PSIR Paper 1: The 5 Thinkers That Matter Most

Most PSIR aspirants open the Paper 1 syllabus, see Plato at one end and Hannah Arendt at the other, and try to give every name the same week. The question papers don’t reward that. If you want the important thinkers for PSIR Paper 1 in the order UPSC has examined them, five stand clear in the official papers from 2014 to 2025: Karl Marx (9 of 12 papers), John Rawls (9), Mahatma Gandhi (9), B.R. Ambedkar (6) and Aristotle (5).

Those numbers are our own count of the official UPSC Paper I question papers from 2014 to 2025, both sections. A thinker counts in a paper when one of its questions names him or directly examines his doctrine. By that count Plato, a fixture of most lists, appears in only three of the twelve papers.

Why These Five Thinkers Carry PSIR Paper 1

These are the important thinkers for PSIR Paper 1 for two reasons: they are examined most often, and other topics lean on them. Here is the record behind the first reason.

Two judgment calls sit inside those numbers, and you should know both. Gandhi’s 9 includes three questions that examine his ideas without printing his name: satyagraha as a strategy (2015), satyagraha and Indian nationalism (2023) and Gram Swaraj (2022). Count only the questions that name him and he has 7, which still puts him in the five.

The second call decides fifth place. J.S. Mill ties Aristotle exactly: 5 papers and 5 questions each. We broke the tie on marks set, and Aristotle’s questions carry 80 marks against Mill’s 60. Aristotle would also gain a sixth paper if you counted the 2020 question on the “Greek perspective of Justice”, which names neither Plato nor Aristotle, so we left it out. Treat Mill as a close sixth. Behind him, Hobbes, Locke, Machiavelli, Hannah Arendt and Sri Aurobindo appear in 4 papers each, and Bentham in none.

The counts don’t predict next year’s paper. They record where the examiner has been. Use them to set the order of your revision, not the size of your syllabus.

The deeper reason these five deserve first place is that each one is a hub. A Marx answer feeds your answers on the state and on ideologies, and Marxist approaches return in the IR theory section of PSIR Paper 2. Rawls is the reference point for almost every question on justice. Gandhi and Ambedkar cross from Section A into Section B, where the national movement, caste and local government are asked. Aristotle’s classification of constitutions sits under questions on democracy, equality and the state.

For the whole syllabus, section by section, see our PSIR Paper 1 guide. If you’re still deciding whether PSIR is the right optional, the PSIR optional guide covers that choice.

Karl Marx: The Critique the Whole Paper Needs

Marx comes back so often because he supplies the critique the rest of the paper needs. Almost every liberal idea in Section A, from rights to the neutral state, has a Marxist counter-reading, and UPSC likes to test whether you can hold both. He is examined in 9 of the 12 papers from 2014 to 2025, one question each time.

The Marx ideas you must be able to explain

Six ideas cover the ground. Each one is a term UPSC uses directly in its questions, so learn the term and the plain meaning together.

• Historical materialism and base-superstructure. The economic structure of society is the real foundation on which a legal and political superstructure rises. In Marx’s 1859 Preface, it’s social existence that determines consciousness, not the other way round.
• Class struggle. The Communist Manifesto (1848, with Engels) opens with the claim that the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Class here means your relation to the means of production, not your income bracket.
• Alienation. In the 1844 Manuscripts, the worker under capitalism is separated from four things: the product, the activity of work, their human potential (species-being) and other people. A delivery rider ranked by an app, paid per drop and never meeting whoever set the rules is a workable modern example.
• Surplus value. The worker produces more value than the wage paid for their labor power. That difference is surplus value, and Marx treats it as the source of profit.
• The state as class rule. The state isn’t a neutral referee but an instrument of the dominant class. Once classes disappear, the Marxist tradition expects the state itself to wither away.
• Freedom and communism. Freedom for Marx is the power to develop yourself without exploitation, not just the absence of interference. In the Critique of the Gotha Programme, communism is a society where each contributes according to ability and receives according to need.

That list is the whole grammar. All nine Marx questions from 2014 to 2025 map onto one or more of these six ideas.

How the Marx questions come

UPSC asks Marx in four recurring ways, and the angle tells you how to open the answer.

