Political Theory Questions and Answers

Answer: B

The thinker is Karl Marx.

In On the Jewish Question (1843) Marx argued that the modern state splits a person in two: as a citizen he is a member of a political community of equals, while in civil society he is a private individual pursuing self-interest. Political emancipation leaves this division intact, which is why Marx called for human emancipation.

J.S. Mill defended individual liberty without seeing such a contradiction, Will Kymlicka writes on multicultural citizenship, and Nathan Glazer on ethnicity and the American melting pot.

Answer: A

The idea was revived by Robert Nozick.

In Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) Nozick defended self-ownership: each person owns himself, his talents and his capacities, and so is entitled to what he produces with them. Redistributive taxation therefore amounts to forced labour. This revives Locke's claim that every man has a property in his own person.

John Rawls took the opposite view, treating the distribution of natural talents as a common asset. Adam Smith and Lenin are not associated with reviving the idea.

Answer: C

The key names Friedrich Engels.

Engels' The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) traced the subordination of women to the rise of private property and class society, calling it the world-historic defeat of the female sex. Socialist feminists treat this book as their founding text, which is why the key places him in that stream.

Kate Millett is a radical feminist, Betty Friedan a liberal feminist, and Max Weber a sociologist of authority and bureaucracy, not of women's oppression.

Answer: A

Civil society as the sphere of interest is G.W.F. Hegel's idea.

In the Philosophy of Right (1821) Hegel placed civil society between the family and the state. It is the sphere where individuals pursue their particular interests and needs through the market, the 'system of needs', and where those interests are only partly reconciled. Only the state brings them into a universal unity.

John Locke used civil society to mean political society itself, Charles Fourier was a utopian socialist, and Robert Putnam links civil society to social capital and civic associations.

Answer: B

The theory is Post-Modernism.

Michel Foucault (spelt 'Michael' in the paper) argued that power and knowledge are inseparable: what a society counts as truth, its 'discourses' and patterns of thought about madness, crime or sexuality, is produced through relations of power, and in turn makes power work. This power/knowledge analysis is a founding strand of post-structuralist and post-modern theory.

Feminism studies gender and patriarchy, structural theory explains outcomes by social structures, and realist theory treats politics as the pursuit of state power and interest; none is the frame Foucault used for power and thought.

Answer: C

The ideology that champions the free market is the New Right.

The New Right of the 1970s and 1980s combined neo-liberal economics, drawn from Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, with social conservatism. It called for deregulation, privatisation, tax cuts and a smaller state, policies associated with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

Socialism favours public ownership and planning, the New Left of the 1960s criticised capitalism from the left, and communitarianism criticises liberal individualism in the name of community, not the market.

Answer: D

'Citizenship and Social Class' is by T.H. Marshall.

The British sociologist T.H. Marshall published the essay in 1950. It traces the growth of citizenship in England through three kinds of rights: civil rights (18th century), political rights (19th century) and social rights, such as welfare and education (20th century), and it remains the starting point for theories of citizenship.

John Rawls wrote A Theory of Justice, Will Kymlicka Multicultural Citizenship, and Michael Sandel (spelt 'Sandal' in the paper) Liberalism and the Limits of Justice.

Answer: C

The concept of positive liberty was introduced by T.H. Green.

The Oxford idealist T.H. Green argued, in his 1881 lecture on liberal legislation and freedom of contract, that freedom is not merely the absence of restraint but 'a positive power or capacity of doing or enjoying something worth doing'. That justified state action in education, health and labour conditions, and laid the basis of new liberalism; Isaiah Berlin later named the two concepts negative and positive liberty.

J.S. Mill's On Liberty is the classic of non-interference, Robert Nozick defends a minimal state, and H.J. Laski built on Green's ideas later rather than introducing them.

Answer: A

German social democracy was developed by Ferdinand Lassalle.

Lassalle founded the General German Workers' Association in 1863, the first workers' party in Germany and a forerunner of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). He argued that workers should win universal suffrage and use the state to build producers' cooperatives, a reformist, state-centred socialism.

Eduard Bernstein came later, revising Marxism into evolutionary socialism around 1899. Karl Kautsky was the leading orthodox Marxist theorist of the SPD. Georges Sorel was a French theorist of revolutionary syndicalism.

Answer: C

The thinker is J.J. Rousseau.

Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men (1755) is one of the earliest sustained studies of inequality in civilised society. He argued that natural inequalities are slight and that the great inequalities of wealth and power arise with private property and the institutions of civil society.

Proudhon (What is Property?, 1840), Tocqueville (Democracy in America, 1835-40) and Marx all wrote on inequality later, in the 19th century, so none is among the earliest.