a stable majority from several hundred individuals, and no way for the electorate to know in advance who will govern.

A choice the voter can make. A voter chooses one candidate in one constituency and is in fact choosing a government. That is possible only because the candidate carries a party label that carries a programme and a prospective Prime Minister or Chief Minister.

An opposition. Scrutiny, questions, committee work and the readiness to take office all require an organised alternative, and only a party supplies it.

Leadership. Almost every person who holds ministerial office in India arrived through a party organisation.

Aggregation across an extraordinarily diverse country. A party seeking a majority in India must assemble support across languages, religions, castes and regions, and the necessity of doing so is itself a moderating force.

Continuity. Governments change and parties persist, so a programme can outlast a term.

The Tenth Schedule, which is where parties enter the law

What it does. The Constitution (Fifty-second Amendment) Act 1985 inserted the Tenth Schedule. Paragraph 2 disqualifies a member of either House of Parliament or of a State Legislature who voluntarily gives up membership of the party which set them up as a candidate, or who votes or abstains contrary to any direction issued by that party without prior permission and without being condoned within fifteen days. It also covers an independent who joins a party after the election, and a nominated member who joins one after six months. Paragraph 6 gives the decision on disqualification to the Speaker or Chairman and declares it final, and paragraph 7 purported to exclude the jurisdiction of all courts.

In one line

Indian parties are numerous, internally undemocratic, organised as much around leaders, regions and communities as around ideology, dependent on money, and legally able to bind the members they elect.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the features of political parties in India are a multi-party system with a very large number of registered parties; the coexistence of national and State parties; the prominence of regional, caste and community based parties; the personalisation of leadership and the prevalence of political families; weak internal democracy; ideological convergence with programmatic differences narrower than the rhetoric suggests; heavy dependence on money; and, since 1985, a legal power over their elected members through the Tenth Schedule.

The features

1. A multi-party system, with very many parties

India has a multi-party system in the strict sense: several parties are capable of winning seats and of participating in government. Alongside the recognised national and State parties there are a very large number of registered unrecognised parties, most of which never win anything.

The cause is the country's size and diversity together with a first past the post system that nonetheless rewards parties with geographically concentrated support, which regional and community parties have.

2. National and State parties

A structural feature written into the law. Recognition under the Election Symbols Order distinguishes national parties, State parties and registered unrecognised parties, by reference to seats won and vote share. The distinction is not merely descriptive: it determines the reserved symbol, broadcasting time and the number of star campaigners, and therefore affects who can compete.

3. Regional, caste and community parties

Regional parties have governed States for decades and have repeatedly held the balance in coalitions at the Union.

Caste and community based parties organise around a group's political mobilisation, which chapter 850 treats as one of the older challenges to Indian democracy and which is also, on another reading, a form of representation the older parties denied.

State the fact and both readings. A party organised around a community is a party whose appeal is sectional, which chapter 770 says a party cannot afford; and it is also how groups excluded from power for generations obtained it. Both are true.

4. Personalisation and political families

Many Indian parties are identified with a founder or a leader, and in several the leadership has passed within a family. This is a feature of parties across the spectrum and not of any one of them.

Why it matters. A party organised around a person has no mechanism for changing its leadership except the person's departure, which is Michels's oligarchy at chapter 100 in an Indian form.

5. Weak internal democracy

Internal elections are rare, and where they are held they are often uncontested. Candidates for public office are usually selected by a central committee or a leader rather than by the members in the constituency. There is no legal requirement of internal democracy beyond the requirements of registration.

In one line

A coalition is a government formed by more than one party because no single party has a majority, and in India it has been the normal condition at the Union for long stretches and is the normal condition in many States.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: coalition politics is the practice by which two or more political parties combine, before or after an election, to form and sustain a government, because no single party commands a majority in the legislature; it becomes necessary in a multi-party system operating under a parliamentary constitution in which the Council of Ministers is collectively responsible to the House and must retain its confidence.

Why coalitions happen in India

The constitutional requirement. Under articles 75(3) and 164(2) the Council of Ministers is collectively responsible to the House of the People and to the Legislative Assembly of a State respectively. A government must therefore command a majority continuously, and where no party has one, several must combine.