• Explain a concept: “Explain Marx’s understanding of Human Essence and Alienation.” (2016); “Discuss Karl Marx’s concept of class.” (2020, 15 marks); “Marx’s concept of ‘alienation’ is an essential part of the reality in capitalism. Explain.” (2021, 15 marks)
• Explain the method: “Discuss the relationship between base and superstructure in Marxist theory.” (2015, 15 marks)
• Judge the relevance: “What is the contemporary relevance of Marxism?” (2019, 15 marks); “Marxism is a political theory of action demanding strict compliance with its core principles. Comment.” (2024, 15 marks)
• Set Marx against other ideologies: “Examine the conception of the State in the ideologies of Fascism and Marxism.” (2014, 15 marks); “Differentiate between Freedom and Liberty. Discuss Marx’s notion of freedom.” (2017, 15 marks); “What is the Marxist and liberal approach towards the state? On what grounds the theoretical differences between them are premised? Explain.” (2025, 20 marks)

The 2024 question is where many answers slip. The easy move is to agree and list Marx’s core principles. But the statement is a charge: it calls Marxism rigid. A strong answer tests the charge. Bernstein revised the theory toward a gradual, parliamentary road, and Gramsci rebuilt it around culture and consent, which is hard to square with “strict compliance.” Then you take a position on how much of the rigidity belongs to Marx and how much to the parties that ruled in his name.

The critique to deploy on Marx

• Weber: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904 to 1905) gives a non-Marxist account of capitalism’s rise, in which religious ideas matter. The superstructure isn’t only a reflection of the base.
• Bernstein: he questioned Marx’s revolutionary predictions and argued for a gradual, parliamentary path to socialism, the position known as revisionism or evolutionary socialism.
• Popper: the forecast of capitalism’s collapse and communism’s victory is historicism, a prophecy dressed as science.
• History itself: revolutions came in agrarian Russia and China, not in the industrial West where Marx expected them. Gramsci’s idea of hegemony, rule that wins the consent of subordinate groups instead of relying only on force, is the Marxist tradition’s own answer to why.

Comparison to rehearse: Marx vs the liberal theory of the state

The 2025 paper asked this pairing directly, and it returns under other names. Keep this grid in your head:

Open with this contrast, bring in Gramsci and the welfare state as the complications, and a 20-mark answer has a spine.

John Rawls: The Theory Every Justice Question Runs Through

Rawls is examined as often as Marx: in 9 of the 12 papers from 2014 to 2025, every year from 2015 except 2019 and 2024. Justice is one of the most regular themes in Section A, and Rawls is the theory every other position on justice defines itself against. Even the 2019 paper, which doesn’t name him, asked about communitarian perspectives on justice, a debate that exists because of him.

The Rawls ideas you must be able to explain

• Justice as fairness. Set out in A Theory of Justice (1971): principles of justice are fair when they would be chosen under fair conditions. Rawls offers it as the alternative to utilitarianism, the dominant tradition in modern political thought before him.
• The original position and the veil of ignorance. Imagine choosing the rules of society without knowing your race, class, gender or talents. The veil strips away facts that shouldn’t affect justice, so nobody can rig the rules in their own favor.
• The first principle: equal basic liberties. Every citizen gets the same basic rights: conscience, association, speech, the vote, the rule of law. This principle takes priority over the second.
• The second principle: fair equality of opportunity and the difference principle. Inequalities are allowed only if positions are open to all under fair equality of opportunity, and only if they work to the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged. Fair opportunity comes before the difference principle.
• Political Liberalism (1993). In a society of many religions and worldviews, the later Rawls asks how a just order stays stable. His answer is an overlapping consensus: citizens with different worldviews each endorse the same political principles for their own reasons, and public reason keeps political argument in terms everyone can accept.

The difference principle is where most answers go wrong, so here it is worked through. Take three possible economies. In A, everyone earns 10. In B, the poorest earn 12 and the richest 60. In C, the average is highest, but the poorest earn only 9. A strict egalitarian picks A. A utilitarian leans to C. Rawls picks B, because its worst-off group is better off than the worst-off group anywhere else.

Notice what just happened: the difference principle chose an unequal economy over an equal one. Many answers describe Rawls as someone who wants equal outcomes. He doesn’t. He wants every inequality to earn its keep by helping the least-advantaged.

