BLS LLB 5 Years Sem 3 Political Science 2 2023-24 - ATKT 75/25 Question Paper with Solutions

The 106th Constitutional Amendment Act, 2023, called the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam, provides for the reservation of one-third of the seats for women in the Lok Sabha, in the State Legislative Assemblies and in the Legislative Assembly of the National Capital Territory of Delhi. Within that share, one-third of the seats reserved for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes are also reserved for women of those communities. The reservation is to operate for fifteen years, extendable by Parliament, and reserved seats are to be rotated after each delimitation.

Its significance:

1. It extends to the national and State legislatures the reservation that has existed at the local level since the 73rd and 74th Amendments, 1992, and so completes the design at all three tiers.

The sanction is religious: the fear of God and of divine punishment. The theory holds that the king derives his authority directly from God and is God's deputy on earth, so disobedience is not merely a crime against the state but a sin against God, punishable hereafter. The sanction is therefore supernatural rather than legal, and it operates on conscience where no policeman can reach.

The nature of the obligation advocated is ABSOLUTE, UNCONDITIONAL AND PERMANENT. Because the king is answerable to God alone and not to his subjects, no human authority may judge, limit or depose him; his title does not depend on his governing well; and a tyrannical king must still be obeyed, since he too is God's appointee. There is no right of resistance and no right of revolution, and the only permissible response to misgovernment is prayer and passive suffering.

Its chief exponents were Sir Robert Filmer in Patriarcha, King James I and Bishop Bossuet.

An interest group, also called a pressure group, is an organised association of people with a shared interest or concern which seeks to influence government policy in that interest without seeking to capture political office itself. That last element is what distinguishes it from a political party.

Its methods are lobbying, representation and memoranda, appearing before committees, supplying information and expertise, shaping public opinion through the media, litigation, and in some cases agitation.

One private economic interest group from India: the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), founded in 1927, which represents business and industry to government and makes annual pre-budget representations to the Ministry of Finance.

Other correct answers: the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), ASSOCHAM, or, on the labour side, INTUC, AITUC and BMS.

The Iron Law of Oligarchy states that every organisation, however democratic in intention and in constitution, inevitably becomes oligarchic, that is, controlled by a small leadership. Its summary is: "Who says organisation, says oligarchy."

Its advocate is Robert Michels (1876 to 1936), the German-Italian sociologist, who formulated it in Political Parties (1911).

The reasons he gives:

1. Technical necessity: a large organisation cannot be run by mass meetings, so it must delegate to full-time officials.
2. Expertise and control of information: leaders acquire specialised knowledge, control the funds and the organisation's press, and become indispensable.
3. Psychological factors: the mass is apathetic and inclined to venerate leaders, while leaders develop a vested interest in retaining office.

Ethical decay of democracy is the erosion of the moral standards, conventions and public spirit on which democratic institutions depend, so that the machinery of democracy survives while its spirit drains away. Elections continue to be held, but they cease to be contests over policy; legislatures continue to sit, but they cease to deliberate; offices continue to be filled, but they cease to be held as a trust.

Its symptoms: criminalisation of politics; corruption and the use of public office for private gain; opaque political funding and the rising cost of elections; defection and horse-trading; communal and caste appeals in campaigning; misinformation and paid news; dynastic control and the absence of inner-party democracy; and declining legislative deliberation.

Features: authority is inherited by birth and succession; obedience is owed to the person, not to an office; the ruler is bound by custom rather than enacted law; administration is personal, officials being retainers chosen for loyalty and kinship; and the type is conservative, since innovation attacks the very source of the authority.

Sub-types: patriarchalism, patrimonialism, feudalism. Examples: hereditary monarchy, tribal chieftainship, the caste-sanctioned village elder.

2. Charismatic authority

Basis: devotion to the exceptional personal qualities of an individual, his "gift of grace", heroism or exemplary character.

Features: obedience is owed to the person of the leader and is emotional and intensely personal; the leader is revolutionary and may set existing rules aside, "it is written, but I say unto you"; there is no settled administration, only disciples; and it is inherently unstable, having no rule of succession and no source of legitimacy outside the leader himself.

Examples: the prophet, the war hero, the revolutionary and mass leader.

Assessment

Merits: the classification is simple, universal and comparative; it explains the basis of obedience rather than merely describing who rules; and it supplies a theory of historical change through routinisation and rationalisation.

