Political Theory Questions and Answers

Answer: A

The variant is Multiculturalism.

Liberal multiculturalism, associated with thinkers such as Will Kymlicka, extends the liberal concern for the individual to the cultural groups that give individuals their identity. It treats respect for cultural difference, group-differentiated rights and fair majority-minority relations as core values, while staying within a liberal framework of individual freedom.

Classical liberalism stresses individual rights and a minimal state and is wary of group rights. Libertarianism pushes that individualism further. Communitarianism criticises liberal individualism from outside, stressing shared community values rather than diversity within a liberal state.

Answer: A

The correct pair is Conservatism - Anti-social change.

Conservatism, from Edmund Burke onward, distrusts rapid or radical social change and prefers gradual reform that preserves what has been inherited. In that sense it stands against sweeping social change.

The other pairs reverse conservative values. Conservatives defend authority as necessary for order, see society as an organic whole rather than a mechanical contract, and treat tradition as the store of accumulated wisdom. Being anti-authority, anti-organic society or anti-tradition is the opposite of the conservative position.

Answer: D

The correct matching is a-4, b-3, c-2, d-1.

• Liberalism: freedom, justice, reason and toleration (4).
• Conservatism: tradition, organic society, hierarchy and property (3).
• Socialism: community, equality, labourism and cooperation (2).
• Ecologism: holism and anti-anthropocentrism, the rejection of a human-centred view of nature (1).

The other codes misplace at least two ideologies; the first, for example, gives liberalism the ecological values of holism, which belong to the green tradition.

Answer: A

The thinker who stressed the productive dimension of power is Foucault.

Michel Foucault argued that power should not be seen only as something that forbids and represses. In Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality he showed how power produces knowledge, identities, norms and the very subjects it governs, through disciplines such as the prison, the school and medicine.

Mill treated power mainly as a threat to individual liberty to be limited. Marx saw power as rooted in class domination, and Lasswell defined politics as who gets what, when and how. None of them made the productive side of power his theme.

Answer: A

The expression was used by Rousseau.

In The Social Contract (1762), Rousseau argues that whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body, which means nothing else than that he will be forced to be free. For Rousseau, true liberty is obedience to a law one prescribes for oneself as a member of the sovereign people.

Locke defended liberty as freedom from arbitrary power, Green as the positive power to do things worth doing, and Hobhouse as a liberal socialist idea of freedom. None used the phrase 'forced to be free'.

Answer: D

The argument is Locke's.

In the Second Treatise of Government (1689), John Locke holds that people in the state of nature have natural rights to life, liberty and property (estate), and that government is formed by consent to protect them. A government that violates these rights may be resisted.

Hobbes allowed only the right of self-preservation against an absolute sovereign, Rousseau located rights in the general will, and Aristotle had no theory of inalienable individual rights. The trio of life, liberty and property is Locke's.

Answer: B

Freedom as the 'silence of the laws' is the phrase of Thomas Hobbes.

In chapter 21 of Leviathan (1651), Hobbes says that the liberty of subjects lies only in those things which the sovereign has passed over in silence. Where the law does not command or forbid, the subject is free.

Isaiah Berlin developed the concept of negative liberty in the twentieth century, Milton Friedman tied freedom to free markets, and J.S. Mill defended liberty through the harm principle. The particular phrase about the silence of the laws is Hobbes's.

Answer: C

The statement that is not part of Schumpeter's model is that democracy is competition between elites and masses.

In Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942), Joseph Schumpeter defined democracy as an institutional arrangement in which leaders acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people's vote. The competition is among elites, rival teams of leaders, while the masses only choose between them.

The other statements fit his model: he doubted the ordinary citizen's capacity for rational political judgement, held that real power lies with an elite minority, and limited the citizen's role to choosing leaders at the ballot box.

Answer: A

Deconstruction is associated with Jacques Derrida.

Derrida introduced deconstruction in works such as Of Grammatology (1967). It reads a text to expose the hierarchies of opposites (speech over writing, presence over absence) on which its meaning depends, and to show how the text undermines them itself.

Saussure founded the structural linguistics that Derrida criticised. Heidegger's idea of Destruktion of metaphysics was a source for Derrida, but deconstruction as a method is Derrida's. The Frankfurt School is the home of critical theory, a different tradition.

Answer: B

The correct matching is a-2, b-1, c-4, d-3.

Freedom, in the classical philosophical sense, is a property of the will, the capacity to choose (a-2). Toleration is treated as an essential pre-condition for harmony and social stability in a plural society (b-1). Positive liberty, in Isaiah Berlin's account, is being one's own master, self-rule (c-4). Negative liberty, the absence of interference, is tied to the idea of a minimal state that leaves individuals alone (d-3).

Option A swaps positive liberty with toleration, and options C and D link negative liberty with harmony or self-mastery, which are the marks of the other concepts.