How the Rawls questions come

Nine questions, in four shapes:

• Explain the machinery: “‘Difference Principle’ in Rawls’ Theory of Justice” (2015, 10 marks); “Critically examine John Rawl’s argument for democratic equality.” (2016); “Rawls’ theory of justice is both contractual and distributive. Examine.” (2017, 20 marks); “Explain how Rawls used the liberal and egalitarian perspective to develop his concept of distributive justice.” (2025, 15 marks)
• Apply it: “Analyse John Rawls justification of discrimination to achieve the goals of Justice.” (2018, 15 marks)
• Place him in liberalism: “How has Rawls enriched the idea of justice in liberalism?” (2021, 20 marks)
• Compare or critique: “Make a comparative assessment of Greek perspective of Justice with the Rawlsian concept of Justice.” (2020, 20 marks); the Ambedkar comparison (2022, 20 marks, covered in the Ambedkar section); “Rawls’ idea of the ‘liberal self’ is too individualistic. Explain, in this context, the communitarian critique of Rawls’ theory of justice.” (2023, 15 marks)

One pattern matters for your preparation. No question from 2014 to 2025 asks about Nozick or Sen on their own. They arrive inside Rawls answers, as the critics who earn you the critical marks. Prepare them that way.

The 2018 question tests whether you understood the machinery. “Justification of discrimination” sounds like the opposite of fairness. But the difference principle is exactly a case for unequal treatment when it benefits the least-advantaged, and that is the bridge to reservations in an Indian answer.

The critique to deploy on Rawls

• Nozick: in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), justice in holdings depends on how they were acquired and transferred, and taxation for redistribution is on a par with forced labor.
• The communitarians: Sandel, Taylor, MacIntyre and Walzer argued that Rawls rests on an overly individualistic self, when our identities are shaped by communal attachments we don’t simply choose. This is the 2023 question.
• Sen and the capability approach: Rawls’s primary goods measure means, not ends. People differ in their ability to convert the same resources into a good life, so equal goods can leave unequal freedoms.
• Rawls’s own reply: Political Liberalism recasts justice as fairness as a political conception rather than a full philosophy of the self, which is his answer to the communitarian charge.

Comparison to rehearse: Rawls vs the communitarians

Open with the self, because that’s where the 2023 question aims, and close with Political Liberalism as Rawls’s reply.

Mahatma Gandhi: The Most Examined Indian Thinker

Gandhi is examined in 9 of the 12 papers from 2014 to 2025, by name in 7 of them, across 11 questions. That makes him the most examined Indian thinker in Paper I. He keeps returning because he can be examined twice: as a political theorist in Section A, and as the strategist of the national movement in Section B.

The Gandhi ideas you must be able to explain

• Swaraj. Self-rule at two levels: rule over one’s own self, and a nation governing itself. Hind Swaraj (1909), written in Gujarati on board the SS Kildonan Castle, argues that driving out the British while keeping their civilization would not be swaraj at all.
• The critique of modern civilization. The same book attacks modern civilization and mechanization for multiplying wants instead of making people free.
• Satyagraha. Truth force, a form of nonviolent resistance that Gandhi coined and developed. The satyagrahi resists injustice without violence. Means and ends are inseparable: a good end reached by violent means is spoiled by them.
• Sarvodaya and trusteeship. Sarvodaya, the welfare of all, was the title Gandhi gave to his 1908 translation of John Ruskin’s Unto This Last. Trusteeship asks the wealthy to act as trustees of their property for the welfare of the people in general.
• The state and Gram Swaraj. Gandhi feared a powerful state because it destroys individuality, and he wanted power pushed down to self-reliant village republics. That is what Gram Swaraj means.

How the Gandhi questions come

In Section A, the questions ask for his political theory:

• “Gandhi’s Views on State” (2015, 10 marks)
• “Examine Gandhi’s critique of ‘Modernisation’.” (2016, 15 marks)
• “M. K. Gandhi’s concept of Swaraj.” (2019, 10 marks)
• “Explicate the ideological components of Gandhism.” (2020, 20 marks)
• “The Panchayats with Gram Sabhas should be so organised as to identify the resources locally available for the development in agricultural and industrial sectors.” Examine the statement in the context of Gram Swaraj. (2022, 15 marks)
• “…does the greatest harm to mankind by destroying individuality, which lies at the root of all progress.” (Mahatma Gandhi). Elucidate. (2025, 15 marks)

In Section B, he comes through the movement and the village:

• “Satyagraha as a Strategy in the Indian National Movement” (2015, 10 marks)
• “Compare the Nehruvian and Gandhian models of development.” (2015, 15 marks)
• “The success of Mahatma Gandhi lay in transforming both political and non-political movements into a unified nationalist movement.” (2017, 10 marks)
• “Satyagraha and Indian Nationalism” (2023, 10 marks)
• “The blueprint of Gram Swaraj is the key to understand the Gandhian perspective on planning. Discuss.” (2024)

Gram Swaraj came twice in three years, once in each section. The state question bookends the period, in 2015 and again in 2025. If you prepare one Gandhi answer in full, make it that one.