Criticisms: the three are ideal types and never occur pure, so every real regime is a mixture; they are not exhaustive, since Weber has no comfortable place for authority resting on expertise or on ideology; charisma is subjective and identifiable mainly after the event; and the scheme ignores the economic basis of authority that Marx placed at the centre.

The 73rd Constitutional Amendment Act, 1992, inserted Part IX (Articles 243 to 243-O) and the Eleventh Schedule, giving panchayats constitutional status. It came into force on 24 April 1993.

Structure and features

1. Three tiers (Article 243B): the Gram Panchayat at village level, the Panchayat Samiti at intermediate level, and the Zila Parishad at district level. The intermediate tier is compulsory only for States with a population above twenty lakhs.
2. The Gram Sabha (Article 243A): a body of all registered voters of the village, the foundation of the system and the nearest approach to direct democracy in India.
3. Direct elections every five years (Articles 243C and 243E). A dissolved body must be re-elected within six months.
4. Mandatory reservation (Article 243D): seats for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in proportion to their population; not less than one-third for women, including one-third of the SC and ST seats; reservation of the office of chairperson; rotation of reserved seats; and a State option to reserve for backward classes.

Achievements

More than three million elected representatives, of whom over 1.4 million are women, a scale of participation unmatched anywhere; more than twenty States have raised the women's share to 50 per cent by their own legislation; elections are now held broadly on time; and studies of panchayats headed by women have found measurably greater investment in drinking water and related goods. Kerala's People's Plan Campaign from 1996 showed what genuine devolution can achieve.

Shortcomings

1. Funds, functions and functionaries were not transferred with the status. Article 243G says a State "may" endow panchayats with powers, so devolution is permissive and varies enormously between States.
2. Financial dependence: most panchayats raise very little of their own revenue and administer tied grants rather than deciding priorities.
3. The sarpanch pati phenomenon, where a male relative exercises in practice an office a woman holds in law.
4. Rotation of reserved seats prevents an effective incumbent from building a constituency over successive terms.

Democracy is government by the people, exercised through free and fair elections under a constitution that guarantees rights, limits power and protects minorities. Its machinery cannot work without certain conditions, and the classical writers, J.S. Mill, Laski, Bryce and Ambedkar, list broadly the same ones.

1. An educated and enlightened citizenry. Democracy is government by discussion, and a citizen who cannot inform himself cannot choose. Mill regarded universal education as the first condition of representative government, and it is why Article 21A and the Right to Education Act matter politically as well as socially.
2. Sound and informed public opinion, and a free press. Public opinion is how the people's will is known between elections. It requires Article 19(1)(a), a free and diverse press, and access to information, which in India is secured by the Right to Information Act, 2005. Where opinion is manufactured by propaganda, paid news or misinformation, the vote loses its meaning.

8. A spirit of compromise and constitutional morality. Ambedkar, borrowing from Grote, insisted that constitutional morality, obedience to the spirit and not merely the letter, has to be cultivated, since it is not a natural sentiment.
9. Decentralisation and local self-government, so that citizens participate continuously and not only at elections. The 73rd and 74th Amendments supply this.
10. Political parties with internal democracy, since the voter's choice is only as democratic as the process that selected the options.
11. Sound economic conditions and administrative capacity, since a state unable to deliver security, justice and basic services loses the faith on which consent rests.
12. Vigilant civil society: associations, unions and voluntary bodies, which Tocqueville called the schools of democracy.

2. Truth (Satya) and non-violence (Ahimsa). Truth is the end and non-violence the means, and a social order can be built only by methods consistent with it.
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. This is Gandhi's answer both to capitalism and to class war.
5. Gram Swaraj, the self-sufficient village republic. The village is the basic unit, self-governing and self-supporting, deciding its affairs in the gram sabha by consensus. Power flows upward; Gandhi's image is not a pyramid but an oceanic circle whose centre is the individual.
6. Dignity of labour, and bread labour. Everyone should earn bread by physical work, and manual and intellectual work are of equal worth, which attacks both untouchability and caste-based occupation.
7. Decentralisation and swadeshi. Economic and political power must be dispersed: khadi and village industry, production by the masses rather than mass production.

