Putting Political Theory to Practice

This textbook deliberately narrows its focus to just one strand of political theory: the origin, meaning and significance of political ideas we already encounter all around us, such as freedom, equality, citizenship, justice, development, nationalism and secularism. Whenever we start a debate or an argument on any of these topics, we naturally begin by asking two questions -- "what does it actually mean?" and "how does it matter?" Political theorists have asked exactly these two questions about freedom or equality, and, unlike in mathematics, where a triangle or a square has one single, agreed definition, they have arrived at many different, sometimes competing, definitions of equality, freedom or justice.

The reason for this is that concepts like equality describe our relationships with other human beings, not our relationships with fixed objects. Human beings, unlike objects, hold their own opinions on things like equality, and those many opinions have to be understood and reconciled with one another. We can see this by reflecting on our own everyday experience of equality. Most of us have noticed people jumping a queue at a shop, a doctor's waiting room, or a government office -- when someone is sent back into line, we feel glad; when they get away with it, we feel cheated, because we all expect an equal opportunity to obtain the goods or services we are paying for. At the same time, we readily accept that separate counters for the elderly or disabled are a fair and justified exception to this rule, rather than a violation of it.

But equal opportunity by itself is not always enough. We also see every day that many poor people -- day labourers cutting stone or carrying bricks for long hours, for instance -- simply cannot afford to visit a shop or a doctor at all. If we think about this honestly, we realise it is unfair that some members of society cannot even meet their basic needs, and we come to see that genuine equality has to include some notion of fairness, so that people are not left exploited and disadvantaged purely because of economic circumstances beyond their control. Consider, too, the many children who cannot attend school because they must work to support themselves, and the girls in poor households who are routinely pulled out of school to care for younger siblings while their parents work. Even though the Indian Constitution guarantees every child the right to primary education, this right stays merely formal for children in exactly this situation -- which is why we may feel the government should proactively do more, through fair distribution of resources such as jobs, decent wages, subsidised hospitals, and steps like offering midday meals to keep poor children in school.

This shows that our idea of equality is genuinely complex and layered: when we are in a queue or on a playground, what we want is equal opportunity; when we think about people facing disability or poverty, we recognise the need for special, proactive measures instead. The reason political theorists arrive at so many different definitions of equality is simply that its meaning depends on the context -- we start from what equality means for ourselves, and then extend the same reasoning to others (the poor, the disadvantaged, the elderly), discovering new layers of meaning along the way. In fact, we have often been doing a version of political theory ourselves, in daily life, without ever calling it that.

What professional political theorists do is take this everyday reasoning and make it systematic: they clarify the meaning of political concepts by studying how ordinary people actually use and understand them, and they debate and examine the different possible meanings and opinions in a rigorous way -- asking, for example, when equality of opportunity is enough, when people genuinely need special treatment, and how far and for how long such special treatment should continue. These are not abstract puzzles; they are eminently practical questions, because the answers directly shape public policy on education and employment. The same method applies just as much to the other big political ideas -- freedom, citizenship, rights, development, justice, equality, nationalism and secularism -- each of which gets its own systematic treatment in the chapters that follow this one. …