Political Theory Questions and Answers

Answer: D

The argument belongs to eco feminism.

Ecofeminism links the domination of women with the domination of nature. It argues that patriarchal, male-designed institutions of science, industry and the state treat both women and nature as resources to be controlled and exploited, so those institutions are the main threat to the environment. Vandana Shiva and Maria Mies are well-known exponents.

Liberal feminism seeks equal rights within existing institutions, Black feminism stresses the interaction of race and gender, and socialist feminism links women's oppression to capitalism as well as patriarchy; none of these makes nature its central concern.

Answer: B

The argument was offered by Michel Foucault.

Foucault argued that power and knowledge are inseparable (power/knowledge): every field of knowledge, such as medicine, psychiatry or criminology, both arises from and produces relations of power, by defining what is normal and who may be observed and disciplined. The search for knowledge is therefore also a search for power.

Derrida is known for deconstruction of texts, Habermas for communicative rationality and the public sphere, and Hegel for the dialectical development of spirit; none of them reduces knowledge to power in this way.

Answer: B

'The Real World of Democracy' was written by C.B. Macpherson.

The Canadian political theorist delivered these Massey Lectures in 1965. He argued that there are three real models of democracy, the liberal, the communist and the underdeveloped (Third World) variants, each with its own claim to be democratic.

Robert Dahl wrote Polyarchy and A Preface to Democratic Theory, Joseph Schumpeter Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, and Jeremy Bentham, the utilitarian, lived long before the book was written.

Answer: B

The concept is credited to Max Weber.

In 'Politics as a Vocation' (1919), Weber defined the modern state as a human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. The definition is still the standard starting point for discussing what a state is.

Machiavelli wrote about acquiring and keeping power, but not in these terms. Plato's concern was the just city, and Marx saw the state as an instrument of class rule rather than defining it by legitimate force.

Answer: C

The key attributes this view of the citizen to Rousseau.

In The Social Contract (1762), each citizen is a member of the sovereign people and obeys only laws he has, as part of the general will, made for himself. Rousseau calls obedience to a law one prescribes to oneself 'liberty', which is the idea of the citizen as free and autonomous.

Locke's citizen is a holder of natural rights who consents to government, Mill's is an individual protected from interference, and Bentham's is a maximiser of pleasure; none of them grounds citizenship in self-legislation, which is what autonomy means.

Answer: D

Equal is not a part of Rawls' well ordered society. A well ordered society in Rawls is one regulated by a public conception of justice: it is just, it is stable because its members have a sense of justice that supports its institutions, and it is designed to be efficient in advancing the good of its members under that conception.

Stable is wrong as an answer because stability is a defining feature. Just is wrong because the society is effectively regulated by the principles of justice. Efficient is wrong because efficiency is among the properties expected of its basic structure. Equality of outcome is not a stated feature, since the difference principle allows inequalities that help the worst off.

Answer: B

The word theory comes from the Greek theoria, which means a well focused mental look: contemplation or a considered way of seeing something. In political thought a theory is therefore a reasoned view of how political life is or ought to be.

A well organised political system, a well articulated economic structure and a system of physical arrangement are all wrong, because each names a thing in the world and not the act of looking at it that the Greek word expresses.

Answer: C

Jean Blondel is the one not associated with the decline of political theory. The decline thesis is tied to Peter Laslett, who wrote that political philosophy was dead, to David Easton, who wrote on the decline of modern political theory, and to Alfred Cobban, who wrote The Decline of Political Theory in 1953.

Laslett, Easton and Cobban are therefore wrong as answers, since each took part in this debate. Blondel is known as a comparative politics scholar who studied governments and parties.

Answer: B

Isaiah Berlin argued that negative liberty is superior to positive liberty. In his lecture Two Concepts of Liberty (1958) he defended freedom as the absence of interference and warned that positive liberty, the idea of self-mastery, can be used to justify coercion.

J.S. Mill is wrong because his On Liberty defends individual freedom without ranking negative over positive liberty. T.H. Green is wrong because he is a leading advocate of positive liberty. Ernest Barker is wrong because he is a liberal idealist who aligned with Green's view of the state's enabling role.

Answer: B

The true statement is that social justice is derived from moral reasonableness. Social justice asks for fair treatment of persons and groups in the distribution of benefits and burdens, and that demand rests on moral reasons accepted by reasonable people.

The statement that it violates the principles of equality is wrong because social justice aims at equal respect and fair opportunity. The statement that it is a negation of justice is wrong because it extends justice to the social order. The statement that it is an instrument of political manipulation is wrong because it confuses its abuse with its meaning.