The electoral system does not prevent it. First past the post is often said to manufacture majorities, and it does so where competition is between two parties. Where competition is multi-cornered and support is regionally concentrated, it produces neither a majority nor proportionality, which is the Indian pattern.

The social basis. A country divided by language, religion, caste and region produces parties whose support is regional or sectional, and such parties can win seats without ever approaching a majority.

The kinds of coalition

Pre-poll alliances, formed before the election, with seats distributed among the partners and often a common programme and a declared leader. These have a stronger claim to a mandate, because the voter knew what combination they were voting for.

Post-poll coalitions, assembled after the results. The voter did not choose the combination, which is the standing objection to them.

Coalitions with outside support, where a party sustains the government by voting with it without joining the Council of Ministers. This is a distinctively Indian arrangement and it is unstable, because the supporting party has influence without responsibility and can withdraw at any time.

Minority governments, which are not coalitions at all but survive by issue by issue support, and which belong in the same discussion because they arise from the same arithmetic.

The phases of coalition government in India

An answer that gives the phases is much stronger than one that describes coalitions in the abstract.

Dominance at the Union with coalitions in the States. For the first two decades after independence one party held a clear majority at the Union while several States saw non-Congress coalitions, particularly from the late 1960s. Coalition politics in India begins in the States.

In one line

Whether India remains a multi-party system depends on whether regional parties keep their hold on States, on how party finance is regulated, and on how the recognition rules operate, and there are strong arguments both ways.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the future of the multi-party system in India is contested; the case for its continuance rests on the country's linguistic, regional and social diversity, on the entrenchment of regional parties in State politics, and on the federal structure which gives them a permanent arena; the case for a return to a dominant party system rests on the advantages of scale in finance, organisation and communication, on the consolidation of votes behind national parties, and on the difficulty small parties face in meeting the thresholds for recognition.

What a multi-party system is, and what India has

A multi-party system exists where more than two parties are capable of winning seats and of participating in government, so that a single party's majority is not the normal expectation.

A dominant party system exists where many parties compete but one wins repeatedly, so that competition is real and alternation is rare.

A two-party system exists where two parties alternate and others are marginal. The standard examples are the United States, where the Democrats and the Republicans alternate and no third party has won the presidency in more than a century, and the United Kingdom, where Labour and the Conservatives have formed every government since the nineteen twenties. MU has asked for two such countries by name, so learn a pair.

India has been all three at different times, and describing which is which is the first task of an answer.

The first two decades: a dominant party system at the Union with genuine competition inside the dominant party and multi-party competition in several States.

From the late 1960s to the 1980s: increasing competition, the first alternations, and the growth of State parties.

From the late 1980s to the mid 2010s: a genuine multi-party system in which no party won a majority at the Union.

Since then: single-party majorities at the Union with the multi-party structure intact beneath them, since States continue to be governed by parties that do not compete nationally.

That last observation is the key to the whole question. India's party system is not one system but two: a system at the Union and a system in each State, and they need not be the same shape at the same time.

The case for the multi-party system continuing

1. Diversity has not diminished. The languages, regions, religions and castes that produced regional and community parties are still there, and no party that must appeal across all of them can be everybody's first preference.

In one line

Democracy is the arrangement by which the people authorise those who govern them and can remove them, and an election performs that function only if the voter knows what they are choosing.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: democracy rests on the principle that the authority of government derives from the consent of the governed; since actual consent to the state was never given, the institutions of a democracy supply a continuing substitute for it, through periodic elections on a universal adult franchise, freedom of speech and association, the availability of an alternative government, and the right of the voter to information about those seeking their vote; and the legitimacy of a democratic government rests on the operation of those institutions rather than on any original act of agreement.

The word, and the two questions

Democracy is from the Greek demos, the people, and kratos, rule: rule by the people.

Two questions have to be separated, and most confusion about democracy comes from running them together.

Who rules? The people, in some sense that has to be specified.

How do the people rule? Directly, or through representatives who are chosen and can be removed.

The forms

Direct democracy. The people themselves decide, in an assembly or by referendum. Rousseau at chapter 330 regarded this as the only genuine form, because sovereignty cannot be represented. It is possible in a small community and, in a modern state, only for particular questions.

Representative democracy. The people choose those who decide, at intervals, and may remove them. This is what every large modern democracy is.

