Political Thought Questions and Answers

Answer: B

The author is Thomas Paine.

Paine's Rights of Man (1791-92) defended the French Revolution and the natural rights of all people against Edmund Burke's attack on it.

That rules out the other options. Edmund Burke wrote Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), the very book Paine was answering. John Locke's Two Treatises of Government (1690) predates it by a century, and T. H. Green's Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation belongs to the late nineteenth century.

Answer: C

Rousseau favoured Direct democracy.

In The Social Contract (1762) Rousseau held that sovereignty lies in the general will, which cannot be represented. Laws must be made by the assembled citizens themselves; he famously remarked that the English are free only during elections and slaves once their members are chosen.

Representative and indirect democracy are the same idea, and Rousseau rejected it for legislation. Mixed democracy, combining popular and other elements, is not his position either.

Answer: D

The key names J. S. Mill.

John Stuart Mill moved utilitarianism away from Bentham's calculus of pleasure. He held that the worth of a state lies in the moral and intellectual development of its citizens: good government should improve the character of the people, and representative institutions are best because they educate citizens morally. That gives the state a moral end.

The other options do not. Bentham and James Mill saw the state as a device for maximising pleasure and minimising pain through law, with no moral purpose of its own. Machiavelli is known for separating politics from conventional morality.

Answer: D

'What is to be Done?' was written by Lenin.

Published in 1902, the pamphlet argued that workers left to themselves develop only trade-union consciousness, and that revolution requires a disciplined vanguard party of professional revolutionaries to bring socialist consciousness to the working class. It laid the ground for the Bolshevik-Menshevik split of 1903.

The title is borrowed from Chernyshevsky's novel of 1863, but among the options only Lenin wrote a book of this name. Georgi Plekhanov (printed 'Plekhnov') was the father of Russian Marxism, Marx died in 1883, and Stalin's works came later.

Answer: C

The key names George Lukacs, printed here as 'George Lukas'.

Georg Lukacs's History and Class Consciousness (1923) put class consciousness at the centre of Marxism, arguing against the mechanical view that economic forces alone bring revolution. Through his idea of reification he is regarded as a founder of Western Marxism, which turned from material forces to consciousness and culture.

Antonio Gramsci also stressed ideas, but his key contribution is hegemony, the cultural leadership of the ruling class. Lenin and Trotsky were classical Marxist revolutionaries concerned with party organisation and permanent revolution, not with consciousness in place of material forces.

Answer: B

The book was written by Friedrich Engels, printed 'Fredrick Engels'.

In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) Engels traced the oppression of women to the rise of private property and the monogamous family, calling it 'the world historical defeat of the female sex'. He argued that women's emancipation would require their entry into social production and the end of private property.

The others are wrong: Karl Deutsch wrote on nationalism and communication, Susan Moller Okin wrote Justice, Gender, and the Family (1989) a century later, and Louis Althusser was a twentieth-century structural Marxist.

Answer: D

'The Subjection of Women' was written by J. S. Mill.

John Stuart Mill published it in 1869, drawing on ideas he had developed with Harriet Taylor Mill. It argued that the legal subordination of women to men was wrong and a chief obstacle to human improvement, and that women should have equal rights, including the vote.

Mary Wollstonecraft (printed 'Marry') wrote the earlier A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Friedrich Hayek was an economist of the market order, and Iris Marion Young wrote Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990).

Answer: C

For Hegel, the ethical life of individuals is integrally connected to the life of the State.

Hegel's Sittlichkeit (ethical life) unfolds through the family, civil society and the state, and the state is its highest form, the actuality of the ethical idea. Individuals find their freedom and moral fulfilment as members of the state, not apart from it.

The other options reverse his view: he did not see the state as irrelevant to ethics, did not think ethical life possible in isolation from social institutions, and made ethical life the centre of his political philosophy rather than dismissing it.

Answer: B

The war of position is the struggle for ideological dominance and control over civil society.

In the Prison Notebooks Gramsci contrasted a war of manoeuvre, the direct assault on state power seen in Russia in 1917, with a war of position, the slow cultural struggle needed in Western societies, where the ruling class rules through hegemony in schools, churches, the press and other institutions of civil society.

Open military conflict and revolutionary uprising describe the war of manoeuvre, and Gramsci was a critic of economic determinism, not its advocate.

Answer: C

The concept is Alienation and Dehumanization.

In Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist, showed how colonialism makes the colonised person internalise inferiority, lose his own culture and see himself through the coloniser's eyes. He argued that colonial violence dehumanises and that decolonisation restores the colonised as human beings.

Economic determinism and historical materialism belong to Marxism, which Fanon adapted but did not centre on, and cultural relativism is an anthropological stance.