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 yaworski@binghamton.edu 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.