Participatory democracy. Representative institutions supplemented by direct participation in decisions that affect people locally, which is what chapter 920's Gram Sabha is.

Deliberative democracy. The emphasis on the quality of the reasoning that precedes the decision rather than only on the counting of preferences.

How consent operates in a democracy

Chapter 340 concluded that actual consent to the state cannot be found, that tacit consent is a weak inference, and that hypothetical consent is not consent. Democracy's answer is institutional: it replaces an original act of agreement with a continuing process that performs the same functions.

Authorisation. An election confers a mandate to govern for a term. It is not agreement with each measure; it is authorisation of a body to decide.

Accountability. The government must return and ask again, which is the mechanism that consent alone could never supply, because a person who has agreed once cannot withdraw the agreement.

Removal without violence. The single greatest practical achievement of democracy, and the one that most deserves emphasis: governments are changed without anybody being killed.

Participation between elections. Speech, assembly, association, petition, litigation and the press, which allow the governed to press their views continuously.

In one line

A democracy needs an educated and participating citizenry, a measure of economic security, tolerance and the acceptance of dissent, independent institutions that hold rulers to the rules, and an opposition ready to take office.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the success of democracy requires social conditions, principally an educated citizenry, a spirit of tolerance and a willingness to accept dissent and the verdict of the electorate; economic conditions, principally a level of security and a limitation of inequality sufficient to make political equality real; and institutional conditions, principally free and fair elections, an independent judiciary and election commission, a free press, the rule of law, an organised opposition, effective local government and a neutral administration.

The social conditions

Education. A voter must be able to obtain and assess information about candidates and policies, which is the practical form of the right to know at chapter 820. It is why article 21A now makes free and compulsory education a fundamental right, and it is what Mill and Ambedkar both insisted on.

Tolerance and the acceptance of dissent. A democracy asks a defeated group to accept a decision it opposes and to continue to work within the system. That is only possible where disagreement is not treated as disloyalty. Where it is, elections become contests to be won at any cost.

Acceptance of the electoral verdict. The single most important habit, and the least noticed. A democracy survives because losers concede.

A sense of common citizenship. Where the divisions of a society are so deep that a group regards a government drawn from another group as illegitimate in principle, the arithmetic of elections cannot hold the society together.

Public spirit and participation. Voting, joining associations, attending meetings, and the willingness to hold office.

The economic conditions

Security of subsistence. A person whose next meal is uncertain cannot deliberate, cannot afford to offend a patron and cannot risk the loss of work that political activity may bring. This is chapter 590's positive liberty applied to democracy.

Limitation of inequality. Political equality does not survive severe economic inequality, because influence follows resources. Ambedkar's warning at chapter 600 is the sharpest Indian statement of this, and it is properly placed here rather than treated as a slogan.

And the honest qualification. India adopted universal adult franchise at once, in a poor and largely illiterate society, and the experiment worked better than almost anybody predicted. Any answer which says that prosperity and literacy are preconditions must confront that fact, and the correct formulation is that they make democracy easier and are not conditions precedent.

The institutional conditions

Free and fair elections, held at fixed intervals, on a universal adult franchise, by secret ballot, conducted by an authority independent of the government.

In one line

Ethical decay is what happens when the forms of democracy are kept and the substance is hollowed out, so that elections continue while the things that made them meaningful are removed one at a time.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the ethical decay of democracy refers to the erosion of the moral and institutional conditions on which democratic government depends, while its outward forms are preserved; its principal manifestations are the criminalisation of politics, the dominance of money in elections, defection and the trade in legislators, the capture or weakening of institutions meant to hold rulers to the rules, the decline of deliberation in legislatures, the use of communal and caste appeals, and the manipulation of information.

What is being claimed, and what is not

The claim is not that politicians are dishonest, which is a complaint about individuals and is made in every country and every century.

The claim is not that the machinery has been abolished. Elections are held, legislatures sit and courts function.

The claim is that the conditions at chapter 830 are being eroded while the machinery continues, so that an election ceases to perform the functions that made it a means of consent. That is a structural claim, it can be tested, and stating it in that form is the difference between an answer and a complaint.

The manifestations

1. Criminalisation of politics

Candidates and legislators against whom serious criminal cases are pending, and in some cases who have been convicted.

