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Ans 1: Liberty and Equality are closely related to each other. There is no value of liberty in the absence of equality. They are the same conditions viewed from different angles. They are the two sides of the same coin. Though there is a close relationship between liberty and equality, yet there are some political thinkers who do not find any relationship between liberty and equality. For example, Lord Acton and De Tocqueville who were the ardent advocates of liberty, found no relationship between the two conditions.

To them liberty and equality were antagonistic and antithetical to each other. Lord Acton maintains that “The passion for equality made vain the hope for liberty”. Such political thinkers maintain that where there is liberty, there is no equality and vice versa. These political thinkers are of the opinion that people were conferred inequality by nature. We find inequality in nature also.

In some parts there are rivers while in others there are mountains and in still other parts there are plains and fields. No two persons are similar in their ability and capacity. And so there cannot be equality in society.

The views of Lord Acton and De Tocqueville are not accepted by modern political thinkers. Professor H.J. Laski has very aptly remarked in this connection: “To persons so ardent for liberty as Tocqueville and Lord Acton, liberty and equality, are antithetic things. It is a drastic conclusion. But it turns, in the case of both men, upon a misunderstanding of what equality implies”.

These days, it is generally believed that liberty and equality should go together. If an individual is given unrestrained liberty to do whatever he likes, he will cause harm to others. There will be chaos in society if individuals are given unrestrained liberty.

In the nineteenth century, the Individualists wrongly interpreted the term ‘Liberty’. They did not attach any importance to economic equality and laid stress on Laissez Faire to be adopted by the government. Adam Smith was the ardent advocate of this view.

C.E.M. Joad has also asserted, “The doctrine of liberty, of “which the importance cannot be over-estimated in politics, worked disastrously when applied in the field of economics”. Hobbes has also asserted, “What good is freedom to a starving man? He cannot eat freedom or drink it”.

Liberty and Equality “are to be reconciled by remembering that both (liberty and equality) are subordinate means to the end of realising the potentialities of individual personality on the widest possible scale. The development of a rich variety of potentialities requires a large measure of liberty and forbids all attempts to impose a dead level of social and economic equality”.

“There is an intimate connection between the two “because all individual liberties are related to the basic equality of all men and because historically the aspiration for liberty became in practice and destruction of privilege or inequality”.

Both are complementary to each other. “Liberty thus implies equality,” says Herbert A. Dean, “liberty and equality are not in conflict nor even separate but are different facts of the same ideal

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… indeed since they are identical, there can be no problem how or to what extent they are or can be related; this surely the nearest, if not the most satisfactory solution ever devised for a perennial problem in political philosophy”.

Ans 2: Gandhi has remarked that “a duty well performed creates a corresponding right”. 

From a survey of the Collected Works, it is found that Gandhi appears to have made

explicit use of the concept of specifically corresponding duties/rights less than twenty

times, but the rather modest number of such occasions is, I think, compensated for by

the remarkable variety of contexts in which he did evoke the concept.  I will cite eight

examples. 

On August 4th, 1909, when he wrote in a letter to Arthur Russell, the Baron of Ampthill 

“I know that under the British Constitution, British subjects, no matter what race they

belong, have never got and never can get their rights until they have performed their

corresponding duties and until they are willing to fight for them.  The fight takes the form

either of physical violence, as in the case of the extremists in India, or of personal

suffering by the fighters, as in the case of our passive resisters in the Transvaal.” 

Soon afterwards Gandhi wrote in chapter 16 (entitled “Brute Force”) in Hind Swaraj: 

“The English in 11833 obtained greater voting power by violence.  Did they by using

brute force better appreciate their duty?  They wanted the right of voting, which they

obtained by using physical force.  But real rights are a result of performance of duty;

these rights they have not obtained…..I do not wish to imply that they do no duties.  They

don’t perform the duties corresponding to those rights; and as they do not perform that

particular duty, namely, [to] acquire fitness, their rights have proved a burden to them.” 

