Political Theory Comprehensive Examination                                      August 2003

Major Field Examination: Day 1

 

 

INSTRUCTIONS: Answer one question from each of the following three groups.  Please identify clearly each question answered, and avoid repetition between answers.  Write out and sign (by number) the pledge on the face of your exam.

 

If you do not type, please attempt to write legibly.  Use blue or black ink, and please skip lines.

 

 

I

 

1. Are Plato's accounts of the just cities in the Republic and Laws intended as blueprints for ideal cities?  If these accounts are not so intended, what are Plato's purposes in the two works?

 

2. What is the common good and how can a citizen or community come to know it?  Drawing on both ancient and medieval thinkers, discuss how political philosophy has attempted to resolve this perennial problem.

 

 

II

 

3. "Without religion, it is not possible to sustain a stable democratic society." Discuss with reference to at least two modern thinkers.

 

4.J.S. Mill and Karl Marx might be said to offer similar views about human flourishing and to evince similar faith that human beings will eventually realize that ideal. Nonetheless, their differences about how to accomplish it are so deep as to render their similarities meaningless."

Discuss.

 

III

 

5. The US today is characterized by growing economic inequality.  Modern political theorists have a good bit to say regarding how we should address such inequality.  Discuss the insights of three of the following: Locke, Rousseau, Marx, J.S. Mill, Nozick, and Rawls.

 

6.Richard Rorty has claimed that liberalism, of a certain variety, is perfectly compatible

with the anti-foundational tradition in Continental political theory and often names Nietzsche,

Heidegger and Wittgenstein among his predecessors.  Is this claim sustainable or is the tradition Rorty names fundamentally anti-liberal?

 

Political Theory Comprehensive Examination                                      August 2003

Major Field Examination: Day 2

 

 

INSTRUCTIONS: Answer one question from each of the following three groups.  Please identify clearly each question answered, and avoid repetition between answers.  Write out and sign (by number) the pledge on the face of your exam.

 

If you do not type, please attempt to write legibly.  Use blue or black ink, and please skip lines.

 

 

I

 

1. In part, the great influence of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War can be attributed to the fact that he presented and criticized ideas of the Greek Sophists.  Discuss.

 

2. Christianity is often described as "Platonism for the masses."  Discuss.

 

II

 

3. While theories of the "social contract" or "contract of government" are staples of modern political theory, they make similarly important contributions during the ancient and medieval periods.  Discuss.

 

4. Marsilius's conception of law is often regarded as an early statement of the view that later became known as "legal positivism".  Others have suggested, however, that, on close inspection, Marsilius's view is much closer to an orthodox doctrine of Natural Law of the sort to be found in Aquinas.  Evaluate these two interpretations, with reference to Marsilius and Aquinas.

 

 

III

 

5. Discuss the extent to which the roots of contemporary "identity politics" can be found in the great thinkers of the modern period.

 

6.  Hobbes was well-known to his contemporaries for his fondness for mathematics, but some recent scholarship has claimed that both Hobbes' own writing and the political system he promotes rely more on rhetoric and the power of language than on deductive logic or pure

force.  Which view is more correct?