The critique to deploy on Gandhi

• Ambedkar: Gandhi treated caste as a moral problem for caste Hindus to fix through a change of heart, which left the structure standing. Ambedkar rejected the village ideal too: in the Constituent Assembly on 4 November 1948 he called the village “a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism.”
• The socialist critique: trusteeship leaves property with the propertied and depends on their goodwill. Socialists condemned it as favoring landlords, feudal princes and capitalists.
• Nehru’s modernizing critique: a poor new nation needed heavy industry, planning and science, not the self-sufficient village. The 2015 question on development models tests exactly this.

Comparison to rehearse: Gandhi vs Ambedkar on caste

This pairing appears in both sections of the paper. It rewards precision about method more than a verdict on who was right.

The honest conclusion isn’t that one was right and the other wrong. Gandhi moved caste Hindus in a way law alone could not; Ambedkar saw that a change of heart without a change of structure leaves the weakest waiting on the goodwill of the strongest. The Constitution carries both: Article 17 abolishes untouchability by law, and Article 40 puts village panchayats into the Directive Principles.

B.R. Ambedkar: The Thinker Whose Questions Got Harder

Ambedkar is examined in 6 of the 12 papers from 2014 to 2025, all between 2016 and 2023, one question each time. The count is lower than Marx’s or Gandhi’s, but the questions changed character across those years. The early ones asked what he thought; the later ones set him against Rawls or read his slogans as political strategy. He’s examined as a theorist of justice, not only as the architect of the Constitution.

One more question sits just outside his count. The 2024 paper had a short note on “Constitutional morality in the Indian Constitution”, a term Ambedkar brought into the Constituent Assembly, but it doesn’t name him, so we didn’t count it.

The Ambedkar ideas you must be able to explain

• Annihilation of caste. Written in 1936 as a speech for the Jat-Pat Todak Mandal in Lahore and never delivered, it argues that caste is not merely a division of labor but a division of laborers, fixed by birth. It attacks the religious texts that sanction caste, because reform inside caste isn’t enough.
• Social democracy under political democracy. On 25 November 1949 he warned that political democracy cannot last unless there lies at the base of it social democracy: liberty, equality and fraternity as one union. From 26 January 1950, India would enter “a life of contradictions,” equal in politics and unequal in social and economic life.
• Constitutional morality. Borrowing the term from the historian George Grote on 4 November 1948, he meant a paramount reverence for the forms of the Constitution, and he warned that it has to be cultivated. On 25 November 1949 he went further: once constitutional methods are open, civil disobedience, non-cooperation and satyagraha are “the Grammar of Anarchy,” and hero-worship in politics is a sure road to dictatorship.
• State socialism. His scheme put agricultural land and the resources for production under state ownership, so that economic democracy wouldn’t depend on private goodwill. The 2016 short note asked for exactly this idea.
• Buddhism as an egalitarian exit. On 14 October 1956 in Nagpur he converted to Buddhism with his followers, choosing a faith he read as rational and egalitarian over reform from within Hinduism.

How the Ambedkar questions come

• “Dr. B. R. Ambedkar’s idea of state socialism.” (2016, 10 marks)
• “Political democracy could not last unless social democracy lay at its base.” (B.R. Ambedkar). Comment. (2017, 20 marks)
• “Discuss Ambedkar’s ideas on ‘annihilation of caste’.” (2018, 15 marks)
• “Ambedkar’s ideas on constitutionalism” (2020, 10 marks)
• “Dr. Ambedkar’s idea of social justice leads to ‘egalitarian justice’ as compared to Rawls’ ‘justice as fairness’ which aims at the notion of ‘pure procedural justice’. Comment.” (2022, 20 marks)
• “Dr. Ambedkar’s clarion call, ‘Educate, Agitate and Organize’, strategizes the Dalit movement towards achieving civil liberty. Discuss.” (2023)

Read that list from top to bottom and the direction is clear: from what Ambedkar proposed to how his ideas stand against the best of liberal theory. Prepare him at the depth you prepare Rawls.