Assessment

Merits: it supplies an ethical standard that both capitalism and communism lack; it protects the minority absolutely; it is the philosophical basis of decentralisation and participatory democracy; and its limitation of wants anticipated the modern concern with sustainability.

Criticisms: trusteeship depends on a change of heart in the propertied and has almost no record of producing one, which is the Marxist and Ambedkarite objection; the self-sufficient village underrates caste oppression within the village; village self-sufficiency cannot support a modern economy, a defence establishment or a public health system; and consensus in an unequal society is often the veto of the powerful rather than the agreement of equals.

Its constitutional traces: Article 40 and, giving it effect, the 73rd and 74th Amendments, 1992; Articles 38 and 39 on the welfare of the people and the concentration of wealth; Article 43 on cottage industries; Article 46 on the weaker sections; and Article 17 abolishing untouchability.

Martin Luther King Jr led the Civil Rights movement, which is to be distinguished from Black Power. King was committed to non-violence and integration; Black Power, associated with Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X, emphasised black self-reliance, separatism and, in some strands, armed self-defence. The two are often mentioned together because they overlapped in time and shared an opponent, and the parallel drawn with BLM belongs to King's tradition rather than to Black Power.

(i) The objectives of Black Lives Matter

Black Lives Matter began in 2013 as a hashtag created by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi after the acquittal of the man who shot the unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin. It became a mass movement in 2014 after the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner in New York, and again in 2020 after the killing of George Floyd.

(ii) The Gandhian technique of resistance to unjust laws

Gandhi's answer to the unjust law is Satyagraha, "holding firmly to truth", resting on Satya (truth) and Ahimsa (non-violence), and on the principle that the means must be as pure as the end.

Its essential conditions, which distinguish it from ordinary law-breaking:

1. The resistance must be non-violent in thought, word and deed.
2. It must be open and public, never secret, so that it is an appeal to conscience rather than an evasion.
3. The resister must accept the punishment willingly, which demonstrates his sincerity and his respect for law in general.
4. The aim is to convert the opponent, not to defeat or humiliate him, since he too may hold part of the truth.
5. Lawful means must be exhausted first: petition, negotiation and arbitration come before disobedience.
6. The resister must undergo self-purification before offering resistance.
7. Only a specific unjust law is disobeyed, not the legal order as a whole.

The techniques:

Merits: it is available to the unarmed and the weak; it wins moral authority and public sympathy; it leaves reconciliation possible, so the society that emerges is not poisoned; and it worked, in India, in King's hands in the United States, and in the anti-apartheid movement.

Criticisms: it is slow and demands great discipline from large numbers; it presupposes an opponent with a conscience and a press free to report the suffering; mass movements are hard to keep non-violent, as Chauri Chaura in 1922 showed, when Gandhi suspended the movement after a mob killed policemen; and Ambedkar argued that it served the national struggle better than it served the socially oppressed within India.

Its features:

1. Individualisation. The response is fitted to the offender, not to the offence, so two people convicted of the same act may be treated quite differently. This requires a pre-sentence report on the offender's background and character.
2. Correction rather than infliction: education, vocational training, work, counselling and medical treatment.
3. Alternatives to imprisonment: probation, parole, community service, open prisons, admonition and release on good behaviour, because prison itself is criminogenic.
4. Belief in the capacity to change, which rules out permanently degrading punishment.
5. Recidivism as the measure of success, rather than the severity of the sentence.

Merits: it addresses causes rather than symptoms and so protects society durably; it is humane and consistent with human dignity under Article 21; it is particularly effective for juveniles and first offenders; and it is cheaper over time.

2. To prevent private revenge and blood feud. If the injured party punished the offender, the result would be an endless cycle of retaliation. The state converts vengeance into justice by taking it into public hands.
3. Impartiality requires a judge who is not a party. Locke identified this as one of the three "inconveniences" of the state of nature: every man is judge in his own cause, and self-love makes men partial. Men enter civil society precisely to obtain a settled known law, an indifferent judge, and a power to execute the sentence, surrendering their own right to punish in the process.
4. The state alone holds the monopoly of legitimate force, which is Weber's definition of the state.
5. To maintain public order and vindicate the law, since a law that is never enforced ceases to be law.
6. To ensure proportion and due process. Only a public authority can guarantee that punishment follows a fair trial, is proportionate, and is inflicted only for a defined offence. In India those limits are constitutional: Articles 20, 21 and 22.

