(a) Behavioural approach to Political Science (b) Pluralist theory of State (c) Locke's views on Revolution (d) Decline of…

(a) Behavioural Approach to Political Science

The behavioural approach emerged as a post-WWII paradigm shift, moving political science away from normative, legalistic, and historical traditions toward an empirical, scientific study of human political behaviour. Anticipated by Charles Merriam and the Chicago School of the 1920s and spearheaded by scholars like David Easton, Robert Dahl, and Gabriel Almond, this "behavioural revolution" sought to make the discipline explanatory and predictive. It prioritized empirical verification, interdisciplinary borrowing, survey research, quantitative techniques, and systems analysis over philosophical abstraction. Easton formulated its core tenets, emphasizing regularities, systematic data collection, value-neutrality, and pure science. However, traditionalist thinkers such as Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin criticized behaviouralism for its excessive hyper-factualism, reductionism, and deliberate neglect of fundamental ethical questions regarding justice and the good life. This internal tension eventually led Easton to propose the "post-behavioural" synthesis, reintroducing relevance and social action into empirical inquiry.

(b) Pluralist Theory of State

The pluralist theory rejects monistic, legal conceptions of sovereignty, asserting that political power is not concentrated in a unified state but dispersed across multiple competing autonomous groups and associations. Its classical form arose in early twentieth-century Britain as a revolt against John Austin's doctrine of absolute, indivisible sovereignty: F.W. Maitland and J.N. Figgis argued that churches, trade unions and guilds have a real personality of their own, Harold Laski declared that sovereignty is plural and the state only one association among many, whose claim to obedience depends on what it achieves, and G.D.H. Cole developed guild socialism. Later, in American political science, Robert Dahl conceptualized this modern democratic arrangement as a "polyarchy," where the state acts primarily as a neutral arbiter, broker, or umpire mediating between rival economic, cultural, and professional interests. In India, pluralism is reflected in federal bargaining, vibrant civil society movements, and coalition politics, where policy outcomes emerge from inter-group consensus rather than monolithic state directives. However, elitists like C. Wright Mills and G. William Domhoff argue that pluralism presents a false appearance of openness while real decisions remain dominated by a cohesive power elite. Marxists similarly dismiss the state's supposed neutrality, viewing it as a structural instrument serving dominant capitalist class interests.

(c) Locke's Views on Revolution

In his Second Treatise of Government, John Locke established that political authority rests on popular consent and a fiduciary trust created to safeguard natural rights to life, liberty, and estate (property). For Locke, when a government degenerates into tyranny and systematically violates this trust, citizens have a right to resist and, having no judge on earth, may "appeal to heaven" - a right to revolution. Crucially, Locke distinguished between the dissolution of the government and the dissolution of society; unlike Thomas Hobbes, who warned that overthrowing the sovereign plunges humanity back into a chaotic state of nature, Locke argued that society retains the supreme power to reconstitute a new legislative authority. Locke did not advocate anarchic or frequent rebellions, framing resistance as a defensive moral remedy justified only after a prolonged train of abuses. This formulation provided a primary philosophical justification for the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the American Declaration of Independence (1776), which echoes his "long train of abuses", and it shaped later revolutionary thought.

(d) Decline of Liberalism

Classical liberalism, defined by laissez-faire capitalism, negative liberty, and the minimal state, underwent severe decline in the early twentieth century. The economic devastation of the Great Depression (1929) exposed the systemic failure of self-regulating markets, while rising socio-economic inequality fueled the ideological growth of totalitarian fascism and Soviet communism. This crisis discredited the non-interventionist state, prompting the Keynesian revolution which argued that market economies require deliberate macroeconomic intervention and demand management. Consequently, classical liberalism ceded ground to the "new liberalism" of T.H. Green and L.T. Hobhouse, which had already argued for positive liberty, and to the egalitarian welfare state; Harold Laski's The Rise of European Liberalism (1936) read the crisis as the exhaustion of a creed tied to the interests of property. Although resurrected in the late twentieth century through neoliberal policies championed by Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and the Washington Consensus, liberalism faces renewed decline today under mounting economic inequality, institutional decay, and the global resurgence of majoritarian populism - the "illiberal democracy" that Fareed Zakaria described in 1997 - which has undercut Francis Fukuyama's post-Cold War claim of liberalism's final victory.

(e) Linkage between Power and Hegemony

Power and hegemony represent interrelated yet qualitatively distinct modes of political authority. While power refers to material capabilities, institutional authority, and the capacity to enforce obedience through coercion, hegemony involves transforming power into legitimate, consensual leadership. In realist international relations, hegemony signifies overwhelming structural dominance and material superiority within the global system, and hegemonic stability theory (Charles Kindleberger, Robert Gilpin) holds that an open world economy needs a dominant power willing to supply public goods. Joseph Nye's distinction between hard power and "soft power" - the ability to attract rather than coerce - captures why durable hegemony needs both. Conversely, Antonio Gramsci developed a critical distinction between "domination" (direct coercive control via the state apparatus) and "hegemony" (cultural, ideological, and moral leadership engineered within civil society to manufacture the consent of the subordinate classes). The linkage is evident in post-Cold War world politics: US global hegemony rested not merely on raw military supremacy and economic leverage (Bretton Woods institutions), but on its ideological legitimacy, projecting liberal democracy and free-market capitalism as universal common sense.