Power, Authority and Legitimacy
Every advance in the theory of power has come from noticing something the previous account could not see. The sequence from Dahl to Lukes…
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Study Notes
Everything published under Study Notes on Anantam IAS, newest first.
3454 articles
Democracy: Classical, Contemporary and Deliberative
The argument about democracy is an argument about how much it can be asked to deliver. Elite theorists lowered the demand until the theory…
Rights: Theories, Generations and Debates
A right is a claim strong enough to override the general welfare. Every dispute in this chapter is about where such claims come from,…
Equality and Freedom
Liberty and equality are treated as rivals by those who define liberty as non-interference, and as conditions of each other by those who define…
Theories of the State
Every theory of the state is an answer to one question: in whose interest does it act? The theories differ less in what they…
Political Theory: Meaning, Approaches, Decline and Revival
Political theory was pronounced dead in 1956 and was flourishing again by 1971. What died was one way of doing it, and the argument…
India and the UN System; the Nuclear Question
India’s claim on the Security Council and its refusal of the NPT rest on the same argument: that institutions built in the 1940s and…
Justice: Rawls, Nozick and the Communitarian Critique
Rawls asked what principles free and equal people would choose if they did not know who they were going to be. Almost everything written…
Privacy as a Moral Claim, Not Only a Right: Consent, Coercion and Mandatory Digital ID (UPSC Ethics — GS IV)
Privacy is a moral interest before it is a legal right, and the interest it protects is the capacity to act without being watched.…
Judicial Ethics and Accountability: The Restatement of Values, In-House Procedure and the Independence Problem (UPSC Ethics — GS IV)
A judge has no constituency, cannot explain himself in public, and holds power reviewable only by other judges, so the ordinary mechanisms of accountability…
Police Ethics and the Use of Force: Proportionality, Crowd Control and Custodial Violence (UPSC Ethics — GS IV)
The police is the one civil service routinely authorised to hurt people, which makes its ethics structurally different from every other post. Almost everything…
Humanitarian Intervention and R2P: When Does Force Become a Moral Duty? (UPSC Ethics — GS IV)
R2P did not create a right to intervene; it relocated the primary duty onto the state itself and made outside action a residual third…