Key Concepts of Political Theory

1. Customs and Traditions: Long-standing social usages observed spontaneously by communities, later recognized and enforced by state courts (e.g., English Common Law).
2. Religion: In ancient and medieval polities, divine codes and religious scriptures formed the bedrock of civil and criminal codes (e.g., Hindu Dharmashastras, Islamic Sharia).
3. Judicial Decisions (Precedents): Rulings delivered by superior courts that interpret ambiguous statutes and create binding precedents (stare decisis).
4. Scientific Commentaries: Analytical treatises by eminent jurists (such as Coke, Blackstone, Dicey) that clarify legal doctrines and guide judicial interpretation.
5. Equity: Principles of fairness, natural justice, and good conscience applied by judges when statutory law is silent, inadequate, or excessively harsh.
6. Legislation: Enactments by a representative legislature (Parliament/Congress); the most direct, prolific, and modern source of law in contemporary states.

• Negative Liberty ('Freedom From'): Characterized by the absence of external interference or coercion. It defines a private inviolable sphere around the individual within which they can act unhindered by the state. Championed by classical liberals like John Locke, Adam Smith, J.S. Mill (*On Liberty*), and modern libertarians like Robert Nozick. J.S. Mill formulated the famous Harm Principle: state coercion is justified solely to prevent harm to others.
• Positive Liberty ('Freedom To'): Defined as the presence of real capacity, resources, and institutional opportunities to achieve autonomous self-development and participate in collective governance. T.H. Green defined it as 'a positive power of doing or enjoying something that is worth doing or enjoying in common with others'. Harold Laski emphasized that a starving or illiterate person is not truly free, regardless of legal declarations.

1. Rule of Law (A.V. Dicey): Equality before the law, absence of arbitrary administrative discretion, and supremacy of regular law.
2. Entrenched Fundamental Rights: Constitutional guarantees protected against ordinary legislative majorities.
3. Independent Judiciary & Prerogative Writs: An insulated court system armed with powers of judicial review and habeas corpus (Article 32).
4. Separation of Powers (Montesquieu): Institutional checks and balances dividing authority among legislature, executive, and judiciary.
5. Democratic Decentralization: Dispersal of state authority across local self-governing bodies to prevent tyrannical central concentrations.
6. Eternal Vigilance: Active civic awareness and popular readiness to resist encroachments; as John Philpot Curran observed, 'Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty'.

1. Incompatible / Antithetical School (Lord Acton, Alexis de Tocqueville): Lord Acton famously declared, 'The passion for equality made vain the hope for freedom.' This school argues that enforcing equality requires massive state coercion and expropriation, which inevitably destroys individual liberty, property rights, and competitive excellence.

2. Complementary / Reconcilable School (Harold Laski, R.H. Tawney, Rousseau): Laski asserted, 'A large degree of equality is a condition precedent to the attainment of liberty.' Tawney remarked that freedom of contract between a powerful capitalist and an impoverished worker is no freedom at all. Without economic and social equality, liberty is merely a hollow privilege for the wealthy few.

• Procedural Justice: Contends that if the legal and procedural rules of acquisition, exchange, and competition are formally fair and strictly applied, the resulting socio-economic distribution is inherently just, regardless of disparities (advocated by F.A. Hayek and Robert Nozick).
• Distributive / Substantive Justice: Demands that goods, wealth, opportunities, and burdens be distributed according to ethical principles such as human need, merit, or vulnerability. It actively corrects structural social injustices.

Rawls imagines rational individuals situated in an 'Original Position' behind a 'Veil of Ignorance', where no one knows their social class, race, gender, natural talents, or conception of the good. To protect themselves against the worst possible outcome, they would unanimously choose two lexicographically ordered principles:

1. Equal Basic Liberties Principle: Each person has an equal, inalienable claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic rights and liberties (freedom of thought, speech, conscience, assembly, and political participation).
2. Social and Economic Inequalities Principle: Social and economic inequalities must satisfy two strict conditions:
     a) Fair Equality of Opportunity: Offices and positions must be open to all under conditions of fair opportunity regardless of social origin.
     b) The Difference Principle: Socio-economic inequalities are justifiable only if they work to the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society (the 'maximin' rule).

• One person's right is another person's duty: My right to free speech imposes a corresponding legal duty upon all fellow citizens and the state not to silence me.
• One person's right is one's own duty: The enjoyment of my right requires me to exercise it with social responsibility, respecting identical rights held by others.
• Duty towards the State: Because the democratic state guarantees and protects individual rights, the citizen owes civic allegiance, tax compliance, law abidance, and constructive participation to the state.