2. Consensus and moderation in policy. Because every decision must carry the partners, extreme or sectional measures cannot pass, and policy is negotiated rather than imposed. Coalitions therefore tend towards the centre, and they force consultation on the government as a matter of arithmetic rather than of goodwill.
3. A check on the concentration of power. No single party can dominate the executive, and in a federal system regional partners bargain for their States, which strengthens federalism through the party system rather than through the constitutional text. This was visible at the Centre between 1989 and 2014, when national policy required the consent of parties answerable to different State electorates.

Other merits available: coalitions give smaller parties a stake in the system rather than pushing them towards agitation; they promote accommodation and political stability in the long run by including rather than excluding; and they make parliamentary accountability sharper, since the government cannot take its majority for granted.

2. Money power and opaque funding. The cost of contesting has risen far beyond lawful expenditure limits, and the sources of party funds have been obscure, which makes parties dependent on those who can finance them. The electoral bonds scheme was struck down as unconstitutional in Association for Democratic Reforms v Union of India (2024) for violating the voter's right to information under Article 19(1)(a).

Other challenges available: criminalisation, with a large proportion of legislators facing serious charges; defection and horse-trading, which the Tenth Schedule was enacted in 1985 to control and which has been evaded by mass resignation; casteism and communalism in candidate selection; factionalism, splits and mergers; ideological vagueness, so that manifestos differ less than social bases do; and populism in competitive welfare promises.

2. Slave society: master and slave.
3. Feudalism: lord and serf.
4. Capitalism: the bourgeoisie, who own the means of production, and the proletariat, who own only their labour and must sell it to live.
5. Socialism and communism: classes progressively disappear.

Marx also identified intermediate groups: the petty bourgeoisie of small traders, artisans and peasants, squeezed out by large capital and driven into the proletariat, and the lumpenproletariat, the unorganised poor, whom he regarded as politically unreliable.

Why the two are opposed. The profit of the owner is by definition the unpaid surplus labour of the worker. Marx's theory of surplus value states the mechanism: labour power is bought at the cost of the worker's subsistence, but the worker produces more value than that, and the difference is appropriated as profit, interest and rent. There is no rate of wages that abolishes the surplus, so the interests are irreconcilable and the conflict cannot be settled by bargaining within the system.

4. The obligation the worker owes is to his class, not to the state. "Working men of all countries, unite." Class solidarity displaces national and civic loyalty, since the state is an instrument of the class enemy.
5. The state is to be overthrown, not reformed. A revolution transfers the means of production to the community, a transitional dictatorship of the proletariat suppresses the former ruling class, and when classes disappear the state, having no class to coerce, withers away.

For full marks, cover: what Marxism is and its main doctrines set out compactly, then the merits, then the criticisms grouped by doctrine, the Indian critique, and a reasoned verdict distinguishing what survives from what does not.

What Marxism is

Marxism is the body of political, economic and social thought founded by Karl Marx (1818 to 1883) and Friedrich Engels, set out chiefly in The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Das Kapital (1867). It is called scientific socialism, because Marx claimed to have shown that socialism would arrive through the laws of historical development and not merely because it is desirable.

Its main doctrines:

1. Dialectical materialism. Hegel's dialectic of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, with matter and the material conditions of life in place of the Idea. Hegel was, in Marx's phrase, standing on his head and had to be set upon his feet.

Merits

1. It exposed exploitation that classical economics had treated as natural, and gave the labour movement both a theory and a vocabulary.
2. It made economics central to political analysis. No serious study of politics now ignores economic interest, and the influence extends far beyond those who call themselves Marxists.
3. It is a genuine theory of change, where most political thought explains only order. Very little political theory attempts prediction at all.
4. It produced practical results by way of reaction. The eight-hour day, minimum wages, factory legislation, social security and trade union rights are reformist answers to problems Marx identified; capitalism was reformed partly under the pressure his analysis created.
5. Alienation remains a powerful description of modern work and has outlived the economics it was attached to.

1. Class has not polarised into two camps. A large middle class of professionals, managers and technicians grew instead, and shareholding, pension funds and small enterprise spread ownership widely.
2. The immiseration thesis failed. Real wages, life expectancy and living standards rose in industrial countries rather than falling to subsistence.
3. Class consciousness did not develop as predicted; workers in industrial democracies proved more interested in improving their position within capitalism than in overthrowing it.

