Political Thought: Confucius to Rawls
What it is
Unit 2 runs from ancient China and Athens to late-twentieth-century liberalism through sixteen thinkers: Confucius, Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hegel, Mary Wollstonecraft, J.S. Mill, Marx, Gramsci, Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, Mao Zedong and John Rawls. Questions are mostly attribution (who wrote what, when, and whose concept is whose) plus assertion-reason items, so learn each thinker as a cluster: dates, major works, signature concepts, and whom he or she was answering.
Core concepts
Confucius (551–479 BCE). His sayings, compiled by disciples as the Analects, ground order in ren (humaneness), li (ritual propriety), yi (righteousness) and xiao (filial piety). The junzi (exemplary person) is made by virtue, not birth. Rectification of names (zhengming): "Let the ruler be a ruler, the minister a minister, the father a father, the son a son." Rule by virtue and example (de), not by punishments.
Plato (c. 427–347 BCE). Founder of the Academy; works include the Republic, the Statesman and the Laws. The Republic rejects justice as the interest of the stronger (Thrasymachus) and defines it as each part doing its own work: reason, spirit and appetite in the soul mirror rulers, auxiliaries and producers. Philosopher-kings rule; the guardians share property and family; the myth of metals is the "noble lie". Book VIII's decline runs from aristocracy to timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, tyranny. The Laws is a second-best state under law. Popper attacked him in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945).
Aristotle (384–322 BCE). Founder of the Lyceum; Politics and Nicomachean Ethics. Man is by nature a political animal; the polis arises for life and exists for the good life. Constitutions are classed by number and interest: monarchy, aristocracy and polity are true forms; tyranny, oligarchy and democracy their perversions. Polity, resting on a middle class, is the best practicable state. A citizen shares in deliberative and judicial office. He split justice into distributive and corrective, criticized Plato's communism, defended natural slavery, and made inequality the chief cause of revolution.
Machiavelli (1469–1527). The Prince (written 1513, published 1532) and Discourses on Livy (1531) separate politics from conventional morality. The ruler needs virtù to master fortuna, must be fox and lion, and is safer feared than loved if he cannot be both. The Discourses prefer a republic with a mixed constitution and citizen militia; the Prince ends by urging Italy's liberation.
Hobbes (1588–1679). Leviathan (1651), after De Cive (1642). Competition, diffidence and glory make the state of nature a war of all against all, where life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". Individuals covenant with one another to authorize a sovereign who is not party to the covenant; sovereignty is absolute and indivisible, but a subject keeps the right of self-preservation.
Locke (1632–1704) and Rousseau (1712–1778). Locke's Two Treatises of Government (1689, title page 1690) refute Filmer's Patriarcha. His state of nature, ruled by the law of nature, lacks settled law, an impartial judge and executive power. Property (life, liberty, estate) comes from mixing labour with nature; government rests on consent, holds power in trust, and may be resisted if it breaks that trust. Rousseau wrote the Discourse on Inequality (1755), The Social Contract and Émile (both 1762). "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." The general will aims at the common interest, unlike the will of all (a sum of private wills); sovereignty cannot be alienated or represented, and a dissenter may be "forced to be free".
Hegel (1770–1831). Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) and Philosophy of Right (1820, dated 1821). History is Spirit's progress in the consciousness of freedom: the East knew one is free, the Greeks and Romans some, the Germanic world all. The lord-and-bondsman dialectic shows self-consciousness needing recognition. Ethical life moves from family to civil society (the system of needs) to the state, where the bureaucracy is the universal class.
Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) and Mill (1806–1873). Wollstonecraft answered Burke in A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), then wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Women seem inferior only through poor education; she attacked Rousseau's Émile and demanded rational education. Mill's On Liberty (1859) sets the harm principle and defends free speech; Considerations on Representative Government (1861) backs proportional representation, plural votes for the educated and open voting; Utilitarianism ranks higher above lower pleasures; The Subjection of Women (1869) demands sex equality.
Marx (1818–1883) and Gramsci (1891–1937). Marx's works: Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844, alienation), Theses on Feuerbach (1845), The German Ideology (with Engels), The Communist Manifesto (1848), The Eighteenth Brumaire (1852), A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859, base and superstructure), Capital I (1867), Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875). He inverted Hegel's dialectic into historical materialism: class struggle, surplus value, the dictatorship of the proletariat. Gramsci, jailed by the Fascists, wrote the Prison Notebooks: hegemony is consent organized in civil society, backed by coercion; the West needs a war of position, not of manoeuvre; organic intellectuals; the party as Modern Prince.
Arendt (1906–1975), Fanon (1925–1961) and Mao (1893–1976). Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958: labour, work, action), On Revolution and Eichmann in Jerusalem (both 1963, the banality of evil), On Violence (1970: power is acting in concert, violence is instrumental). Fanon, a Martinican psychiatrist in the Algerian struggle, wrote Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961, preface by Sartre): decolonization is violent, the peasantry and lumpenproletariat are revolutionary, a national bourgeoisie may simply replace the colonizer. Mao's Hunan Report (1927), On Practice and On Contradiction (1937) and On New Democracy (1940) put the peasantry first: protracted people's war, the mass line, and non-antagonistic contradictions among the people.
Rawls (1921–2002). A Theory of Justice (1971) answers utilitarianism with justice as fairness. Behind a veil of ignorance in the original position, parties choose by maximin: (1) equal basic liberties; (2) fair equality of opportunity and the difference principle (inequalities must benefit the least advantaged), in lexical order. Political Liberalism (1993) adds overlapping consensus and public reason; The Law of Peoples (1999) extends it globally. Nozick and the communitarians are his chief critics.
