BLS LLB 5 Years Sem 3 Political Science 2 2025-26 Question Paper with Solutions

De jure authority means authority by right, or in law. It is authority that rests on a legal or constitutional title: the holder occupies the office by the procedure the law lays down, and so has a legal right to issue commands and to be obeyed. The Latin phrase means "concerning law".

The elected government of India holds de jure authority, because it takes office under the Constitution after an election conducted under law.

It is contrasted with de facto authority, which is authority exercised in fact, without legal title, as by a military junta that has seized power by a coup. A regime may be de facto without being de jure, and a government in exile may be de jure without being de facto.

Legitimacy is the quality that turns naked power into rightful authority. A government is legitimate when those who are governed believe that its rule is proper and that its commands ought to be obeyed, so that obedience is given willingly rather than extracted by force.

Max Weber defined it as the belief of the governed in the rightfulness of the rule, and gave three grounds on which that belief can rest: tradition, charisma and legal-rational rules.

In a modern democracy the principal source of legitimacy is a free and fair election held under a constitution.

Laissez faire is a French expression meaning "let do", or "leave alone". In political theory it is the doctrine of classical, negative liberalism: the state should confine itself to maintaining law and order, defence and justice, and should not interfere with the economic and private lives of individuals.

Its core claims are that the individual is the best judge of his own interest, that free competition and the market allocate resources most efficiently, and that state interference does more harm than good. Adam Smith is its classic exponent, and the state it produces is often called the police state or the night-watchman state.

Traditional authority is the first of Max Weber's three types of legitimate authority. Its legitimacy rests on "an established belief in the sanctity of immemorial traditions". People obey because the ruler occupies a position that custom has always sanctioned, and because things have always been done this way.

Its features are:

1. Authority is inherited, usually by birth and succession, not earned or elected.
2. Obedience is owed to the person of the chief, not to an impersonal office or rule.
3. The ruler is bound by custom rather than by written law, and there is no formal, rule-bound administration.

Examples are hereditary monarchy, tribal chieftainship, and the caste-sanctioned village elder. Weber's sub-types are patriarchalism, patrimonialism and feudalism.

What makes a law unjust. A law is formally valid when it is made by the competent authority in the prescribed manner. It is unjust when, though validly made, it violates morality, natural justice, human dignity or fundamental rights. St Augustine said that an unjust law is no law at all, a maxim Aquinas developed into the position that a law contrary to the divine or natural law does not bind in conscience. Martin Luther King Jr, in the Letter from Birmingham Jail, gave the most usable test: a just law uplifts human personality, an unjust law degrades it, and a law is unjust when a majority imposes on a minority a rule it does not make binding on itself.

The problem. If law derives its force from justice, an unjust law creates a conflict between legal duty and moral duty. Political obligation is not absolute: the citizen owes obedience to the state, but the state owes justice to the citizen, and where it fails, the ground of the obligation is weakened.

The right to resistance is the right of the citizen to refuse obedience to, and to actively oppose, an unjust law or a tyrannical government.

Its principal forms:

2. T.H. Green: the citizen ought normally to obey, because law serves the common good, but where a law defeats the common good he may resist, preferably by lawful and public means, and only when the general interest will not suffer more from the resistance than from the law.
3. Gandhi: resistance must be non-violent, open, and must accept the punishment, since the aim is to convert the opponent, not to defeat him.
4. Martin Luther King Jr: one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws, but must do so openly, lovingly and with a willingness to accept the penalty, which is the highest respect for law.
5. Nelson Mandela: began with non-violent resistance to apartheid and turned to armed struggle only when peaceful channels were closed, and returned to negotiation once they reopened.

3. The state represents the general will. Following Rousseau, the state expresses not the sum of private wishes but the general will, the will of the community aimed at the common good. In obeying the law the citizen obeys his own better self, and so remains free. The objection is the one every critic of Rousseau makes: someone must decide what the general will is, and that opens the door to compelling a man to be free.
4. The state secures justice. The state exists to protect rights and to hold the balance between competing claims. Because it secures the citizen's rights, the citizen owes the corresponding duty of obedience. Obligation here is a matter of reciprocity: rights and duties are two sides of one relation.
5. The state pursues the general interest, or common good. This is the utilitarian ground. Obedience is owed because the state promotes the greatest happiness of the greatest number, and general disobedience would make everyone worse off. Raphael regards this as the most robust of the five in practice, though it cannot easily explain why a minority should submit when the general interest is served by sacrificing it.

