Political Thought Questions and Answers

Answer: D

The correct matching is a-1, b-3, c-2, d-4. Justice as one person, one duty, one class, one work is Plato's view in the Republic. Justice as fairness is Rawls. Justice as proportionate equality is Aristotle. Justice as the interest of the stronger is the position of Thrasymachus, which Socrates refutes. The code is 1 3 2 4.

Option (A), 1 2 3 4, swaps Rawls and Aristotle. Option (B), 2 1 3 4, wrongly gives Plato's formula to Aristotle. Option (C), 2 1 4 3, also does this and in addition swaps Rawls and Thrasymachus, so neither of them can be correct.

Answer: B

The correct matching is a-2, b-3, c-1, d-4. Perpetual peace is Kant's essay on lasting peace among states. The Golden Mean is Aristotle's ethical principle of virtue as a mean between excess and deficiency. The analogy of the cave is in Plato's Republic. Fortune as a woman is Machiavelli's image in The Prince. The code is 2 3 1 4.

Option (A), 1 2 3 4, assigns perpetual peace to Plato and the cave to Aristotle. Option (C), 2 1 4 3, gives the Golden Mean to Plato. Option (D), 4 3 2 1, gives perpetual peace to Machiavelli. None of them matches the actual authorship.

Answer: C

The official key gives the Hundred Flowers campaign, summed up in the slogan let a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend. It was launched in 1956, before the Great Leap Forward of 1958 and the Cultural Revolution of 1966.

The Cultural Revolution is wrong because it came last, in 1966. The Great Leap Forward is wrong because it began in 1958, two years after the Hundred Flowers campaign. None of the above is wrong because the keyed movement is among the choices.

Answer: B

The term Leninism was coined by Stalin. In The Foundations of Leninism (1924), the lectures he gave at Sverdlov University soon after Lenin's death, he presented Leninism as Marxism in the epoch of imperialism and proletarian revolution.

Trotsky is wrong because he rejected the idea that Leninism was a separate system. Marx is wrong because he died in 1883, before Lenin's work. Mao is wrong because he developed his own thought and did not coin the term Leninism.

Answer: D

Machiavelli compared fortune with a woman. In The Prince, in the chapter on fortune, he says that fortune is a woman and that she is more readily won by the bold who master her than by the cold, so a prince should be impetuous rather than cautious.

M.N. Roy, Rousseau and Hobbes are wrong because none of them used this image: Rousseau wrote on the general will, Hobbes on the commonwealth, and Roy on radical humanism.

Answer: C

Poverty of Philosophy is not a work about alienation. It is Marx's 1847 reply to Proudhon's Philosophy of Poverty, a work mainly about economic theory and method.

The Paris or Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 are the main text on alienation of labour. The Theses on Feuerbach and The German Ideology also discuss human estrangement and the division of labour, so they are wrong as answers to a question asking what is not about alienation.

Answer: D

In Rousseau's theory the general will means the real will: what the people want when each thinks of the common good and not of private interest. It is not what individuals happen to want at a given moment.

Actual will is wrong because it is the will people have at present, which may be selfish. Majority will is wrong because a majority can be mistaken or selfish. Sum total of wills is wrong because it is what Rousseau calls the will of all, which he distinguishes from the general will.

Answer: C

The assertion is true and the reason is false. The social contract is the agreement by which a sovereign government is established, so (A) is correct.

The reason says citizens have an absolute obligation to obey all laws or accept any form of government. This is not what contract theory gives, since obligation depends on the terms of the contract, and in Locke and Rousseau an unjust government may be resisted. Hence both true with explanation, both true without it, and the option that only (R) is true are wrong.

Answer: B

The correct matching is Monarchy with Tyranny (ii), Aristocracy with Oligarchy (iii), Polity with Democracy (i) and the Ideal State with Timocracy as the first stage of degeneration (iv). The code is ii iii i iv.

In Aristotle each pure form has a corrupt form: monarchy turns to tyranny, aristocracy to oligarchy and polity to democracy. In Plato's Republic the ideal state first decays into timocracy. Option (A) gives monarchy timocracy, option (C) gives it oligarchy and option (D) gives it democracy, all wrong.

Answer: D

Science of Logic is the work of Hegel, not of Marx, so (D) is the answer. Hegel published it in 1812-16, and Marx took over its dialectical method while turning it from idealism to materialism. The other three are Marx's. The German Ideology (option A) was written with Engels in 1845-46. The Critique of the Gotha Programme (option B) is his 1875 comment on the programme of the German workers' party. The Economic and Philosophic (Paris) Manuscripts (option C) date from 1844. A reader who knows that the Logic is one of Hegel's three major works can answer without more.