Worked example
Arrange in chronological order of first publication: A. Leviathan; B. The Social Contract; C. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; D. Two Treatises of Government; E. On Liberty; F. The Wretched of the Earth.
Options: (1) A, D, B, C, E, F; (2) D, A, B, C, E, F; (3) A, D, C, B, E, F; (4) A, B, D, C, F, E.
| Work | Thinker | Year |
|---|---|---|
| A. Leviathan | Hobbes | 1651 |
| D. Two Treatises | Locke | 1689–90 |
| B. The Social Contract | Rousseau | 1762 |
| C. Vindication of the Rights of Woman | Wollstonecraft | 1792 |
| E. On Liberty | Mill | 1859 |
| F. The Wretched of the Earth | Fanon | 1961 |
Step 1. Sorting the years gives A, D, B, C, E, F. Step 2. Check with internal evidence instead of memory alone. Option (2) puts Locke before Hobbes, but Locke's First Treatise refutes Filmer's Patriarcha, published only in 1680, long after Leviathan (1651). Option (3) puts Wollstonecraft before Rousseau, but she criticizes Rousseau's Émile, so she must come later. Option (4) puts Rousseau before Locke and Fanon before Mill, both impossible. Answer: (1).
Common traps
- Quoting "the end justifies the means" as a line from The Prince. It is a later paraphrase, not Machiavelli's wording.
- Making Hobbes's sovereign a party to the contract. He is not; only Locke's government is a trustee that can be resisted.
- Equating the general will with the will of all. The will of all is a mere sum of private interests.
- Treating Aristotle's "democracy" as a good form. It is the perversion; polity is the good form of rule by many.
- Crediting Marx with "withering away" of the state. The phrase is Engels's; the dictatorship of the proletariat is Marx's.
- Assuming Fanon's revolutionary class is the urban proletariat. He chose the peasantry and lumpenproletariat.
Speed technique
- Anchor years: 1651, 1689, 1762, 1792, 1848, 1859, 1951, 1961, 1971.
- Use the "who answers whom" chain: Locke answers Filmer, Wollstonecraft answers Burke and Rousseau, Marx inverts Hegel, Nozick answers Rawls.
- Learn the triads together: Plato's soul and classes, Aristotle's three true forms, Arendt's labour, work and action.
Check yourself
- Which thinker separated the general will from the will of all, and in which work?
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Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762) — the general will aims at the common interest. - In Aristotle, what is the good form of rule by the many?
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Polity — democracy is its perversion. - Where does Gramsci locate hegemony?
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Civil society — consent organized through culture, backed by coercion in political society. - What are Arendt's three activities of the vita activa?
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Labour, work and action — in The Human Condition (1958). - What is the lexical order of Rawls's principles?
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Equal liberty, then fair equality of opportunity, then the difference principle — no trading liberty for gains.
Try it: Political Thought: Confucius to Rawls questions
Real questions from the NET Political Sci. bank on exactly this skill. Pick an answer to see the full solution — the intuition, the worked steps, the faster methods and the traps.
Confucius's maxim 'Let the ruler be a ruler, the minister a minister, the father a father, the son a son' expresses the doctrine of:
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Answer: option B
The rectification of names (zhengming) holds that social order requires each person to live up to the duties that the name of his role implies.
When a ruler does not act as a ruler or a son as a son, names and reality come apart and order breaks down; the maxim covers every role, from ruler to son.
So the maxim expresses the rectification of names, option B.
In Plato's Republic, the 'noble lie' that the citizens are to be told is the:
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Answer: option A
The noble lie tells citizens that the god mixed gold into the rulers, silver into the auxiliaries, and iron and bronze into the farmers and craftsmen.
Its purpose is to make everyone accept his place in the three-class city and to treat fellow citizens as kin.
So the noble lie is the myth of the metals, option A.
In Locke's account in the Second Treatise, a person first acquires property in something taken from the common stock of nature by:
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Answer: option C
Locke holds that every man has property in his own person, and so in the labour of his body.
By mixing that labour with what nature provides, he removes it from the common state and makes it his own, without needing the consent of others.
So property is first acquired by mixing one's labour with it, option C.
Match the thinkers in List – I with the thinker or text that each was chiefly answering in List – II and choose the correct answer from the options. List – I (Thinker and work) | List – II (Target) --- | --- (a) Locke, First Treatise of Government | (i) Filmer's Patriarcha (b) Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men | (ii) Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (c) Aristotle, Politics, Book II | (iii) Hegel's idealist dialectic (d) Marx, historical materialism | (iv) Plato's common property and families for the guardians
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Answer: option A
Locke's First Treatise refutes Filmer's Patriarcha and its divine right of kings (a – i), and Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) answers Burke's Reflections (b – ii).
In Book II of the Politics Aristotle criticizes Plato's communism of property and families among the guardians (c – iv), and Marx inverted Hegel's idealist dialectic into historical materialism (d – iii).
So matching List I, from "Locke, First Treatise of Government", gives a – i, b – ii, c – iv, d – iii, option A.
In Book VIII of Plato's Republic, the ideal constitution degenerates through a series of inferior forms. Arrange these forms in the order in which they arise: I. Oligarchy II. Tyranny III. Timocracy IV. Democracy Choose the correct answer from the options.
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Answer: option B
From aristocracy, the rule of the philosopher-kings, the city first declines into timocracy, the rule of honour, and then into oligarchy, the rule of wealth.
Oligarchy gives way to democracy when the poor overthrow the rich, and democracy's excess of freedom ends in tyranny: III, I, IV, II.
So the order is III, I, IV, II, option B.
Answer above — every one shows its working.