Of the economics:

1. The labour theory of value is rejected by modern economics, which holds that value depends on utility and scarcity as well as labour, so the derivation of surplus value is disputed at its foundation.
2. It denies any productive contribution to capital, enterprise, risk-bearing and management, treating all return to them as theft, which cannot explain why firms with the same labour succeed or fail.
3. The transformation problem: deriving prices from labour values has never been satisfactorily accomplished.

Of the politics:

Verdict

Marxism's diagnosis has outlived its prognosis. As an account of inequality, of the relation between economic power and political power, and of the experience of work, it remains indispensable, and the concentration of wealth over the last four decades has given it renewed force. As a prediction, of two-class polarisation, increasing misery, proletarian revolution in advanced economies and a withering state, it has been falsified by events.

India's own response was neither revolution nor laissez faire but democratic socialism: the word socialist in the Preamble by the 42nd Amendment, 1976; the Directive Principles in Articles 38 and 39 aimed at preventing the concentration of wealth; land reform; and the removal of property from the Fundamental Rights by the 44th Amendment, 1978, all pursued by law and consent.

His method is significant in itself. Hobbes was influenced by Galileo and by the geometry of Euclid, and set out to build political science on the model of the physical sciences: begin with the simplest elements, individual human beings and their motions, and reason deductively to the necessity of the state. He is therefore the first modern political theorist, deriving the state from individuals and their interests rather than from God, nature or history.

Human nature

Man is selfish, appetitive, competitive and above all fearful. He is moved by "a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death". Men are also roughly equal in body and mind, since "the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination or by confederacy", and this equality of ability produces an equality of hope in attaining ends, and therefore competition.

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

Two clarifications Hobbes himself supplies, and which distinguish an accurate answer from a caricature. First, war means "not actual fighting, but the known disposition thereto", as foul weather lies not in a shower or two but in an inclination over many days. Second, he offers evidence that the condition is not a fantasy: men lock their doors and travel armed even in civil society, and sovereign states themselves stand towards each other in exactly this posture, acknowledging no common superior.

The laws of nature

Reason discovers precepts, which Hobbes calls laws of nature:

1. Seek peace and follow it, and by all means defend ourselves.
2. Be willing to lay down the right to all things so far as others are willing to do the same, and be contented with so much liberty against others as one would allow others against oneself.
3. Perform the covenants made, which is the fountain and original of justice.

But these are only theorems of reason, not commands, and they do not bind in action while there is no security. "Covenants, without the sword, are but words, and of no strength to secure a man at all."

5. Sovereignty may reside in a man or an assembly, but Hobbes prefers a monarch as least liable to internal faction.
6. The sovereign is the author of justice, law, property and morality; before his commands there is no standard by which he could be judged.

Political obligation

Political obligation is absolute, unconditional and unlimited:

1. The subject has covenanted to obey, and covenants must be kept.
2. The sovereign, not being a party, can commit no breach and therefore can do the subject no injury.
3. Resistance would return society to the state of nature, and the worst government is better than anarchy.
4. Since the sovereign defines justice, nothing he does can be unjust.
5. There is no right of rebellion, no right of revolution, no separation of powers and no appeal against him.

5. Reducing justice to the sovereign's command collapses the distinction between might and right and leaves no ground on which any law could be criticised.
6. The exception is inconsistent with the whole: if obligation lapses where life is threatened, it is conditional after all, and Locke had only to widen that opening.
7. It confuses sovereignty with government: the modern distinction, that sovereignty may rest in the people while government is limited, dissolves his dilemma.

Influence

Hobbes founded modern political theory: the derivation of the state from individuals and their interests; the concept of sovereignty as undivided and supreme, which passes to Bodin before him and to Austin's command theory of law after him; and the contract method itself, which Locke and Rousseau adopt while changing his premises. His account of relations between sovereign states remains the classical statement of international anarchy and is the foundation of realist international relations theory.

