Political Thought Questions and Answers

Answer: C

The banality of evil is associated with Eichmann's role in the Holocaust.

Hannah Arendt reported on the 1961 Jerusalem trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi official who organised deportations to the death camps, and published Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). She argued that he was not a monster but a thoughtless careerist following orders, and that great evil can be done by ordinary people who do not think.

The phrase has nothing to do with Machiavelli's realism, Aristotle's virtue ethics or Rousseau's social contract.

Answer: C

The words are Mary Wollstonecraft's.

In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) she wrote that she did not wish women to have power over men, but over themselves. She argued that women are rational beings who need education and independence to govern their own lives, not to dominate men.

Simone de Beauvoir (spelt 'Simon De Bouvoir' in the paper) wrote The Second Sex, Shulamith Firestone The Dialectic of Sex, and Kate Millett Sexual Politics, all in the twentieth century.

Answer: B

The key attributes the idea to Rousseau.

Rousseau's natural man is moved by two sentiments: self-love (amour de soi), the healthy concern for one's own preservation, and pity or sympathy for the suffering of others. His educational and moral writings, above all Emile, aim at a person in whom conscience and reason keep these two in balance, which is what the passage describes.

Hobbes's natural man is driven by fear and self-interest with no natural sympathy, Bentham reduced motives to pleasure and pain, and Locke's natural man is governed by the law of nature known through reason rather than by a harmony of sentiments.

Answer: D

The concept is Li.

In Confucian thought li means ritual propriety: the rules of conduct and courtesy proper to each relationship, such as ruler and subject, father and son, husband and wife. Social harmony comes when everyone performs the duties of his place in this order.

Tian is Heaven, the moral order above the ruler. Dao is the Way. Xiao, filial piety, is one particular virtue of children towards parents, not the general principle of role-based conduct across the social hierarchy.

Answer: A

The key gives The Art of War.

Machiavelli's best-known discussion of virtu in a ruler is The Prince, which is not among the options. Of the titles offered, The Art of War (1521) is the only work Machiavelli actually wrote, and it too treats the virtue of the prince and citizen-soldier in military affairs, so it is the answer the paper intends.

Two Treatises of Government is by John Locke, 'Perfect state' is not a work of Machiavelli, and fortuna is a concept he set against virtu, not a book.

Answer: D

The Right to Work is not one of Locke's natural rights.

In the Second Treatise of Government (1689) Locke named the natural rights as life, liberty and estate, which he summed up as property. Government exists to protect them, and a government that violates them may be resisted.

A right to work is a social and economic right of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, linked to socialist thought and later to documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It formed no part of Locke's list, while life, property and liberty all did.

Answer: A

The words are John Rawls's.

They come from the opening section of A Theory of Justice (1971), where Rawls rejects utilitarianism: justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. That inviolability of the person is the basis for his priority of liberty.

Robert Nozick shared the stress on individual rights but wrote Anarchy, State, and Utopia in reply to Rawls. Friedrich Hayek defended the market order and Habermas developed discourse ethics; neither wrote this sentence.

Answer: B

The thinker often taken to be a conservative is David Hume.

Hume rejected the social contract as historical fiction and argued that government rests on habit, custom and opinion, and that established institutions should be valued because they have grown out of experience rather than abstract reason. This scepticism about rational blueprints places him in the conservative tradition, alongside Burke.

The others are not conservatives: Jacques Derrida is the philosopher of deconstruction, Noam Chomsky is a libertarian socialist (anarchist) critic of state and corporate power, and E.F. Schumacher, author of Small Is Beautiful, was an environmental and decentralist economist.

Answer: A

Ideology as 'false consciousness' belongs to Karl Marx and the Marxist tradition.

For Marx, the ruling ideas of every age are the ideas of its ruling class (The German Ideology), and ideology presents those class interests as natural and universal, hiding the real relations of exploitation from the exploited themselves. The phrase 'false consciousness' itself comes from Engels's letter to Franz Mehring of 1893, but the idea is the Marxist theory of ideology.

Karl Popper criticised historicism and closed societies. Hegel treated history as the unfolding of spirit, not of false consciousness. Jean Bodin is known for the theory of sovereignty.

Answer: A

The concept of hegemony was developed by Antonio Gramsci.

In his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci explained how a ruling class maintains its power not only by force but by consent: through the institutions of civil society, such as schools, churches and the press, its world view becomes the common sense of the whole society. This cultural and moral leadership is hegemony.

Marx explained domination mainly through economic relations and the state. David Held is known for cosmopolitan democracy, and Hannah Arendt (spelt 'Hennah' in the paper) for her work on totalitarianism and the human condition.