Why it is decay rather than crime. A person facing serious charges is not disqualified until convicted, and trials take many years, so the position is lawful and the effect is corrosive. It also alters the incentives of everybody else, because a candidate who can deter opponents has an advantage that has nothing to do with the electorate.

What the law has done. The disclosure requirement in Union of India v. Association for Democratic Reforms, (2002) 5 SCC 294, is the principal remedy: the voter has a right to know the antecedents of a candidate, derived from article 19(1)(a), because the casting of a vote is an expression of opinion and a meaningful choice requires information, and the Election Commission was directed under article 324 to require affidavits on pending cases and convictions, on assets and liabilities of the candidate, spouse and dependants, and on educational qualifications. The remedy is disclosure, which leaves the decision to the voter.

2. Money

The cost of contesting has risen far beyond what an ordinary candidate can raise, which restricts who can stand, makes parties dependent on contributors, and creates an expectation of return. Chapter 860 sets out the electoral bonds judgment, which is the constitutional treatment of it.

In one line

The challenges India began with were poverty, illiteracy, caste, communalism, regionalism, the centre's power to dismiss State governments, and the possibility that a government could suspend the Constitution from inside, and the last two were answered by cases and the first five have not been answered at all.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the older challenges to Indian democracy are the social and economic conditions with which it began, namely mass poverty, illiteracy and extreme inequality; the divisions of caste, religion, language and region, which threatened both the working of elections and the unity of the country; the misuse of central power to dismiss State governments under article 356; and the demonstrated possibility that a government could suspend rights and postpone elections while remaining formally lawful, which occurred during the Emergency.

Why "old" is a defensible category

They were present from 1950. Each was identified in the Constituent Assembly and by the leadership of the time as a threat to the arrangement being adopted.

They arose from India's social and constitutional structure, not from any later development.

And most of them persist. The point of the category is not that they are past but that they are original, which is why an answer must not say that the old challenges have been overcome.

The challenges

1. Poverty and economic inequality

The problem. A democracy adopted in a society where most people lacked subsistence, in which the conditions at chapter 830 for real political equality were absent.

Why it threatens democracy. A person dependent for their livelihood on a landlord, an employer or a patron cannot vote freely, cannot afford to protest and cannot risk the loss of work. Ambedkar's warning at chapter 600 is the classical Indian statement.

What was done. The Directive Principles, land reform legislation, and later welfare and employment programmes, which chapter 710 examined.

Where it stands. Poverty has fallen very substantially and inequality has not, and the second is what bears on democracy.

2. Illiteracy

Why it threatens democracy. A voter who cannot read cannot check a claim, cannot read a manifesto or an affidavit, and is dependent on intermediaries.

What was done. Universal schooling as a directive, symbols on ballot papers so that illiteracy did not disenfranchise anybody, and eventually article 21A.

What is worth noticing, because it corrects a widespread assumption: turnout among poorer and less literate voters in India has frequently exceeded turnout among the well educated and prosperous. Illiteracy limited what a voter could check and did not prevent them from voting.

3. Caste

The problem. A hierarchy of birth in a system founded on the equality of persons, and the most fundamental of the old challenges.

In one line

The newer threats are money on a scale that decides who can compete, information environments in which voters are addressed separately and cannot check what they are told, and pressure on the institutions whose job is to say no.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the newer challenges to Indian democracy are the scale and opacity of political finance; the transformation of the information environment by social media, targeted messaging and coordinated disinformation; the concentration of media ownership; pressure on the independence of institutions charged with holding governments to the rules; surveillance and the erosion of privacy; the shrinking of legislative deliberation; and the rise of a majoritarian conception of democracy in which winning an election is treated as authorising anything.

The challenges

1. Money, and the electoral bonds judgment

The problem. Elections cost sums no ordinary candidate can raise, so parties depend on those who can supply them, and a contributor who cannot be identified cannot be held to account by anybody.

Facts. Association for Democratic Reforms v. Union of India, decided 15 February 2024. The Finance Act 2017 introduced the Electoral Bond Scheme and made four connected amendments: to section 31 of the Reserve Bank of India Act, to section 29C of the Representation of the People Act 1951, to section 13A of the Income Tax Act, and to section 182 of the Companies Act. Together these permitted contributions to parties through bearer instruments bought from a bank, exempted parties from disclosing contributions received in that form, exempted them from maintaining records of those contributors, and removed the previous cap on the proportion of profits a company could contribute. Petitioners under article 32 sought a declaration that the Scheme and those provisions were unconstitutional.