2. The Directive Principles, Part IV, the core socialist content

1. Article 38: a social order for the welfare of the people, minimising inequalities in income, status, facilities and opportunities.
2. Article 39(a): adequate means of livelihood for all citizens.
3. Article 39(b): ownership and control of material resources distributed to subserve the common good.
4. Article 39(c): the economic system shall not result in the concentration of wealth to the common detriment.
5. Article 39(d): equal pay for equal work for men and women.
6. Article 39A: equal justice and free legal aid.
7. Article 41: right to work, education and public assistance in old age, sickness, disablement and unemployment.
8. Article 42: just and humane conditions of work and maternity relief.
9. Article 43: a living wage and decent conditions, and cottage industries in rural areas.

5. Judicial expansion

The courts have used the Directive Principles to interpret the Fundamental Rights, reading into Article 21 the right to livelihood in Olga Tellis v Bombay Municipal Corporation (1985), to emergency medical care in Paschim Banga Khet Mazdoor Samity v State of West Bengal (1996), and to shelter, food and a clean environment. Minerva Mills v Union of India (1980) held that the harmony and balance between Parts III and IV is itself part of the basic structure.

6. Legislation and programmes

Land reform and abolition of zamindari; the Minimum Wages Act, 1948; nationalisation of banks in 1969 and coal in 1973; MGNREGA, 2005; the Right to Education Act, 2009; and the National Food Security Act, 2013.

Part 2: The demerits of socialism

1. It destroys incentive and therefore productivity. If reward is unrelated to effort, skill and risk, the able and industrious have no reason to exert themselves and the idle have no reason not to free-ride. Historically, socialist economies have shown low productivity growth and chronic shortages of consumer goods.

5. It sacrifices the individual to the collective. In its Marxist form the individual is subordinate to the class and to the party, and rights, dissent and the rule of law are dismissed as bourgeois ideology, which is what made the historical record of socialist states so poor on civil liberty.
6. It is impracticable in its full form. Complete equality of income is unattainable and probably undesirable, since some differentials are needed to allocate labour to where it is most valued; and complete public ownership has been abandoned even by states that professed it.
7. It underrates the role of enterprise, innovation and risk-bearing, treating the entrepreneur's return as theft rather than as payment for a function nobody else is performing.
8. Its historical record is poor. The centrally planned economies of the twentieth century produced shortages, famine in some cases, environmental damage and political repression, and most abandoned central planning by the 1990s.

For full marks, cover: Pareto's definition of the elite, residues, lions and foxes, why elites decay, the two modes of circulation, his conclusion about revolution, an evaluation; then a full comparison of the Marxian and elite theories on eight or nine bases, with Mosca and Michels brought in, and a conclusion applying both to India.

Part 1: The circulation of elites

Vilfredo Pareto (1848 to 1923), Italian economist and sociologist, set out the theory in The Mind and Society (Trattato di Sociologia Generale, 1916).

The elite defined. An elite is the class of people with the highest indices in their branch of activity, that is, those who excel. Pareto divides it into the governing elite, those who directly or indirectly play a considerable part in government, and the non-governing elite, those who excel in other fields. Below both is the non-elite, the mass.

2. Foxes are dominated by Class I residues. They are cunning, innovative, sceptical, materialistic and manipulative, and they rule by fraud, negotiation and clever combination. They are flexible and inventive, but shrink from using force and lack conviction.

Why elites decay. A ruling elite is at first vigorous and recruits the ablest. In time it becomes closed and hereditary, complacent, humanitarian and reluctant to use force; meanwhile the ablest members of the lower orders are excluded, so ability accumulates outside the elite and a counter-elite forms. Decay is therefore not accidental but structural.

The cycle. Neither type can rule indefinitely. A regime of foxes accumulates debt, cynicism and clever expedients and loses the will to defend itself, and falls to rising lions. A regime of lions becomes rigid and brutal, cannot adapt to change, and lets in the foxes. Government therefore oscillates, and history, in Pareto's phrase, is "a graveyard of aristocracies".

Two modes of circulation:

1. Gradual and peaceful, where the elite is open: able individuals from below are absorbed, the elite is renewed, and stability is preserved. Pareto regarded this as the healthier route.

Criticisms: it is pessimistic and undemocratic in its implications, and was invoked to justify authoritarian rule, Mussolini having claimed Pareto's authority; the categories of lion and fox are crude and impressionistic; the theory is close to unfalsifiable, since whoever holds power is by definition the elite; it underrates institutions, since elections, a free press, judicial review and federalism genuinely alter how power is used; it ignores the economic structure Marx placed at the centre, treating psychological residues as basic when they may be produced by material conditions; and "highest ability" turns out to describe the outcome rather than to explain it.

