MA Comprehensive Exam in Social and Political Philosophy
January 2010
You have three hours to complete the following three questions. This is a “closed book” exam: please do not consult any online source or open any documents (other than the one in which you are writing your answers) during your exam. Please save your exam as a Microsoft Word document and, at the end of the exam time, email it to or copy it onto a memory stick provided by the proctor. Names will be removed from the exams by Melanie Yaworski for “blind” grading.
1)What, according to Aristotle, are the duties and privileges of a citizen? How would you construe the status of non-citizen inhabitants of an Aristotelian constitutionally governed state? Starting from the Aristotelian account of citizenship, who would be a citizen in Plato’s Republic? What would be the status of other inhabitants of Kallipolis? Does Socrates derive a moral duty from his citizenship status in the Crito?
2)Based on the selections assigned to you, what are the primary claims of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations? Compare and contrast Smith’s project with Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan.
3)In the Federalist Paper #10, Madison famously identifies "faction" as a terrible risk that all republican forms of governments run, a risk that arises whenever any substantial portion of citizens "are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community." Unfortunately, the only available means of minimizing the causes of faction -- restricting individual liberties or trying to make public opinions uniform -- are both cures that are worse than the disease. Regarding the effects rather than the causes of faction, Madison observes that the regular operation of republican governance (in this case, political representation via elections, and majority rule) will counteract faction if the portion of citizens so united is itself a minority. But what about if it is a majority? Briefly describe how Madison thinks that a republic is able to manage the potentially fatal effects of faction, and why he thinks no "pure democracy" is capable of this. In your answer, discuss how Madison is drawing on the work both of John Locke in the Second Treatise on Government, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in The Social Contract, whether for inspiration or as opponents.