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(The Indian Express has launched a new series of articles for UPSC aspirants written by seasoned writers and scholars on issues and concepts spanning History, Polity, International Relations, Art, Culture and Heritage, Environment, Geography, Science and Technology, and so on. Read and reflect with subject experts and boost your chance of cracking the much-coveted UPSC CSE. In the following article, political scientist Amir Ali explains normative political theory and its significance in evaluating governance.)
In the first part of this article, the need and purpose of political theory was analysed. In this part, let’s explore normative political theory – how it provides the benchmarks (such as justice, equality, freedom) that help ascertain how just, equal or free a society is and whether it is progressing in the right direction.
The revival of normative political theory in the late 20th century happened after it had been dismissed as dead. The reason for this slightly premature declaration of death stemmed from the absence of major work in the 20th century that could rival the scale and ambition of normative concerns of political theory that had emerged in the 19th century.
The mid-19th century witnessed iconic writings such as John Stuart Mill’s essay On Liberty – a foundational work in normative political theory. In the mid-20th century, Isaiah Berlin’s essay, Two Concepts of Liberty, attempted to reclaim some of that earlier normative ambition, and it acquired a stature that has usually been associated with grand works in normative political theory.
However, this happened during the height of the Behavioural Revolution, which emphasised empirical (what can be verified by direct observation) and descriptive analysis of political behaviour or primarily focussed on ‘what is’. It was in many ways the polar opposite of normative political theory which was concerned with ‘what ought to be’.
If there is one defining feature of normative political theory, it is its emphasis on the question of ‘what ought to be’. By raising this question, normative political theory sets a benchmark against which societies can assess themselves to know how far they fall short and how far they need to move in that desirable direction.
In this context, John Rawls’s 1971 book A Theory of Justice has become a classic as it brings the fundamental question of justice back into political theory. While Isaiah Berlin’s essay stood as something of an isolated event amid the mid-20th century dominance of the Behavioural Revolution, Rawls’s work marked the beginning of a renewed normative turn. It inspired a set of writings that simultaneously responded to his concerns and extended them in directions that his initial work did not take.
To appreciate the impact of Rawls’s work, one needs to consider the number of influential texts on political theory that followed its publication over the subsequent five decades. In 1974, Robert Nozick wrote Anarchy, State and Utopia and in 1982, Michael Sandel responded to Rawls with his book Liberalism and the Limits of Justice.
More recently, Martha Nussbaum took the conversation further with The Frontiers of Justice (2006), while in 2009, Indian-born Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen published The Idea of Justice – a book that crucially hinges on the distinction between the Sanskrit concepts niti (institutional justice) and nyaya (realised justice in lived experience).
What one notices is that the major normative concern that is raised in all these late 20th-century and early 21st-century works is justice. However, this concern is not new. If one considers the works of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, one finds a similar preoccupation with the theme of justice in perhaps his most famous work, The Republic.
However, normative political theory is not solely about justice. It also engages with other concerns like liberty, rights, equality – and, especially in the Indian context, the idea of fraternity emphasised by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar as a critical component of democracy.
Each of these concepts in normative political theory (justice, liberty, equality, fraternity) can be explored through three dimensions – the history behind it, the core idea it embodies and a desirable future direction it points towards. The third dimension becomes important. As a normative political theory concept, it not only indicates a desirable direction but also serves as a benchmark against which a society can assess how far they have progressed or fallen short of attaining the standard in question.
Engaging with normative political theory also requires us to understand slightly difficult terms such as morality, ethics and virtue. But what is morality? It is a difficult question to answer and can be understood as the values that a society or a community has accumulated through its historical experience and expects its members to abide by them in the present and future. Certain acts are called out as ‘immoral’ if they violate this accepted value system.
Morality is related to ‘mores’, which are the customarily acceptable forms of behaviour in a society. These mores provide norms of conduct and behaviour and normative political theory emerges from this foundation. The concept of the ethical becomes especially important when it is not clear how an individual ‘ought to’ behave in a particular situation.
A good way of differentiating between the moral and the ethical is to think of the moral as acceptable behavioural norms accumulated by a community through its past experience, while ethical conduct is future-oriented. The ethical draws from morality not mechanically, but by creatively exercising judgment as to how accumulated past experience is to be adapted to future-oriented decisions.
Normative political theory, especially in the works of Plato and Aristotle, has emphasised the concept of virtue. In recent times, virtue ethics has witnessed a revival of interest. In his book The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle famously described virtue as a mean, like an in-between of extremes, so that a person takes the famous path of the golden mean, by steering away from extremes in either direction.
If a person acts with the virtue of courage, as we very often must in politics, then s/he avoids the extremes of recklessness – excessive courage without thought of consequences – and cowardice – a complete deficiency of courage.
Thus, normative political theory is crucial in assessing how societies and polities measure up to their ideals. This is especially relevant in contemporary democracies, which premise on the idea of rulers being accountable to the ruled. When the ruled (citizens) evaluate the promise and performance of their rulers (governments), it is normative political theory that provides the benchmarks (such as justice, equality, freedom) to ascertain how just, equal or free their societies are and whether they are progressing in the right direction.
How does normative political theory help societies assess their adherence to ideals like justice, equality, and freedom?
Why is John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice considered a turning point in normative political theory? How did it mark a shift from the Behavioural Revolution to a normative turn in political theory?
How does Amartya Sen’s distinction between niti and nyaya deepen our understanding of justice?
Apart from justice, what other values does normative political theory engage with, and why are they significant in democratic societies?
Why is ethical conduct described as more future-oriented and judgment-based than morality? How do ‘mores’ shape the development of normative political theory in any given society?
(Amir Ali is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi)
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