The nine features of the state, as set out by Christopher Pierson from Max Weber’s definition, are: control of the means of violence, territoriality, sovereignty, constitutionality, impersonal power, a public bureaucracy, authority and legitimacy, citizenship and taxation. Together they describe what makes the modern state different from earlier forms of rule.
Political thought is the whole body of ideas a society or thinker holds about government, power and the good life, expressed in any form. Political thought vs political theory vs political philosophy: theory is a systematic explanation of political phenomena by an individual thinker, while philosophy asks the most abstract, normative questions about justice and the good.
The major theorists of communitarianism are Michael Sandel, Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor and Michael Walzer. Sandel attacks the “unencumbered self”, MacIntyre roots morality in virtues and traditions, Taylor rejects liberal atomism, and Walzer argues that justice depends on the shared meanings of each community’s goods.
The impact of commercialisation of agriculture in colonial India was mostly harmful. Cash crops such as indigo, opium, cotton and jute were grown under revenue pressure and advances, so peasants fell into debt, lost land to moneylenders, faced price swings and food shortages, and protested, while a small group of rich peasants, traders and planters gained.
In the Dobb and Guy Bois debate, Maurice Dobb traced the decline of feudalism to the lords’ over-exploitation of serfs and class struggle inside the feudal economy. Guy Bois, studying Normandy, argued that feudalism had its own law, a long-term fall in the rate of seigneurial levy, and that its crisis came from this internal tendency.
The rise of Maratha power came from the Sahyadri terrain and forts, the training of Maratha chiefs under the Deccan sultanates, a regional identity shaped by the Bhakti saints, Shivaji’s state with its Ashtapradhan and chauth-sardeshmukhi, resistance to Aurangzeb after 1689, and Peshwa-led expansion after 1713 as the Mughal empire weakened.
The transformation of India’s party system moved from the one-party dominant “Congress system” (1952-67), through the decline of Congress and rise of opposition (1967-89), to a competitive, regionalised multi-party system with coalitions (1989-2014), and then BJP pre-eminence. It widened representation for backward castes, Dalits and regions, and made coalition bargaining routine.
Libertarianism rests on self-ownership, natural rights, negative liberty, private property, free markets and a minimal state. The Nozick entitlement theory says holdings are just if they come from (1) justice in acquisition, (2) justice in transfer, or (3) rectification of past injustice. Justice depends on history, not on any pattern of distribution.