The critique to deploy on Ambedkar

• The Gandhian reply: law can forbid untouchability but can’t make people stop practicing it. Without a change in social attitudes, rights stay on paper.
• The class-first reply: a common reading on the Left holds that caste can’t be dismantled apart from the struggle over land and property, which is why his own state socialism matters to the answer.
• The tension in his constitutionalism: he trusted the state and the Constitution as instruments of reform, yet warned on 25 November 1949 that even a good constitution turns out bad if those called to work it are a bad lot. Critics ask how far a state staffed by the old social order can reform it.
• The conversion question: the move to Buddhism gave dignity and a new identity, but critics argue it moved the struggle out of Hindu society rather than transforming it.

Comparison to rehearse: Ambedkar vs Rawls on justice

The 2022 question framed this pairing for you, and it joins the two most examined theories of justice in the paper.

The overlap is the scoring point. Rawls’s difference principle and Ambedkar’s case for reservations both favor the least-advantaged. The difference is that Ambedkar names who they are and why they’re there.

Aristotle: The Fifth Place, Won on Marks

Aristotle is examined in 5 of the 12 papers from 2014 to 2025, all in Section A, one question each time, and those questions carry 80 marks. He wins fifth place from Mill on those marks, as explained above. He keeps returning because he is the empirical counterweight to Plato and the first thinker to sort constitutions systematically, which makes him the ancestor of every question on forms of government.

The Aristotle ideas you must be able to explain

• Man is by nature a political animal. Human beings naturally want to live together, and the city-state exists for the good life, not just for survival.
• The six-fold classification of constitutions. Rule can be by one, a few or many. Each has a correct form, aimed at the common advantage, and a deviant form, aimed at the rulers’ own advantage.
• Polity and the middle class. For cities as they actually are, the best constitution is a mixed one controlled by a numerous middle class, standing between the rich and the poor and freest from faction.
• Distributive justice and equality. Everyone agrees that justice means treating equals equally and unequals unequally. The dispute is over the standard of merit: wealth, free birth or virtue.
• Revolution. Book V of the Politics studies faction and revolution, their causes and their cures. Disputes over equality are at the root of them, which is the 2017 question.
• Rule of law and the critique of Plato. He weighs the rule of law against the rule of a supremely virtuous individual, and he rejects Plato’s communism as impractical and against human nature.

The classification is the one table you should be able to draw in the exam hall without thinking:

Notice the trap in the last row. For Aristotle, democracy is the deviant form, rule by the poor in their own interest. The good version of rule by the many is polity. An answer that calls Aristotle a democrat without that distinction loses the examiner in the first paragraph.

How the Aristotle questions come

• “Central to Aristotle’s political thought is his classification of the different types of political constitutions in the Politics. Evaluate.” (2014, 15 marks)
• “Aristotle’s Conception of Equality” (2015, 10 marks)
• “Everywhere, inequality is a cause of revolution.” (Aristotle). Comment. (2017, 15 marks)
• “Explain Aristotle’s critique of Plato’s Idealism.” (2019, 20 marks)
• “Explain the Aristotelian view of politics. To what extent do you think it has contributed to the development of modern-day constitutional democracies?” (2021, 20 marks)

Two of the five are about equality, and two ask you to judge his method or his legacy. The 2021 question shows how to use the grid above: the middle-class polity, the rule of law and the idea of rotating citizen rule under a constitution are the parts of Aristotle that modern constitutional democracies kept, and natural slavery is the part they threw away.

The critique to deploy on Aristotle

• Natural slavery: he defends slavery for people he says lack a deliberative faculty, and he asserts this without evidence. It is the sharpest limit on his idea of the political community.
• Merit as the measure: distributive justice by merit can harden into a defense of existing hierarchy, depending on who decides what counts as merit.
• Scale: his best constitution is designed for a small city-state of citizens who know one another, not for a mass democracy of a billion people.

Comparison to rehearse: Plato vs Aristotle

That grid answers the 2019 question almost on its own, and it’s also how Plato, at three papers, stays in your preparation. The marks come from saying which of Aristotle’s objections still hold.

One Grid That Links All Five

The five are easier to revise, and easier to use, when you see them against the same four concepts. Read down a column for a concept question and across a row for a thinker question.

