Author: Haroon Khalil

Despite putting limitations on sovereignty, pluralists assign the State the role of a thereby required to serve the purpose of securing common interest by taking cognizance of interests of all the groups and associations. In the process of public service or social service, the State assumes the role of a coordinator and facilitator of common…

Political pluralism views the State not in terms of power or sovereignty but essentially in terms of purpose and the end it serves or should serve according to R. M. MacIver, Leon Duguit and Hugo Krabbe. According to MacIver, service is the end of the state and power is its means. Since the service of…

Sociological jurists like Léon Duguit (France) and Hugo Krabbe (Holland) have put forward the doctrine of law not emanating from the sovereign but has location in society. This denies sovereign being the source of law, let alone the sole source of law. As such, the State is neither a creator of law nor beyond it. Duguit, for example,…

Doctrine of real or juristic/corporate personality of groups Otto Van Gierke, a German jurist and F. W. Maitland, an English legal historian, are considered to have given a theoretical basis of political pluralism in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. We may call it Gierke-Maitland thesis, which enunciates the doctrine of real/juristic personality of groups/corporations. The underlying…

The monist theory of sovereignty (of Bodin, Hobbes and Austin) is characterized by legal supremacy and absoluteness. Rousseau’s concept of General Will also adds to its absoluteness and comprehensiveness. According to monists, ‘the State exists to enact and apply law and that the State can not itself be subjected to limitations of the same character…

Political pluralism often invokes the dynamics of power and authority in its critiques of monist theory of sovereignty. Legally, sovereignty has been accepted as bestowing the supreme law-making power to the State. However, whether by virtue of this legal supremacy, sovereignty also subsumes supreme political power or authority. If yes, then what are its manifestations?…

A Brief Introduction to Political Pluralism The term ‘pluralism’ is often used in many senses like philosophical, ethical, cultural and political. However, for our purpose we are concerned only with ‘political pluralism’. Political pluralism has been viewed as a doctrine, which asserts that certain groups in society (e.g., church, family, professional associations, labour unions, local…

The concept of sovereignty relates specifically to the concept of the State and may lose its essence without it. The state can be seen as an overarching political organization over a territorially demarcated political community. By virtue of this, the State gets a dominant position and tends to regulate various aspects of society, and other…