Political Theory Questions and Answers

Answer: B

The social contract theory primarily seeks to explain the basis of political obligation.

Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau used the idea of a contract to answer why individuals ought to obey the state: because they have, actually or hypothetically, consented to its authority. It is a justification of political obligation rather than a historical account.

As history it is weak, since no such contract is recorded, which is why 'the historical origin of the state' is wrong. Locke and Rousseau used it to limit or remake government, so it does not simply justify the status quo, and it is not a programme of revolution.

Answer: A

The quotation is from Robert Nozick.

In Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), Nozick concludes that a minimal state, limited to protection against force, theft and fraud and the enforcement of contracts, is justified, but that any more extensive state violates people's rights. It is the classic libertarian statement.

Rawls defended a more extensive redistributive state, which Nozick was answering. Hayek also opposed state planning but on different grounds, and Michael Sandel is a communitarian critic of both.

Answer: B

The incorrect statement is Nationalism paved the way to foreign domination.

Nationalism did the opposite: it was the force that ended foreign rule, uniting peoples against empires in nineteenth-century Europe and in the anti-colonial movements of Asia and Africa.

The other statements are correct: nationalism transformed the map of Europe in the nineteenth century, it regards the nation with pride and loyalty, and the French Revolution, with its idea of popular sovereignty, launched the modern nation-state.

Answer: B

Imagined Communities was written by Benedict Anderson.

Anderson's book (1983) argued that a nation is an 'imagined political community', because its members will never meet most of their fellows yet feel a common bond, and that print capitalism made this imagining possible.

Ernest Gellner (spelt 'Arnest' in the paper) wrote Nations and Nationalism, Anthony Smith is known for the ethno-symbolist approach, and Steven Grosby wrote on nationalism and nationality, but none wrote this title.

Answer: B

Both statements are true, but the Reason does not explain the Assertion.

The Assertion is true: liberal democracies grant every citizen the same formal liberties, such as equality before the law, one person one vote and the same civil rights. The Reason is also true: liberty can be understood negatively, as the absence of external constraint, or positively, as the capacity to direct one's own life, so 'equal liberty' means different things to different thinkers.

The Reason does not account for the Assertion. It opens with 'However' because it points to a difficulty inside the doctrine, not to the cause of democracies respecting it. That rules out the first option, and the last two fail because both statements are true.

Answer: B

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

• Alienation: in the 1844 Manuscripts Marx describes the worker's estrangement from the product of labour, a state of consciousness shaped by the relation between man and the objects he makes (3).
• Dialectical (historical) materialism: the economic structure of society is the real foundation on which the legal and political superstructure rises (4).
• Class war: history moves through antagonisms, and one antagonism gives way only when a new one emerges, as bourgeois against proletarian replaced lord against serf (2).
• Revolution: when the relations of production become fetters on the forces (means) of production, an era of social revolution begins (1).

Only one option pairs alienation with (3), which settles the answer.

Answer: D

Political equality is best guaranteed in a Democratic state.

Political equality means that every citizen has an equal say in government: universal adult suffrage, one person one vote, an equal right to stand for office and the freedoms of speech and association needed to take part. These are the defining institutions of democracy.

A plutocratic state is ruled by the wealthy, so political weight follows money. Fascist and totalitarian states concentrate power in a party or leader and suppress opposition, denying citizens any equal political voice.

Answer: A

As a developed ideology, liberalism was a product of the breakdown of feudalism.

Liberal ideas took shape as the feudal order of fixed ranks, inherited status and absolute rule gave way to a market society in which individuals could own property, trade and choose their occupation. Liberalism expressed the outlook of the rising middle classes in that transition, from the English revolutions of the seventeenth century onwards.

A weakened monarchy and a weakened Church were parts of that larger change rather than its cause. Growing industrialization came later and shaped nineteenth-century classical liberalism, but the ideology already existed by then.

Answer: D

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

• Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), given in the paper as 'Vindication of the Rights of Women'.
• Simone de Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex (1949).
• Andrea Dworkin wrote Pornography and Civil Rights with Catharine MacKinnon (1988).
• Betty Friedan (spelt 'Frieden' in the paper) wrote The Feminine Mystique (1963).

Only one option links Wollstonecraft with (3), so every other option fails at the first pair.

Answer: B

The ideology is Postmodernism.

Postmodern thinkers hold that the certainties of the modern age have broken down: industrial class societies, the nation-state and the grand theories that explained them. Jean-Francois Lyotard summed this up as incredulity towards metanarratives, which is why postmodernists treat the established political doctrines of modernity as irrelevant.

Modernism is the outlook postmodernism rejects. Marxism is itself one of the grand narratives of modernity. Foundationalism holds that knowledge rests on secure foundations, the very belief postmodernism, being anti-foundational, denies.