Held. A Constitution Bench held that information about the funding of a political party is essential for a voter to exercise the freedom to vote in an effective manner, so that the Scheme and the impugned provisions, to the extent that they infringe the voter's right to information by anonymising contributions, violate article 19(1)(a). Applying the proportionality standard, which requires a legitimate goal, a suitable means, the least restrictive and equally effective alternative, and a balance between the restriction and the goal, the Court held the infringement unjustified. It declared unconstitutional the Electoral Bond Scheme, the proviso to section 29C(1) of the Representation of the People Act as amended, section 182(3) of the Companies Act as amended, and section 13A(b) of the Income Tax Act as amended. It further held that the deletion of the proviso to section 182(1) of the Companies Act, which had permitted unlimited corporate contributions, is arbitrary and violative of article 14. And it directed disclosure of the information on contributions already received under the Scheme.

In one line

Gram Swaraj is Gandhi's proposal that India be organised as a very large number of self-governing villages, each managing its own affairs, related to each other not as a pyramid but as widening circles with the individual at the centre.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: Gram Swaraj, meaning village self-rule, is Gandhi's conception of the ideal political order, in which every village is a self-sufficient republic managing its own agriculture, industry, education, health, sanitation and justice, exercising full powers over its own affairs, and related to larger units not by subordination but by voluntary cooperation, so that political power is exercised at the level nearest to the people and the state above exists to serve rather than to direct.

The two words

Gram is village. Swaraj is self-rule, and Gandhi insisted the word means more than independence from foreign rule.

His own distinction, from Hind Swaraj. Independence is the removal of a foreign government; swaraj is rule over oneself, which begins with the individual's control over their own conduct and extends outward. A country whose foreign rulers have gone and whose people are governed from a distant capital by people they cannot reach has independence and not swaraj.

That distinction is the whole of Gram Swaraj. Swaraj at the level of a country is only real if there is swaraj at the level of a village, and swaraj at the level of a village is only real if there is swaraj in the person.

What Gandhi proposed

A self-sufficient village. Producing its own food and cloth, meeting its own basic needs, so that it is not dependent on a distant economy over which it has no control. Dependence, on his account, is the opposite of self-rule.

Full authority over its own affairs. Its own agriculture, its own village industries, its own school, its own sanitation and health, its own watch and ward, and its own settlement of disputes.

Managed by a panchayat chosen annually by the adults of the village, exercising the functions of legislature, executive and judiciary together for village matters. Gandhi was explicit that this combination, which would be objectionable at a larger scale, is workable in a body small enough for everybody to see what it does.

Non-violent. The village defends itself by non-violent means, and Gandhi accepted that this required a level of discipline most villages did not have.

Bread labour and swadeshi. Everybody performs some physical work, and needs are met locally by preference.

Trusteeship within the village, so that those with more hold it for the community, which is chapter 750's material applied locally.

The oceanic circle

Gandhi's answer to the obvious question, what holds the villages together, and the image should be reproduced in an answer because it is precisely designed against the alternative.

In one line

Ambedkar opposed making the village the unit of the Constitution, because for the people he represented the village was not a republic but the place where their exclusion was enforced, and he said so in the Constituent Assembly in terms nobody has been able to soften.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: Ambedkar rejected the proposal that the village should be the unit of the Indian Constitution, holding that the village republics had been the ruination of India, that the village was a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism, and that he was glad the Draft Constitution had discarded the village and adopted the individual as its unit; his objection rested on the position of the excluded, for whom local dominance was closer and more inescapable than any distant government, and his alternative was constitutional democracy with enforceable individual rights, State-directed economic measures and social reform aimed at caste.

The passage

In his speech on the Draft Constitution, Ambedkar answered those who criticised the Constitution for ignoring the village. He first quoted the classic description of village communities surviving every dynasty and every conquest, and then turned it against those who admired it.

