Political Thought Questions and Answers

Answer: C

The statement comes from the Manifesto of the Communist Party.

Section I of the Manifesto (1848), written by Marx and Engels, opens with the line that the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles, and goes on to trace freeman and slave, lord and serf, and finally bourgeois and proletarian.

The other works are by Marx but do not contain this line. On the Jewish Question (1843) criticises political emancipation, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) is famous for its Preface on base and superstructure, and The Civil War in France (1871) analyses the Paris Commune.

Answer: B

Both (A) and (R) are true but (R) is not the correct explanation of (A).

The Assertion is true: the Philosophical Radicals, following Adam Smith and Ricardo, built their economics around laissez-faire, aiming from the start to free trade and industry from mercantilist and other restrictions. The Reason is also true: Bentham's first published work, A Fragment on Government (1776), already set out the principle of utility as the test of law and government.

But the date and contents of Bentham's early book do not explain why the radicals' economic theory was aimed at freeing commerce. That aim came from classical political economy, so R is a separate true statement rather than the reason for A.

Answer: C

The Prison Notebooks were written by Antonio Gramsci.

Gramsci, the Italian Marxist and Communist leader, was imprisoned by Mussolini's regime from 1926 until shortly before his death in 1937. In prison he filled some thirty notebooks with reflections on hegemony, civil society, the role of intellectuals and the war of position, which were published after the war as the Prison Notebooks.

Frantz Fanon wrote The Wretched of the Earth, Marx wrote Capital, and Lenin wrote What Is to Be Done? and The State and Revolution. None of them wrote the Prison Notebooks.

Answer: C

The Wretched of the Earth was written by Frantz Fanon (spelt Franz in the paper).

Fanon, a psychiatrist from Martinique who joined the Algerian war of independence, published Les Damnes de la Terre in 1961, the year he died. It analyses the psychology of colonialism, defends anti-colonial violence as a means of liberation and warns against the national bourgeoisie that takes over after independence.

Marx and Lenin wrote long before decolonisation, and Hannah Arendt is known for The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition; she criticised Fanon's view of violence in On Violence.

Answer: B

Marx borrowed and transformed the dialectic of Hegel.

Hegel saw history as the dialectical self-development of Spirit (Geist), with ideas moving through contradiction to higher syntheses. Marx kept the dialectical method but grounded it in material production and class conflict, saying in the afterword to Capital that with Hegel the dialectic was standing on its head and had to be turned right side up.

Feuerbach gave Marx his materialist critique of religion but not the dialectic, Kant's philosophy is critical rather than dialectical in this sense, and Adam Smith influenced Marx's economics, not his method.

Answer: B

The key's answer is Consent.

Locke grounds legitimate government in the consent of the governed, but he never explained convincingly how people born into an existing state give that consent. His answer, 'tacit consent' shown by owning property or simply travelling on the highway, was attacked by Hume and later critics as stretching consent so far that it means nothing.

Locke's theory of property, toleration and the rule of law were also debated, but his account of consent is the standard example of a principle he relied on without explaining adequately.

Answer: D

The answer is (a) and (b) are correct.

Plato's Republic sketches an ideal state ruled by philosopher-kings, which is why it is read as his idealist work (a). His later Laws describes a 'second-best' state ruled by law, with mixed institutions, and is read as his realist or practical work (b).

Statements (c) and (d) simply reverse the two books, so they are wrong, and options A and B each reject one of the two correct statements.

Answer: B

The pair that is not correct is Aristotle - New Liberalism.

New Liberalism is the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century revision of liberalism by T. H. Green, L. T. Hobhouse and J. A. Hobson, which accepted state action for social welfare. Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher, has nothing to do with it.

J. S. Mill is placed at the start of modern liberalism, John Rawls wrote A Theory of Justice (1971), and Mao Zedong described the socialist stage as continuing class struggle, so those three pairs hold.

Answer: B

The thinker who favoured a qualification for the vote is J. S. Mill.

In Considerations on Representative Government (1861), Mill supported a very wide franchise, including women, but wanted voters to be able to read, write and do simple arithmetic, and proposed plural votes for the better educated. He thus made education a qualification for the right to vote.

Bentham argued for near-universal manhood suffrage on utilitarian grounds. T. H. Green and Ernest Barker were idealist and pluralist thinkers who did not make such a qualification central.

Answer: D

Marx's justice demands (b) and (d): abolition of class structure and social control of the means of production.

For Marx, injustice is rooted in class society, where the owners of the means of production exploit those who own only their labour. Justice therefore requires abolishing classes and bringing the means of production under common, social ownership, which the paper words as state control.

State-regulated justice (a) and the making of just laws (c) are not Marx's demands: he regarded law and the state as instruments of the ruling class, which would wither away in a classless society. Every option containing (a) or (c) is therefore wrong.