What is the state for?

Ask what the state is for and political theory gives at least six answers. The PSIR syllabus asks for all of them, under the heading of theories of the state: liberal, neoliberal, Marxist, pluralist, post-colonial and feminist. Each is set out below in its theorist's own words where those words can be checked against the text, and described where they cannot. None is presented as the right one.

Why are there so many answers?

Because the question holds two. One is what the state does: whose interests it serves, who actually decides. The other is what it should do: what would justify its power over us. Every theory below answers both, and much of the disagreement comes from answering one while seeming to answer the other.

The liberal answer: to protect rights

For John Locke the state is a means to an end, and he names the end. “The great and chief end, therefore, of men's uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property.” Property here is wide: the “mutual preservation of their lives, liberties and estates, which I call by the general name, property.” Because people set up government for that end, it holds its power in trust; the legislative is “only a fiduciary power to act for certain ends”. (Locke's argument from consent is worked through in its own essay.)

The neoliberal answer: as little as possible

Robert Nozick, in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), states his conclusion in the preface: “a minimal state, limited to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts, and so on, is justified”. Anything more, he argues, “will violate persons' rights not to be forced to do certain things, and is unjustified”, and the minimal state is “inspiring as well as right.” Making some citizens pay to help others is, on this view, the kind of extra a state may not take on.

The Marxist answer: a committee of the ruling class

Marx and Engels answer the descriptive question first. In the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), after describing how the bourgeoisie won political power in the modern representative state, they write: “The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” The state, on this reading, is not above the classes. It is one of them, organised.

The pluralist answer: an arena for groups

Robert Dahl looked at who actually decided things in one city. Who Governs? (1961) studied New Haven, Connecticut, and argued against the view that political power is held by a single elite: power, he found, was spread among groups with competing interests. Dahl's word for a system that works this way is polyarchy. The state, for the pluralist, is the arena in which organised groups bargain, not the instrument of any one of them.

The post-colonial answer: a state of populations

Partha Chatterjee asks how the state looks from below in a country like India. In The Politics of the Governed (2004) he argues that much of popular politics in most of the world happens outside civil society and outside the formal institutions of the law, in what he calls political society, where groups that the state counts and administers as populations deal with it directly. A theory that looks only at citizens in civil society would miss them.

The feminist answer: a contract between men

Carole Pateman turns to the social contract itself. In The Sexual Contract (1988) she argues that the original contract of the classic contract theories, the agreement said to found the modern state, is also a sexual contract, one that establishes what she calls “male sex-right”. The story of free and equal individuals agreeing to a state, on this reading, was told about men. (Two of those theories, Hobbes's and Locke's, have their own essays.)

Six theories side by side

Dahl, Chatterjee and Pateman are described here, not quoted: their books are in copyright, and their sentences could not be checked word for word against the text.

What does India's Constitution say?

It answers the question directly, in Article 38(1), one of the Directive Principles: “The State shall strive to promote the welfare of the people by securing and protecting as effectively as it may a social order in which justice, social, economic and political, shall inform all the institutions of the national life.” A second clause, added by the Forty-fourth Amendment in 1978, tells the State to strive to reduce inequalities of income, status, facilities and opportunities.

That is not one theory's answer. It joins a liberal aim, a social order of justice, to a duty to reduce inequality that no minimal state would accept. The exam asks you to set the theories out and to judge them; the judgement is yours.