The theory. The deterrent theory holds that the purpose of punishment is to prevent future crime by creating fear. The offender is punished not so much for what he has done as to make an example of him, so that he and others are frightened out of committing the offence again. Its motto is that men are punished not because they have sinned but so that others may not sin.

Its philosophical basis is utilitarian. Jeremy Bentham held that man is governed by pain and pleasure and calculates before acting; punishment must therefore add enough pain to the crime to outweigh the pleasure or profit expected from it, so that crime never pays.

Its two forms:

1. Specific or individual deterrence, aimed at the offender himself, so that he does not repeat the offence.
2. General deterrence, aimed at the public at large, who are meant to learn from his punishment.

Its features:

1. Punishment is exemplary: it is directed at the audience as much as at the accused.

3. It fails against crimes of passion, and against habitual and hardened criminals, who are not deterred but brutalised.
4. It ignores the causes of crime, poverty, upbringing and circumstance, and makes no attempt to reform the offender, so the released prisoner reoffends.

In India the deterrent element survives in the sentencing policy for grave offences, in the retention of the death penalty for the "rarest of rare" cases laid down in Bachan Singh v State of Punjab, and in the enhanced punishments introduced for serious sexual offences.

3. Class struggle. "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." Every epoch divides into two opposed classes, the owners of the means of production and those who own only their labour: master and slave, lord and serf, and under capitalism the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
4. The theory of surplus value. Labour alone creates value. The worker is paid only enough to subsist, but produces more value than his wages represent, and the difference, surplus value, is taken by the capitalist as profit. This is the precise mechanism of exploitation.
5. The theory of the state. The state is not neutral. It is the instrument by which the economically dominant class holds down the rest, "a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie". Law, religion and morality are part of the same apparatus.
6. Revolution, dictatorship of the proletariat, and the withering away of the state. Capitalism concentrates wealth and misery until the proletariat overthrows it. There follows a transitional dictatorship of the proletariat, and once classes disappear the state, having no class to coerce, withers away, leaving a classless and stateless communist society.

Name two views of this thinker on the concept of truth. (ii) Is there any relevance of this thinker in the context of present day Indian democracy?

Give reasons.

(i) The thinker, and two of his views on truth

The thinker is Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869 to 1948). The passage states his central doctrine, the purity of means: that means and ends are inseparable, that an immoral means can never produce a moral end, and that the only reliable instrument of political action is satyagraha, literally "holding firmly to truth".

Two of Gandhi's views on truth:

1. The purity of means is a constitutional principle, not only a moral one. A democracy is a set of procedures; if the procedures are corrupted, the result is illegitimate however desirable it may be. Due process under Article 21, and the rule that a conviction must be reached by fair trial and lawful evidence, are the legal expression of Gandhi's claim that a wrong road cannot reach a right destination.
2. Non-violent protest is a constitutional right. Article 19(1)(a) and (b) protect free speech and peaceful assembly. Gandhi's method supplies the ethical standard for their exercise: protest that is open, non-violent and willing to bear the legal consequences.
3. Truth in public life answers the problem of ethical decay. Corruption, criminalisation of politics, misinformation and communal appeals are the standing complaints against Indian democracy, and each is a failure of truthfulness. The Right to Information Act, 2005, is Gandhian in spirit: it makes government answerable by making it visible.

(i) Name three differences between the Deterrent and Reformative theory of punishment. (ii) What is Retributive theory of punishment?

(i) Three differences between the Deterrent and the Reformative theory

(ii) The Retributive theory of punishment

The retributive theory holds that punishment is an end in itself, deserved by the offender because he has committed the crime, and not because any future good will come of it. Its principle is just deserts: the wrongdoer has taken an unfair advantage and upset the moral balance, and punishment restores it.

Its features:

1. It is backward-looking, concerned with the offence already committed, not with future consequences.
2. It rests on proportionality, expressed in the ancient rule of lex talionis, an eye for an eye, and in the modern rule that the sentence must fit the gravity of the crime.
3. It treats the offender as a responsible moral agent who chose to do wrong and deserves to answer for it, which is why Kant defended it: to punish a man for his own desert is to respect him as a person, while to punish him to improve others is to use him as a means.
4. Its emotional root is the community's sense of moral indignation, and it channels that feeling into an orderly legal process instead of private vengeance.