His own words. Such is the part the village communities have played in the history of their country. Knowing this, what pride can one feel in them? That they have survived through all vicissitudes may be a fact. But mere survival has no value. The question is on what plane they have survived. Surely on a low, on a selfish level. I hold that these village republics have been the ruination of India. I am therefore surprised that those who condemn provincialism and communalism should come forward as champions of the village. What is the village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism? I am glad that the Draft Constitution has discarded the village and adopted the individual as its unit.

Read the argument, not only the words. Ambedkar's point is not that villages are unpleasant. It is that survival is not a merit, that what survived was a particular social order, and that admiring the survival is admiring the order.

Why he held it

Because of who lives at the bottom of a village. For those excluded by caste, the village was where the exclusion was administered: which well, which street, which land, which occupation, which temple. A distant government is remote and can be appealed to; a village is neither.

Because closeness is not the same as freedom. Gandhi's argument at chapter 870 is that participation is real at village scale. Ambedkar's reply is that domination is also real at village scale, and that a person dominated by neighbours cannot leave, cannot appeal and cannot be anonymous.

In one line

Article 40 told the State to organise village panchayats and to give them the powers of units of self-government, and because a Directive Principle cannot be enforced in a court, almost nothing happened until Parliament wrote local government into the Constitution as an enforceable Part in 1992.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: article 40 is a Directive Principle of State Policy under which the State shall take steps to organise village panchayats and endow them with such powers and authority as may be necessary to enable them to function as units of self-government; being a Directive Principle it is by article 37 not enforceable by any court although it is fundamental in the governance of the country, and the consequence was that panchayats existed only where a State chose to create them, were dissolved and left unelected at the State's convenience, and were given whatever powers and money the State wished, so that after four decades and four expert committees Parliament enacted the Seventy-third and Seventy-fourth Amendments, which took the subject out of the State's discretion and placed it in Part IX and Part IXA of the Constitution.

The text of article 40

Article 40, in Part IV, reads: The State shall take steps to organise village panchayats and endow them with such powers and authority as may be necessary to enable them to function as units of self-government.

Three things about that sentence.

"Units of self-government". Not units of administration. Self-government means governing, not carrying out somebody else's programme, which is the difference between a panchayat and a village level office of the State.

"Take steps to organise". The State is directed to create them. In 1950 there were no panchayats to protect, so the Article is a direction to build.

"Such powers and authority as may be necessary." The powers are not listed. That was left to the State, and became the gap through which the Article was emptied.

Why it is a Directive Principle, and what follows

Article 36 and article 37 govern the whole of Part IV. By article 37, the provisions of Part IV shall not be enforceable by any court, but the principles laid down are nevertheless fundamental in the governance of the country and it shall be the duty of the State to apply these principles in making laws.

So a citizen could not sue. A villager whose panchayat had not been constituted, or had been superseded for eleven years, had nothing to file. There was no right, so there was no remedy.

And the compromise at chapter 880 is visible here. The village entered the Constitution, which is what the Gandhians wanted, and it entered a Part that cannot be enforced, which is what the Assembly was prepared to concede. Article 40 records the disagreement rather than settling it.

In one line

The 73rd Amendment inserted Part IX into the Constitution, which makes panchayats compulsory, elected, reserved, term limited and financed through a defined process, so that local self-government stopped depending on what a State Government felt like doing.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the Constitution (Seventy-third Amendment) Act, 1992, in force from 24 April 1993, inserted Part IX, "The Panchayats", comprising articles 243 to 243O and the Eleventh Schedule; its key features are a Gram Sabha at the village level, a three tier structure of panchayats at the village, intermediate and district levels, direct election to all seats, reservation for the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes and women, a fixed term of five years with elections completed before its expiry or within six months of a dissolution, an independent State Election Commission, a State Finance Commission every five years, and a list of twenty nine subjects in the Eleventh Schedule which a State may devolve to enable panchayats to function as institutions of self-government.

The features, article by article

Article 243: definitions

Gram Sabha means a body consisting of persons registered in the electoral rolls relating to a village comprised within the area of a panchayat at the village level. Panchayat means an institution, by whatever name called, of self-government constituted under article 243B, for the rural areas. Intermediate level and village are what the Governor notifies.

Two things are settled in the definitions themselves: the Gram Sabha is every voter and not a committee, and a panchayat is an institution of self-government, which repeats article 40's phrase in an enforceable Part.