Twenty cells, and together they cover a large share of what Section A asks about these thinkers. Build this grid from memory once a week and you’ll notice the gaps before the examiner does.

How to Revise the Five in the Last Eight Weeks

Spend the last eight weeks turning what you already know into answers, not adding sources. The PSIR booklist is clear that the final stretch is for revision sheets, not new books. For these five, that means O.P. Gauba’s An Introduction to Political Theory, which runs from Plato to Rawls, for Marx, Rawls and Aristotle, and V.R. Mehta’s Foundations of Indian Political Thought for Gandhi and Ambedkar. If you read Hind Swaraj and Annihilation of Caste earlier, as the booklist suggests, go back to your notes on them rather than the full texts.

Two rules make this plan work. First, revise with the questions open: a sheet built around past angles is a sheet you can answer from. Second, write instead of rereading. Rereading Gauba in the final weeks feels productive and leaves nothing on paper. For answer structure, compare your drafts with the PSIR answer writing model answers, and use the Paper 1 PYQ analysis to see where the rest of Section A’s marks sit.

The honest limit of this plan: it prepares the important thinkers for PSIR Paper 1, not the whole of Section A. Mill, level with Aristotle on papers, needs his own sheet, and so do Hobbes, Locke, Machiavelli, Arendt and Sri Aurobindo at four papers each. The five come first because they make the others easier, not because they replace them.

Final Remarks

If you work through these five the way this page sets them out, Section A stops being a list of names and becomes a set of arguments you can enter from any side. The one idea to keep is this: learn each thinker together with the critic or rival UPSC pairs them with, because that pairing is where the marks sit.

Start with Marx and Rawls this week. Between them they set out the two sides that most of Section A argues over: justice as a fair distribution, and the critique that asks whether any distribution under capitalism can be fair.

Frequently Asked Questions

Practice Questions

Prelims MCQs

1. Which work of Karl Marx sets out four dimensions of alienated labor, including alienation from the product of labor and from other people? (a) The Communist Manifesto (b) Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (c) Critique of the Gotha Programme (d) The Poverty of Philosophy Answer: (b) The 1844 Manuscripts describe alienation from the product, the activity of work, species-being and other people.
2. In John Rawls’s theory of justice, the difference principle permits social and economic inequalities only if they: (a) reward those who work hardest (b) are to the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society (c) are approved by a majority in a referendum (d) arise from just acquisition and transfer of holdings Answer: (b) Option (d) describes Nozick’s entitlement theory; Rawls ties inequality to the benefit of the least-advantaged.
3. In Aristotle’s six-fold classification of constitutions, the correct form of rule by the many is: (a) democracy (b) polity (c) aristocracy (d) oligarchy Answer: (b) Polity is the correct form of rule by the many; democracy is its deviant form, aimed at the rulers’ own advantage.
4. Gandhi wrote Hind Swaraj in 1909: (a) in English, in Yerwada jail (b) in Gujarati, on board the SS Kildonan Castle (c) in Hindi, at Sabarmati Ashram (d) in Gujarati, during the Salt March Answer: (b) He wrote it in Gujarati while sailing from London to South Africa, and translated it into English himself.
5. Consider the following statements about B.R. Ambedkar: 1. Annihilation of Caste was written as a speech for the Jat-Pat Todak Mandal of Lahore. 2. He converted to Buddhism at Nagpur on 14 October 1956. 3. In the Constituent Assembly he praised the village as the ideal unit of self-government. Which of the statements given above are correct? (a) 1 and 2 only (b) 2 and 3 only (c) 1 and 3 only (d) 1, 2 and 3 Answer: (a) Statement 3 is wrong: on 4 November 1948 he called the village a sink of localism.

Mains Practice Questions

1. “The Marxist theory of the state explains domination better than it explains consent.” Critically examine with reference to Gramsci. (15 marks, 250 words)
2. “Rawls’s difference principle reconciles liberty with equality.” Critically examine with reference to Nozick and Sen. (20 marks, 300 words)
3. “Aristotle’s polity anticipates modern constitutional democracy.” Examine with reference to his defense of the middle class. (15 marks, 250 words)
4. Compare Gandhi’s and Ambedkar’s approaches to the abolition of untouchability. Which of the two does the Indian Constitution reflect more closely? (20 marks, 300 words)
5. Explain Ambedkar’s idea of constitutional morality and assess its relevance for Indian democracy today. (10 marks, 150 words)

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