Charismatic authority according to Max Weber is found in a leader whose mission and vision inspire loyalty and obedience from followers. It is based upon the perceived extraordinary characteristics of an individual.

(i) Name three differences between Charismatic Authority and Legal-Rational Authority as given by Weber. (ii) What is the significance of Legitimacy in the exercise of Political Power?

What is the primary means of legalising power in a modern Democracy?

(i) Three differences between Charismatic and Legal-Rational Authority

The Obama example is charismatic in its campaign and legal-rational in its outcome: the personal appeal of "hope" and "change" mobilised a following, but the authority he then exercised was the authority of an office defined by the Constitution, limited in its powers and fixed in its term.

(ii) The significance of legitimacy, and how power is legalised

Significance of legitimacy in the exercise of political power:

1. It converts power into authority. Power is the capacity to compel; legitimacy is the belief that the compulsion is rightful. Without it a government has force and no title.

The primary means of legalising power in a modern democracy is the free, fair and periodic election held under a written constitution. The election confers the mandate and fixes its duration; the constitution creates the office and limits it. Around these two run the supporting mechanisms: the rule of law and due process, judicial review, an independent election authority (in India the Election Commission under Article 324), and accountability to the legislature, a free press and public opinion.

(i) The philosophy, an advocate, and its view of the state

The philosophy is LIBERALISM, in its classical or negative form, which arose in Europe during the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Every element in the passage is a liberal position: rejection of the divine right of kings, of hereditary nobility and of an established church; and in their place free and fair elections, private property, a free press, religious toleration and a laissez faire economy.

A main advocate: John Locke (1632 to 1704), commonly called the father of liberalism, who in the Two Treatises of Government argued for natural rights to life, liberty and property, for government by consent, and for a right of resistance against a ruler who breaks the trust. Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, J.S. Mill and Herbert Spencer are the other standard names.

How classical liberalism viewed the state:

1. As a necessary evil, not a positive good. It is necessary because without it there is no security for rights; evil because every law restricts liberty.
2. As a human, artificial institution, created by the consent of individuals for their own purposes, not ordained by God or produced by nature. It is a means to the individual's ends, never an end in itself.

Others that would earn the marks equally: Article 14 (equality before the law, against privilege of birth); Articles 25 to 28 (freedom of religion and a state with no established church); Article 19(1)(g) (freedom of trade, profession and business); the secular and democratic republic of the Preamble; and free and periodic elections with adult suffrage under Article 326.

For full marks, cover: the meaning and rise of classical liberalism, six to eight of its features, then a point-by-point comparison of Bentham and Mill covering the quality of pleasure, liberty and the harm principle, democracy and the franchise, the role of the state, and the place of the individual, ending with an assessment of how Mill transformed the doctrine he inherited.

Meaning and rise

Liberalism takes its name from the Latin liber, free. It is the doctrine that the individual is the central fact of political life, that he possesses rights the state did not give and may not take away, and that government exists to serve him and must be limited accordingly.

Classical or negative liberalism is its first phase, running from the seventeenth century to the middle of the nineteenth. It grew out of the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the rise of a commercial middle class, and the English, American and French revolutions, and it was directed against the three pillars of the old order: absolute monarchy, feudal privilege and the established church.

6. Laissez faire. The economy is self-regulating; free competition and free trade allocate resources best; the state should not interfere. Adam Smith's invisible hand.
7. Rule of law and equality before the law. Privilege of birth is abolished; the same law binds governor and governed.
8. Freedom of thought, speech, press and religion, and toleration; no established church.
9. Faith in reason and progress. Men are rational and can improve their condition if left free to try.
10. Private property as a natural right and as the material guarantee of independence from the state.

Comparative study: Bentham and Mill

Both are utilitarians, and Mill was raised by his father James Mill to be Bentham's intellectual heir. The differences are the more striking for that.

Assessment

Bentham gave utilitarianism its method: a single, measurable standard, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, and a programme of legal and administrative reform. Mill gave it a conscience. By admitting quality of pleasure he saved the doctrine from the charge that it was a philosophy fit for swine, but he also weakened its claim to be a calculus, since quality cannot be weighed. By making liberty an end rather than a means, and by fearing the majority that Bentham trusted, he moved liberalism from the protection of the individual against the king to the protection of the individual against society itself.