Article 243A: the Gram Sabha

A Gram Sabha may exercise such powers and perform such functions at the village level as the Legislature of a State may, by law, provide. Chapter 920 is on this article, including the weakness of the word "may".

Article 243B: constitution of panchayats

There shall be constituted in every State panchayats at the village, intermediate and district levels. The word is mandatory, and this single sentence ends the position described at chapter 890 under which panchayats existed only where a State chose.

The exception: the intermediate level may be omitted in a State having a population not exceeding twenty lakhs.

Article 243C: composition

All the seats in a panchayat shall be filled by persons chosen by direct election from territorial constituencies, with the population to seats ratio kept as nearly the same as practicable.

The chairperson of a village panchayat is elected as the State Legislature provides, and of an intermediate or district panchayat by and from amongst the elected members.

The State may also provide representation for chairpersons of the tier below, and for members of the Lok Sabha, the Rajya Sabha and the State legislature within the area, at levels other than the village.

In one line

The 74th Amendment did for towns what the 73rd did for villages, and added two things villages did not need: a committee inside the town below the level of the council, and a committee above the town that makes the rural and urban plans into one plan for the district.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the Constitution (Seventy-fourth Amendment) Act, 1992, in force from 1 June 1993, inserted Part IXA, "The Municipalities", comprising articles 243P to 243ZG and the Twelfth Schedule; it requires the constitution of a Nagar Panchayat for a transitional area, a Municipal Council for a smaller urban area and a Municipal Corporation for a larger urban area, direct election of all seats from wards, reservation for the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes and women on the same pattern as article 243D, a five year term with timely elections, elections conducted by the same State Election Commission, finance reviewed by the same State Finance Commission, and eighteen subjects listed in the Twelfth Schedule; and it adds Wards Committees in municipalities of three lakhs or more, a District Planning Committee in every district and a Metropolitan Planning Committee in every metropolitan area.

What is the same as Part IX

An answer should dispose of this in a paragraph and then go to the differences.

Note the two economies. There is one State Election Commission and one State Finance Commission for both rural and urban bodies, under articles 243ZA and 243Y. This is worth a line in an answer because it is what makes Kishansing Tomar, decided on a municipal corporation, authority for panchayats as well.

The four things that are different

1. Three kinds of municipality, article 243Q

There shall be constituted in every State:

a Nagar Panchayat for a transitional area, that is, an area in transition from rural to urban;

In one line

The Gram Sabha is the only body in the Indian constitutional scheme that consists of every voter rather than of representatives, which makes it the point at which participatory democracy enters a Constitution that is otherwise representative throughout.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: by article 243(b) the Gram Sabha is a body consisting of persons registered in the electoral rolls relating to a village comprised within the area of a panchayat at the village level, and by article 243A it may exercise such powers and perform such functions at the village level as the Legislature of a State may by law provide; it is thus the assembly of the whole village electorate rather than an elected body, and it is the constitutional expression of participatory democracy, meaning a system in which citizens take part directly in decisions rather than only in choosing those who decide, though its powers depend on State law and are in most States advisory, so that the article guarantees the assembly and not its authority.

The Gram Sabha in the Constitution

Article 243(b): "Gram Sabha" means a body consisting of persons registered in the electoral rolls relating to a village comprised within the area of a panchayat at the village level.

Read the definition carefully, because everything follows from it.

It is a body of persons, not of representatives. Every registered voter of the village is a member by virtue of being on the roll. There is no election to it and no seats in it.

It exists automatically. A State does not constitute a Gram Sabha; it exists wherever there is a village panchayat, because the definition makes it the electorate of that village.

It is only at the village level. There is no equivalent at the intermediate or district level, and none in Part IXA for towns, which chapter 910 identifies as the sharpest gap in the urban reform.

Article 243A: A Gram Sabha may exercise such powers and perform such functions at the village level as the Legislature of a State may, by law, provide.

The word is "may", and the powers are the State's to give. This is the weakness in the design and an answer must name it. The Constitution creates an assembly of every voter and then leaves it to the State to decide whether that assembly decides anything. In most States its statutory functions are to meet a fixed number of times a year, to consider the annual accounts, the audit report and the development programme, and to be consulted, and its resolutions do not bind the panchayat.

