What Do We Study in Political Theory?

When we look around us, what we mostly notice is movement, development and change. But if we look a little deeper, we start to notice the values and principles that have guided and inspired people through all that change -- ideals like democracy, freedom and equality. Different countries try to safeguard such values by writing them directly into their constitutions, as both the American and the Indian constitutions do. These founding documents were not written overnight: they rest on ideas and arguments debated across centuries, from Kautilya and Aristotle onward. As far back as the fifth century BC, Plato and Aristotle debated with their own students whether monarchy or democracy was the better form of government. In the modern era, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the first to argue that freedom is a fundamental right of every human being, while Karl Marx argued that equality mattered every bit as much as freedom. Closer to home, Mahatma Gandhi explored the true meaning of freedom, or swaraj, in his book Hind Swaraj, while Dr B.R. Ambedkar argued forcefully that the scheduled castes had to be recognised as a minority deserving special protection. All of these ideas have found a concrete place in the Indian Constitution: the Preamble enshrines freedom and equality, the chapter on Rights abolishes untouchability in every form, and Gandhian principles are reflected in the Directive Principles of State Policy.

So political theory, at its core, deals with the ideas and principles that shape constitutions, governments and social life in a systematic way. It works out the meaning of concepts such as freedom, equality, justice, democracy and secularism, and it probes the reasoning behind principles like the rule of law, separation of powers, and judicial review, by carefully examining the arguments that different thinkers have made in their defence. Rousseau, Marx and Gandhi were not politicians themselves, yet their ideas have shaped generations of politicians, and thinkers today still draw on them to defend freedom or democracy in new circumstances. Beyond just examining old arguments, political theorists also reflect on our present political experience and try to point out emerging trends and future possibilities.

Is any of this still relevant to us, though, now that India is free and has been a democracy for decades? The answer is yes, because freedom and equality do not get achieved all at once, evenly, across every part of life. These values arise in many different areas of social life and get realised at different paces in each. Equality in the political sphere -- equal voting rights, for instance -- can exist quite fully even while equality in the economic or social sphere lags far behind: people may enjoy equal political rights on paper while still facing discrimination in society because of their caste or their poverty. Some people enjoy a privileged place in society while others are denied even basic necessities; day labourers cutting stone or carrying bricks for long hours have little chance of achieving whatever goals they might set for themselves, because for them freedom remains, in practice, a distant dream. Many children cannot attend school at all because they have to work to support themselves, and in poor households it is very often girls who are pulled out of school to look after younger siblings while their parents go out to work. So even though the Indian Constitution formally guarantees every child the right to primary education, that right can remain merely formal -- true on paper but not in a poor family's lived reality.

A second reason political theory stays relevant is that the meaning of our rights keeps being reinterpreted as circumstances change, somewhat the way players discover new and broader meanings for the rules of chess or cricket the more they play. The fundamental rights guaranteed by our Constitution have, over time, been expanded through judicial interpretation and new government policy to meet new problems -- for instance, courts have read the right to life as including the right to a livelihood, and a new law has created the right to information. …