2. Custom, tradition and prescription. Men obey because they and their ancestors have always obeyed. This is the prescriptive theory: long usage confers a title, and the habit of obedience is the strongest single support of any settled government.
3. Religion and divine sanction. Where the ruler is believed to hold authority from God, disobedience is a sin. The divine right theory rests obligation on this ground.
4. Consent and contract. Men have agreed, expressly or tacitly, to obey in return for protection. The obligation is the moral obligation to keep a promise. Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau all argue in this form.
5. The general will. Following Rousseau, the law expresses the community's will towards the common good, so in obeying the law the citizen obeys his own better self and remains free.
6. Utility and the general interest. The state secures the greatest happiness of the greatest number, and general disobedience would leave everyone worse off. This is the utilitarian ground, argued by Bentham and Mill.
7. Justice and the protection of rights. The state secures the citizen's rights and holds the balance between competing claims, and rights carry corresponding duties. This is the reciprocity ground.

The three causes of quarrel, in Hobbes's own arrangement: competition, for gain; diffidence, that is mistrust, for safety; and glory, for reputation.

The state of nature is therefore a condition without government, without law, and without a common power to keep men in awe. It is a state of war of every man against every man, in which there is:

1. No industry, because the fruit of it is uncertain.
2. No agriculture, navigation, building, arts or letters.
3. No notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, because where there is no common power there is no law, and where there is no law there is no injustice.
4. No property, only possession for as long as a man can keep it.
5. Continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

Hobbes is careful to say that this is a condition of war, meaning a known disposition to fight, not necessarily continual fighting. He offers as evidence the conduct of men who lock their doors and travel armed, and the relations of sovereign states, which acknowledge no common superior.

Hobbes on political obligation

Political obligation, for Hobbes, is absolute, unconditional and unlimited. The citizen must obey the sovereign in all things, because:

1. He has covenanted to do so, and covenants must be kept.
2. The sovereign is not a party to the contract and so can commit no breach of it.
3. Any resistance would return society to the state of nature, which is the worst of all conditions. Even a tyrannical government is better than anarchy.
4. The sovereign is the sole author of law, justice, property and morality: nothing he does can be unjust, because justice is whatever he defines it to be.
5. There is no right of rebellion, no right of revolution and no division of power.

The single exception. Because the whole purpose of the covenant is self-preservation, a man may refuse obedience where his own life is directly at stake. He may refuse to kill himself, to confess a crime, or to fight when his own preservation is threatened; and if the sovereign can no longer protect him, the obligation lapses, since protection and obedience are correlative.

For full marks, cover: the meaning and origin of the word, Gandhi's debt to Ruskin, the eight or nine main principles with a line of explanation each, Vinoba Bhave and Jayaprakash Narayan's development of it, the contrast with utilitarianism, an assessment, and its traces in the Indian Constitution.

Meaning and origin

Sarvodaya is a Sanskrit compound: sarva, all, and udaya, rise or uplift. It means the "welfare of all", or the rise of everyone without exception.

The word was coined by Mahatma Gandhi in 1908 as the title of his Gujarati paraphrase of John Ruskin's Unto This Last, which he read on an overnight train journey in South Africa in 1904 and which, he wrote, changed his life. Gandhi summarised the three lessons he took from Ruskin:

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

2. Truth (Satya) and non-violence (Ahimsa). These are the twin pillars. Truth is the end, non-violence the means; a social order can be built only by methods consistent with it. Violence may change who holds power, but not the relations that made power oppressive.
3. Purity of means. Means and ends are inseparable; the means are the seed and the end the tree. An immoral means can never produce a moral end.
4. Trusteeship. The rich are not to be dispossessed but persuaded to hold their wealth as trustees for society, taking what they reasonably need and administering the rest for the common good. Gandhi's answer to both capitalism and to the class war: it seeks to change the owner's heart rather than to change the owner.
5. Gram Swaraj, the self-sufficient village republic. The village is the basic unit: self-governing, meeting its own needs in food and cloth, deciding its affairs in the gram sabha by consensus. Power flows upward from the village, not downward from the capital. Gandhi's image is not a pyramid but an oceanic circle, whose centre is the individual and whose circles widen without a summit.

