Essentially contested political concepts: a philosophical study

Abstract

Essentially Contested Political Concepts: A Philosophical study is the topic of my research. I choose this topic for the reason that it is one of the most current debates in the political philosophy. Gallie in 1956 wrote a scholarly article where in he discussed this problem at length. He framed some seven postulates forwarding serious contentions to prove that some concepts are essentially contested. By this idea he means that the terms used for these concepts have different meanings in different situations. The scholars do not agree on any one use of the term. The modifications in the use by the authors make these concepts rather more complex. The meaning becomes ambiguous. The concept apparently simple commonly understood immediately becomes problem orientated. Gallie analyses concepts from different fields and tries to show the complexity inherent in the meaning of referred concepts. He gives live and artificial examples from Christianity, Art and Politics and also points out that such concepts are present in almost all the realms of social sciences. The natural sciences of course have no such ambiguous concepts. The term used in them can be defined and agreed upon. Different scientists work on the same definition and build their edifice on this foundation. During this research I found that Gallie was correct and the contestability is the characteristic of at least the key concepts of social sciences including philosophy and Art .with this inference I tried to examine the concepts of democracy, Power and Liberty with the claim that the authors dealing with these concepts do not agree with each others and argue their positions sometimes logically and sometimes rhetorically. I choose this topic for another reason that I may be aware of the recent debates in the political thought. I found that the scholars like Mason; Connolly and Gray have very energetically participated in the debate and have appreciated Gallie s idea.