On September 16, 1921, he delivered a speech in English (which was immediately

translated into Tamil) to a large gathering of labourers on strike in Madras.  The speech,

which lasted more than 45 minutes, included the following remarks: 

“It is your right to be advised by whomsoever you may choose and the company cannot

dictate to you that you may not be advised by outsiders.  You must insist upon your

inherent right of selecting any Chairman or President you like of your Union, whether out

of your own ranks or anybody else….You have a right to demand such wages as will

enable you to sustain life, to educate your children and live as decent human beings.  You

are entitled to the same fresh water and fresh air as your employers.  You are entitled to

insist upon having leisure and recreation from day to day.  But you have also

corresponding duties to perform.  You must render diligent and faithful service to your

employers.  You have to look after the property of your employers as if it were your

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own….These simple rights and duties once being understood must always be insisted

upon and fulfilled as the case may be.” 

In October 6, 1946, issue of Harijan, he wrote: 

“I have received letters from Harijan friends and some have been to see me to.  They feel

that now that power is in the hands of the people, there should be more than one Harijan

minister.  According to the population ratio, the number should be at least three, and

they should be similarly represented in every department….I am not ready to admit the

correctness of all they say.  My ideas in this regard are different….Rights spring only from

duties well done.  Such rights alone are becoming and lasting….Holding the views I do,

and having acted on them and made others act on them over the last fifty years, I have

no interest left in fighting for personal rights.  I shall therefore advise Harijan brethren

that they should think only of their duties.  They may be sure that rights will follow fast on

the heels of duties done.” 

Ans 5: Thoreau opens Civil Disobedience with the maxim "That government is best which governs least," and he speaks in favor of government that does not intrude upon men's lives. Government is only an expedient — a means of attaining an end. It exists because the people have chosen it to execute their will, but it is susceptible to misuse. Government as an institution hinders the accomplishment of the work for which it was created. It exists for the sole purpose of ensuring individual freedom. Majority rule is based on physical strength, not right and justice. Individual conscience should rule instead, and civil government should confine itself to those matters suited to decision by majority rule. Lack of judgment, moral sense, and conscience in the way men serve the state. A man cannot bow unquestioningly to the state's authority without disregarding himself.

Having developed the image of the government as a machine that may or may not do enough good to counterbalance what evil it commits, rebellion is the only option. The opponents of reform, he recognizes, are not faraway politicians but ordinary people who cooperate with the system. The expression of opposition to slavery is meaningless. Only action — what you do about your objection — matters. Wrong will be redressed only by the individual, not through the mechanism of government. Although a man has other, higher duties than eradicating institutional wrong, he must at least not be guilty through compliance. The individual must not support the structure of government, must act with principle, must break the law if necessary.

Abolition can be achieved by withdrawing support from the government, which may be accomplished practically through the nonpayment of taxes. If imprisonment is the result, there is no shame in it — prison is the best place for a just man in an unjust society. In the current state of affairs, payment of taxes is violent and bloody. Nonpayment constitutes a "peaceable revolution." A man can be compelled only by one who possesses greater morality. In Civil Disobedience as throughout his other writings, Thoreau focuses on the individual's ultimate responsibility to live deliberately and to extract meaning from his own life; overseeing the machinery of society is secondary.

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Thoreau asserts that he does not want to quarrel or to feel superior to others. He wants to conform to the laws of the land, but current laws are not honorable from a higher point of view. Politics and politicians act as though the universe were ruled by expediency. In the progression from absolute monarchy to limited monarchy to democracy, Thoreau observes an evolution in government toward greater expression of the consent of the governed. He notes that democracy may not be the final stage in the process. His emphasis at the end of the essay is firmly on respect for the individual. There will never be a "really free and enlightened State" until the state recognizes the preeminence of the individual.

Section II

Ans 8: The Frankfurt School is a school of social theory and philosophy associated in part with the Institute for Social Research at the Goethe University Frankfurt. Founded during the interwar period, the School consisted of dissidents who were at home neither in the existent capitalist, fascist, nor communist systems that had formed at the time. Many of these theorists believed that traditional theory could not adequately explain the turbulent and unexpected development of capitalist societies in the twentieth century. Critical of both capitalism and Soviet socialism, their writings pointed to the possibility of an alternative path to social development.