Sarvodaya compared with Utilitarianism

The contrast is the examiner's favourite, because Gandhi framed Sarvodaya explicitly against Bentham.

Traces in the Indian Constitution

Article 40, the organisation of village panchayats, is the direct constitutional expression of Gram Swaraj, and it was given effect by the 73rd and 74th Amendments, 1992. Articles 38 and 39 direct the state to secure a social order for the welfare of all and to prevent the concentration of wealth. Article 43 speaks of promoting cottage industries in rural areas. Article 46 directs the promotion of the interests of the weaker sections, which is the talisman in constitutional form. Article 17, abolishing untouchability, and Article 47, on nutrition and prohibition, also carry Gandhian marks.

1. Vilfredo Pareto (1848 to 1923), Italian, The Mind and Society: history is a graveyard of aristocracies.
2. Gaetano Mosca (1858 to 1941), The Ruling Class: in all societies two classes appear, a class that rules and a class that is ruled.
3. Robert Michels (1876 to 1936), Political Parties: the Iron Law of Oligarchy, "who says organisation, says oligarchy".
4. C. Wright Mills (1916 to 1962), The Power Elite: in the United States power lies with an interlocking directorate of the corporate, military and political elites.

Marxian theory of power compared with the Elite theory

The sharpest way to put the difference: for Marx, the ruling minority is a symptom of private property and will disappear with it; for the elite theorists, the ruling minority is a constant, and the Russian Revolution proved their point by producing a new party elite in place of the old aristocracy.

The Circulation of Elites (Pareto)

The theory. Pareto held that every society is ruled by an elite, but that no elite lasts. Elites decay, and are continually replaced by new elites rising from below. History, in his famous phrase, is "a graveyard of aristocracies".

The cycle. Neither type can govern indefinitely. A regime of foxes accumulates debt, cynicism and clever expedients, and loses the will to defend itself; it falls to a rising group of lions who are prepared to use force. A regime of lions becomes rigid, brutal and unable to adapt; it decays and lets in the foxes. Government therefore oscillates between the two, and the oscillation is what Pareto means by circulation.

Two ways circulation happens:

1. Gradual and peaceful, where the elite is open: it recruits able individuals from below, and the ablest of the lower orders are absorbed. This renews the elite and preserves stability. Pareto thought this the healthier route.
2. Sudden and violent, where the elite is closed: talent is denied entry, resentment accumulates, a counter-elite organises the masses behind it, and the change comes as a revolution. The masses do the fighting; the counter-elite takes the power.

The conclusion Pareto draws. Revolutions do not abolish elite rule; they merely change the elite. The masses are the instrument, never the beneficiary. This is why he treated the socialist promise of a classless society as an illusion, and it is the sense in which the theory is deeply conservative.

For full marks, cover: the meaning and definitions of authority, its features, its types both in Weber's classification and in the de jure and de facto distinction, the sources of authority, then a full comparison with power on eight or nine bases, the relation between the two, and a conclusion on why the distinction matters.

What is Authority

Authority is the rightful or legitimate power to command and to be obeyed. It is power that those subject to it accept as proper, so that obedience is given willingly, out of a recognition of the right to command, rather than out of fear.

Definitions:

1. Max Weber: authority is legitimate power, the probability that a command with a given specific content will be obeyed by a given group of persons.
2. Robert Bierstedt: authority is institutionalised power.

Types of authority

Weber's threefold classification:

1. Traditional authority, resting on the sanctity of immemorial custom. Hereditary monarchy, tribal chief.
2. Charismatic authority, resting on the extraordinary personal qualities of a leader. The prophet, the revolutionary, the mass leader.
3. Legal-rational authority, resting on impersonal rules and enacted law, attaching to office. The modern bureaucratic and constitutional state.

The legal classification:

1. De jure authority, authority by law and by right, held under a valid legal title.
2. De facto authority, authority exercised in fact without legal title, as by a regime installed by a coup.

Sources of authority are commonly listed as law and the constitution, tradition and custom, election and popular consent, expertise and competence, and personal charisma.

Power and Authority compared

The relation between them

The two are distinct but not separate, and three propositions state the relation:

1. Authority is a species of power, namely legitimate power. All authority is power, but not all power is authority.