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POWER 50 is fifty capsules across fifty days — the whole PSIR syllabus revised once, in the order the syllabus is actually built, one topic a day. The discipline is simple: read the capsule, write the same day, don’t break the chain. Running alongside it are PSIR Dynamics 2026 and the PYQ Vault — 560 previous-year questions over the fifty days, roughly eleven a day — so your static revision and your question practice move together.
Day 28 — The State in Comparative Perspective
Today’s capsule takes the most contested concept in political theory — the State — and reads it across every frame the syllabus demands. It opens with the working distinctions between state, government and administration, and Easton’s move from “state” to “system,” then builds the modern State out of Westphalia (1648): sovereignty, territoriality and the monopoly over the legitimate use of violence. From there it runs the liberal-democratic tradition (Locke, Montesquieu, the utilitarians, Hobhouse’s welfare turn, Nozick’s minimal state), the Marxist theory (the Asiatic mode, Lenin, Gramsci, Althusser, Poulantzas, Miliband), Weber’s rational-legal State, and the fascist and totalitarian forms. It closes on the questions that decide Paper II marks — the developing-world State (Riggs’s prismatic society, Myrdal’s soft state, dependency theory, Alavi’s overdeveloped state), the post-modern State, and whether globalization has abolished sovereignty or merely transformed it. This is among the most heavily examined units in the paper: the “How UPSC Asks It” table logs questions in 2013, 2015, 2018, 2021, 2023 and 2024, from 10 to 20 marks.
Write before the evening:
- Do you subscribe to the view that the modern constructs of the state and politics are pre-eminently Euro-Centric and not indigenous and appropriate for the analysis of non-western societies? (UPSC 2015, 10m)
- Describe the changing nature of the State in the developing societies in the context of inclusive growth in the 21st century. (UPSC 2018, 10m)
- “The post-colonial state was thought of an entity that stood outside and above society as an autonomous agency.” Explain. (UPSC 2021, 20m)
- What are the difficulties faced by a political theorist in comparing the States? (UPSC 2023, 10m)
- What are the distinctive features of the post-modern state in the advanced capitalist economies? Analyse. (UPSC 2024, 15m)
If you go blank on a scholar or a debate, don’t reach for a guess — it is covered in full in the Foundation and OGP class notes and handouts. Revise it, then write.
