(a) How has Rawls enriched the idea of justice in liberalism? 20 (b) Examine the importance of behavioural approach in political…

(a) Rawls and Liberal Justice Rawls replaced utilitarian aggregation with a rights-based account of justice as fairness. In A Theory of Justice (1971) the original position behind a veil of ignorance is a methodological device: free and equal persons choose principles without knowing their class, talents or conception of the good, so the principles are just because they are chosen under fair conditions. It is not a historical contract. Two principles follow: equal basic liberties with lexical priority, which cannot be traded for economic gain; and social and economic inequalities that must attach to offices open to all under fair equality of opportunity and work to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged (the difference principle, a maximin logic). Advantage is measured by primary goods: rights, liberties, opportunities, income, wealth and the social bases of self-respect. Liberalism thus moved from maximising welfare to protecting rights while limiting inequality. In Political Liberalism (1993), responding to reasonable pluralism and communitarian critics such as Sandel, Rawls argued that a just society rests on an overlapping consensus of reasonable doctrines expressed through public reason, not on one metaphysical truth. He differs from Nozick's libertarianism (self-ownership, minimal state) and from Dworkin's equality of resources, which is "ambition-sensitive" but "endowment-insensitive". Critics show his reach: Sen says primary goods ignore differences in converting resources into freedoms, and Okin says the family's internal justice is left unexamined.

(b) Behaviouralism: Importance and Decline Rooted in Charles Merriam's Chicago School of the 1920s and dominant in American political science after 1945, behaviouralism sought a science of politics built on observable conduct, quantification, value-neutrality, empirical verification and cross-national comparison. Its importance lay in systematising the field and making claims testable instead of merely descriptive. Easton's systems theory treated politics as input–output processes, and Almond's structural-functionalism analysed functions such as interest articulation and aggregation. Dahl (1961) wrote its "epitaph for a monument to a successful protest", as it had by then won the discipline. It declined for several reasons. Easton's 1969 address "The New Revolution in Political Science" launched post-behaviouralism with a "credo of relevance", arguing that science alone cannot say what ought to be done. Critics charged reductionism, since measurable behaviour neglects meaning, ideology and legitimacy; Leo Strauss attacked its claim to value-neutrality; and the Caucus for a New Political Science (1967) said it tacitly defended the status quo. Its silence on Vietnam, civil rights and urban unrest exposed its irrelevance, and the revival of normative theory through Rawls and Nozick restored questions of justice and legitimacy.

(c) Can Human Rights Be Universal? Universality can be defended as a minimal core of dignity, not a single detailed code. It draws on natural law, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the 1993 Vienna Declaration, which calls all rights "universal, indivisible and interdependent and interrelated". Sen's capability approach grounds rights in real freedoms, and Held's cosmopolitan democracy extends them beyond the state. India's Part III reflects this: Articles 14 and 21 protect all persons, though Article 19 is limited to citizens, and the dignity-based reading of Article 21 in Maneka Gandhi (1978) and Puttaswamy (2017) strengthens it. Against this, cultural relativists argue that rights cannot be a culturally neutral code. The Asian values debate (Lee Kuan Yew, Mahathir; Bangkok Declaration, 1993) put community, order and development above individual civil-political rights. Post-colonial writers such as Makau Mutua ("savages–victims–saviours") and Spivak warn that universal rights can mask Western liberal assumptions, and the right to development (1986) and indigenous rights challenge a fixed hierarchy. Donnelly's "relative universality" offers a middle path: universal in aspiration, culturally mediated in practice.