(a) Systems Approach (10 marks) (b) Cultural Relativism (10 marks) (c) "Revolution in Permanence" (10 marks) (d) Bases of Power…

(a) Systems Approach

The systems approach in political science, pioneered by David Easton (The Political System, 1953; A Systems Analysis of Political Life, 1965) and later adapted into structural-functional analysis by Gabriel Almond and G. Bingham Powell (1966), conceptualizes politics as an adaptive, open system embedded within social environments. Easton replaces formal-legal institutionalism with an input-output-feedback model: the environment generates inputs in the form of demands and supports, which enter the political system ("conversion mechanism" or "black box") to produce outputs as authoritative decisions and public policies. A continuous feedback loop conveys societal responses back into the system, enabling self-regulation, adaptation, and system maintenance. Although it widened political inquiry beyond formal Western institutions and made cross-national comparison possible, critics - Marxists and conflict theorists among them - argue that the approach suffers from an inherent equilibrium bias. By prioritizing system preservation, political survival, and stability over radical redistribution or conflict, it remains largely static, conservative, and apolitical, failing to account for revolutionary structural transformation.

(b) Cultural Relativism

Cultural relativism, with roots in Montesquieu’s contextualism and systematically formulated by the anthropologist Melville Herskovits, who drafted the American Anthropological Association's 1947 statement warning the UN against a single cultural standard for human rights, posits that moral norms, ethics, and values are culturally situated and cannot be judged by external universal benchmarks. It fundamentally challenges universalist doctrines of human rights, arguing that universalism often acts as an instrument of Western ideological hegemony. This creates sharp philosophical tension with Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which declares all human beings free and equal in dignity and rights irrespective of cultural location. In the Indian context, this tension manifests in the ongoing debate over the Uniform Civil Code under Article 44 versus group-differentiated personal laws. While cultural relativists defend customary and community autonomy, Indian constitutional jurisprudence increasingly mandates that community practices must reconcile with non-negotiable universal constitutional morality, individual dignity, and gender equality, as reaffirmed in the Shayara Bano case (2017).

(c) "Revolution in Permanence"

The concept of "Revolution in Permanence," drawn from Marx and Engels's March 1850 Address to the Communist League, which ended with the battle-cry "The Revolution in Permanence", and fully developed by Leon Trotsky in Results and Prospects (1906) and The Permanent Revolution (1930), posits that in economically backward and late-developing societies, the democratic tasks of the bourgeois revolution cannot be achieved by a weak national bourgeoisie. Instead, the proletariat must lead the revolution, seamlessly fusing democratic struggles with socialist goals into an uninterrupted, continuous process. Crucially, Trotsky maintained that such a revolution cannot survive in national isolation; it must expand internationally into advanced capitalist economies. This doctrine stood in stark ideological opposition to Joseph Stalin’s pragmatic thesis of "Socialism in One Country," which prioritized Soviet state-building and consolidation. The idea finds echoes, though not direct application, in Mao Zedong’s distinct thesis of "continuous revolution" under socialism and in Frantz Fanon’s critique of the post-colonial national bourgeoisie.

(d) Bases of Power

In political sociology, power is fundamentally defined as the capacity to influence, control, or compel the behavior of others, distinct from authority, which is power legitimized by collective societal acceptance. Max Weber categorized legitimate power into three ideal types: traditional authority (sanctity of customs), charismatic authority (exceptional personal devotion), and rational-legal authority (institutionalized bureaucratic rules). Analyzing social power at an operational level, John French and Bertram Raven (1959) formulated five primary bases of power, to which Raven later added informational power: reward power (control over positive incentives), coercive power (capacity to punish), legitimate power (internalized perception of a leader's right to prescribe behavior), expert power (possession of specialized knowledge), and referent power (attraction to or identification with the power-holder). Steven Lukes (Power: A Radical View, 1974) adds that power also works by shaping agendas and even people's wants, not only through visible decisions. While coercion and reward ensure transient obedience, stable democratic governance fundamentally relies on transitioning from raw coercive bases to rational-legal and referent authority.

(e) Locke's Social Contract

In his Two Treatises of Government, John Locke constructs a contractual foundation for modern constitutionalism. Locke’s state of nature is not an amoral state of war, but a pre-political yet social condition governed by the Law of Nature, wherein individuals possess inalienable natural rights to life, liberty, and estate (property). However, the absence of an impartial judiciary, established common laws, and an executive mechanism creates inconveniences and property insecurity. To overcome this, rational individuals enter a social contract through express and tacit consent, voluntarily surrendering their executive power of natural law to establish a limited government acting as a fiduciary trust. Crucially, sovereignty remains fundamentally with the political community. If the state breaches this fiduciary trust by violating fundamental natural rights, Locke asserts the citizens' inviolable right to rebellion and resistance, establishing the bedrock of constitutional limits on state authority.