Although sometimes only loosely affiliated, Frankfurt School theorists spoke with a common paradigm in mind; they shared the same assumptions and were preoccupied with similar questions. To fill in the perceived omissions of classical Marxism, they sought to draw answers from other schools of thought, hence using the insights of antipositivist sociology, psychoanalysis, existential philosophy, and other disciplines. The school's main figures sought to learn from and synthesize the works of such varied thinkers as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Weber, and Lukács

Following Marx, they were concerned with the conditions that allow for social change and the establishment of rational institutions. Their emphasis on the "critical" component of theory was derived significantly from their attempt to overcome the limits of positivism, materialism, and determinism by returning to Kant's critical philosophy and its successors in German idealism, principally Hegel's philosophy, with its emphasis on dialectic and contradiction as inherent properties of human reality.

Since the 1960s, Frankfurt School critical theory has increasingly been guided by Jürgen Habermas's work on communicative reason, linguistic intersubjectivity and what Habermas calls "the philosophical discourse of modernity". Critical theorists such as Raymond Geuss and Nikolas Kompridis have voiced opposition to Habermas, claiming that he has undermined the aspirations for social change that originally gave purpose to critical theory's various projects—for example the problem of what reason should mean, the analysis and enlargement of "conditions of possibility" for social emancipation, and the critique of modern capitalism.

Ans 6: Liberalism is a political philosophy or worldview founded on ideas of liberty and equality. The former principle is stressed in classical liberalism while the latter is more evident in social liberalism. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but generally they support ideas and programs such as freedom of speech,

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freedom of the press, freedom of religion, free markets, civil rights, democratic societies, secular governments, and international cooperation.

Liberalism first became a distinct political movement during the Age of Enlightenment, when it became popular among philosophers and economists in the Western world. Liberalism rejected the notions, common at the time, of hereditary privilege, state religion, absolute monarchy, and the Divine Right of Kings. The 17th-century philosopher John Locke is often credited with founding liberalism as a distinct philosophical tradition. Locke argued that each man has a natural right to life, liberty and property, while adding that governments must not violate these rights based on the social contract. Liberals opposed traditional conservatism and sought to replace absolutism in government with representative democracy and the rule of law.

Prominent revolutionaries in the Glorious Revolution, the American Revolution, and the French Revolution used liberal philosophy to justify the armed overthrow of what they saw as tyrannical rule. Liberalism started to spread rapidly especially after the French Revolution. The 19th century saw liberal governments established in nations across Europe, South America, and North America. In this period, the dominant ideological opponent of classical liberalism was conservatism, but liberalism later survived major ideological challenges from new opponents, such as fascism and communism. During the 20th century, liberal ideas spread even further as liberal democracies found themselves on the winning side in both world wars. In Europe and North America, the establishment of social liberalism became a key component in the expansion of the welfare state. Today, liberal parties continue to wield power and influence throughout the world.

Characteristics of Liberalism

From the above discussion, it is now clear that liberalism is not merely a political concept, but also a socio-economic, cultural and ethical concept. It can be understood through certain characteristics evolved during its long history. John Hallowell has pinpointed the following characteristics of classical liberalism:

I) A belief in the absolute value of human personality and spiritual equality of the individual;

II) A belief in the autonomy of the individual will;

III) A belief in the essential rationality and goodness of man;

IV) A belief in certain inalienable rights of the individual, particularly, the rights of life, liberty and property;

V) That state comes into existence by mutual consent for the purpose of protection of rights;

VI) That the relationship between the state and the individual is a contractual one;

VII) That social control can best be secured by law rather than command;

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VIII) Individual freedom in all spheres of life-political, economic, social,Intellectual and religious;

IX) The government that governs the least is the best;

X) A belief that truth is accessible to man’s natural reason.