(a) Normative approach in Political Science (10 marks) (b) Multicultural perspective on rights (10 marks) (c) State of Nature…

(a) Normative approach in Political Science

The normative approach in political science focuses on ethical, philosophical, and value-laden inquiries, prioritizing questions of what 'ought to be' over empirical descriptions of what 'is'. In sharp contrast to behaviouralist and positivist traditions that emphasize quantitative data and value-neutrality, the normative method evaluates political life against foundational ideals such as justice, freedom, and the good life. Thinkers like Leo Strauss defended classical political philosophy against the reductionism of modern positivism, while Sheldon Wolin championed political theory as a distinct tradition of epic moral vision. Although declared obsolete during the mid-twentieth-century behavioural revolution, the approach experienced a decisive resurgence through John Rawls's formulation of justice as fairness and Robert Nozick's libertarian rights theory. The normative approach remains indispensable to the discipline, as political institutions and public policies cannot be meaningfully conceptualized or legitimized without underlying moral judgments.

(b) Multicultural perspective on rights

The multicultural perspective challenges the difference-blind, universalist framework of classical liberalism by arguing that genuine equality requires the explicit recognition of cultural diversity. Theorists such as Will Kymlicka and Charles Taylor assert that individual autonomy is grounded in cultural membership, requiring group-differentiated rights alongside traditional civil liberties. Kymlicka differentiates polyethnic rights, self-government rights, and special representation rights as external protections to secure minority cultures against majority dominance, while rejecting illiberal internal restrictions on individual members. In India, this perspective is reflected in the constitutional architecture through Articles 29 and 30, which protect minority educational and cultural autonomy, as well as distinct religious personal laws. However, as illustrated by the Shah Bano debate (1985), multicultural rights face acute normative friction when collective cultural claims collide with intra-group gender justice, demanding a continuous reconciliation between group autonomy and individual equality.

(c) State of Nature as State of War (Hobbes)

In Leviathan (1651), Thomas Hobbes conceptualizes the state of nature mainly not as a historical event but as a pre-political thought experiment - though he pointed to civil war and to relations between sovereigns as real examples - characterized by the absence of a sovereign authority, resulting inevitably in a perpetual bellum omnium contra omnes (war of all against all). Rooted in mechanistic psychology and equal human vulnerability, individuals are driven into conflict by three primary causes of quarrel: competition for gain, diffidence for security, and glory for reputation, rendering human existence "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." To escape this generalized security dilemma, rational individuals covenant to surrender their natural rights to an absolute sovereign (Leviathan). This pessimistic view contrasts with John Locke’s state of nature, which is governed by natural law and suffers only from procedural "inconveniences," and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s portrait of a solitary, peaceable natural man moved by self-love and pity and later corrupted by private property (the phrase "noble savage", often attached to Rousseau, is not his). Hobbes's formulation remains a foundational realist baseline for modern state sovereignty.

(d) Foucault's concept of power

Michel Foucault dismantled the traditional juridico-discursive view of power as a top-down, centralized, and merely repressive instrument held by the sovereign state, conceptualizing it instead as a productive, decentered network operating at the capillary level of society. Power does not simply prohibit; it actively produces knowledge, categories of subjectivity, and bodily norms. Foucault illustrated this in Discipline and Punish (1975) through disciplinary power and the internalization of surveillance via Bentham's Panopticon, and in The History of Sexuality (1976) and his lectures through modern bio-power and governmentality, which manage populations through public health, demography, and administrative apparatuses. Crucially, power is co-constitutive with knowledge (the power-knowledge nexus), and because power is dispersed throughout social relations rather than concentrated in a single locus, "where there is power, there is resistance." Foucault’s critical insight establishes power not as a commodity to be captured, but as an inescapable, relational dynamic embedded across all institutional and discursive practices.

(e) Decline of political theory

The mid-twentieth century witnessed the "decline of political theory" debate, named by Alfred Cobban's essay "The Decline of Political Theory" (1953) and sharpened by Peter Laslett's 1956 declaration that "for the moment, anyway, political philosophy is dead". It was catalyzed by David Easton’s critique in The Political System (1953) of classical theory as an uncreative, historicist trap and the rise of positivism, behaviouralism, and the "end of ideology" thesis advanced by Daniel Bell and Seymour Martin Lipset. Positivists argued that normative claims were unverifiable value judgments devoid of scientific validity, relegating political theory to the margins of political analysis. Isaiah Berlin replied in "Does Political Theory Still Exist?" (1962) that it would survive as long as people disagree about ends. The purported decline was decisively reversed by the publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971), which restored normative, philosophical inquiry to the core of the discipline. In India, scholars like Rajni Kothari and Ashis Nandy, and later Bhikhu Parekh, widened the field by articulating non-Western perspectives on democratic politics, state power, and civilizational alternatives. Political theory did not decline; rather, it broke free from narrow positivism, evolving into a methodologically diverse and globally contextualized enterprise.