Part 2: Marxian and elite theories of power compared

The other elite theorists, whose positions are usually expected:

1. Gaetano Mosca (The Ruling Class): in all societies two classes appear, "a class that rules and a class that is ruled"; the ruling class is always a minority and prevails because it is organised against a disorganised majority; and it maintains itself by a "political formula", a doctrine that makes its rule appear legitimate.

For full marks, cover: liberalism's meaning, origins and basic principles set out fully, the two phases with the reason for the shift, a short evaluation and its Indian expression; then Bentham's doctrine of the two sovereign masters with the felicific calculus and what follows from it in law, punishment and politics, and its criticisms.

Part 1: The basic principles of Liberalism

Liberalism, from the Latin liber meaning free, is the doctrine that the individual is the central fact of political life, that he possesses rights which the state did not create and may not destroy, and that government exists to serve him and must therefore be limited. Harold Laski described it as less a body of doctrine than a habit of mind, associated with tolerance, the free play of reason and suspicion of authority.

6. Rule of law and equality before the law, abolishing privilege by birth and opening careers to talent.
7. Toleration and freedom of thought, speech, press and religion, with no established church.
8. Faith in reason and progress: social problems yield to enquiry and discussion rather than to authority or tradition.
9. Private property, both as a right and as the material guarantee of independence from the state.
10. A free economy, in the classical phase laissez faire.
11. Secularism, and internationalism through free trade and international law.

The two phases

Negative or classical liberalism (17th century to about 1850) treats liberty as the absence of restraint, so every law diminishes it and the state is a necessary evil confined to defence, order and justice: the night-watchman state. Thinkers: Locke, Adam Smith, Bentham, the early Mill, Herbert Spencer.

Evaluation. Merits: it established individual rights, limited and constitutional government, consent as the basis of authority, equality before the law and toleration, and it proved self-correcting, reforming itself when its classical form failed. Criticisms: excessive individualism neglecting community; economic inequality produced by its classical form, which is the Marxist charge that it is bourgeois ideology; underestimation of class and structural power; and cultural specificity.

In India: Part III is negative-liberal, with Articles 14, 19, 21 and 25 to 28, judicial review and universal adult franchise under Article 326; Part IV is positive-liberal and socialist. The Constitution contains both phases at once.

Part 2: Bentham on the sovereignty of the Two Masters

The doctrine. Jeremy Bentham (1748 to 1832) opens An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789) with the passage that gives the doctrine its name:

They are called sovereign because their rule is inescapable: "they govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think", and any effort to throw off their subjection "serves but to demonstrate and confirm it". A man may deny their authority in words, but he obeys them in conduct.

How pleasures are measured: the felicific or hedonistic calculus. Since the masters are sovereign, legislation becomes a matter of computation. Bentham lists seven dimensions: intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity, fecundity, purity and, when a community is considered, extent. Pleasures differ only in quantity, never in worth: "Quantity of pleasure being equal, pushpin is as good as poetry."

Four sanctions. Bentham identifies the sources of pain and pleasure that operate on conduct: the physical, the political (that is, law), the moral or popular (public opinion), and the religious. The legislator's task is to arrange the political sanction so that it reinforces the others and makes the interest of the individual coincide with the interest of the community, which Bentham called the artificial identification of interests.

What follows from the doctrine:

1. The two claims are inconsistent with each other. If pain and pleasure determine what we shall do, it is idle to tell us what we ought to do, since we could not do otherwise. Bentham's descriptive claim undermines the normative one.
2. Psychological hedonism is false as a description. People act from duty, love, honour and habit, and sometimes deliberately against their own pleasure. The claim is saved only by defining pleasure so widely that it explains nothing.
3. Pleasures cannot in fact be measured, and there is no way of making interpersonal comparisons.
4. It ignores quality. J.S. Mill conceded the objection: "better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied", but in doing so he introduced a standard other than pleasure and weakened the theory.
5. It can sacrifice the minority, since only the aggregate matters.
6. It reduces all value to one dimension, treating justice, liberty and dignity as valuable only so far as they yield pleasure, and leaves the individual with no defence that is not itself a calculation of utility.