Where the Gram Sabha has real power: two central Acts

This is the material that turns a general answer into a good one, because it is where Parliament did what article 243A only permitted.

In one line

The 73rd and 74th Amendments reserved not less than one third of all seats and of chairperson offices for women, which put more women into elected office in India than any other measure ever has, and the limits are that a seat is not the same as authority.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: articles 243D(3) and 243T(3) reserve not less than one third of the seats to be filled by direct election in every panchayat and municipality for women, articles 243D(2) and 243T(2) reserve not less than one third of the seats reserved for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes for women of those communities, and articles 243D(4) and 243T(4) reserve not less than one third of the offices of chairperson at each level for women; the reservation has no time limit, since article 243D(5) applies the article 334 sunset only to the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe reservation, and many States have raised the share to one half by law, which the words "not less than" permit; the promise is descriptive representation and its documented effects on what local bodies spend on and on what voters come to accept, and the limitations are the proxy exercise of office by male relatives, the disruption caused by rotation of reserved seats, the dependence of local bodies on officials and on money they do not control, and disqualifications in State law that fall hardest on the women the reservation was meant to reach.

The promise

What the Constitution actually reserved

Article 243D(3), and identically article 243T(3) for municipalities: not less than one-third, including the seats reserved for women of the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes, of the total number of seats to be filled by direct election in every panchayat shall be reserved for women, and such seats may be allotted by rotation to different constituencies.

Article 243D(2), and 243T(2): not less than one-third of the seats reserved for the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes shall be reserved for women belonging to those communities. This is the intersection, and it matters: without clause (2) the Scheduled Caste quota could have gone entirely to men and the women's quota entirely to the dominant castes.

Article 243D(4), and 243T(4): not less than one-third of the total number of offices of chairperson in the panchayats at each level shall be reserved for women, allotted by rotation. Office, not merely membership, which is what makes the reservation more than symbolic.

Three features that carry marks

"Not less than" is a floor, not a quota. A State may reserve more, and many have legislated for one half. Nothing in Part IX prevents it.

In one line

The 73rd and 74th Amendments reserved seats and chairperson offices in every local body for the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes in proportion to their population, and merely permitted reservation for backward classes, which the Supreme Court has since confined by a triple test, so that inclusion in local government is guaranteed for two groups, conditional for a third, and in every case delivers a seat rather than authority.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: articles 243D(1) and 243T(1) make reservation for the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes mandatory in every panchayat and municipality in proportion to their population in the area, with one third of those seats for their women under clause (2) and chairperson offices reserved under clause (4), the reservation ceasing under clause (5) with the period fixed by article 334; articles 243D(6) and 243T(6) merely enable a State to reserve seats and chairperson offices for backward classes, and in K. Krishna Murthy v. Union of India the Supreme Court upheld those enabling clauses while holding that political backwardness is distinct from social and educational backwardness, that identification must be by a dedicated commission conducting a rigorous empirical inquiry, and that the aggregate of vertical reservation must not exceed fifty per cent except to safeguard Scheduled Tribes in Scheduled Areas, a triple test applied in Vikas Kishanrao Gawali v. State of Maharashtra to read down a uniform statewide quota; and the limitations are proxy exercise of reserved offices, rotation, the untouchability and dominance that the reservation of a seat cannot reach, and the weakness of the office itself.

The promise: what Part IX guarantees

The Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes

Articles 243D(1) and 243T(1): seats shall be reserved for the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes in every panchayat and every municipality, and the number shall bear, as nearly as may be, the same proportion to the total number of seats to be filled by direct election as their population in the area bears to the total population; the seats may be allotted by rotation.

Proportional, not a fixed quota, and everywhere. In a village where a quarter of the population is Scheduled Caste, a quarter of the seats are reserved. This is what makes the guarantee real in the places where it is most needed: it is largest exactly where the excluded population is largest.

Clause (2): not less than one third of those reserved seats for women of those communities, which is chapter 930's intersection.

Clause (4): the offices of chairperson are reserved in the same proportion at each level, allotted by rotation between panchayats. In K. Krishna Murthy the Court upheld this, holding that chairperson posts cannot be equated with solitary posts in the context of public employment, which is the answer to the argument that reserving a single office in a body is reserving a single post.