Questions: Foundations of Political Philosophy

Question 1

A government requires citizens to pay taxes under threat of fines or imprisonment. If a private person demanded money this way, it would be robbery. Yet most people accept taxation as legitimate. What foundational question of political philosophy does this observation raise?

• A. How can governments raise revenue more efficiently?
• B. What makes political authority legitimate — distinguishable from mere coercion — and why do citizens accept it?
• C. Whether individual moral rules against theft apply to large institutions
• D. How tax rates should be set to maximize social welfare

Answer: (B)

The puzzle is legitimacy: why do the same acts (compelling behavior, extracting resources, imprisoning resisters) count as violence when a private person does them but as governance when a state does them? This is the central question of political philosophy — not how to govern efficiently (political science) or what individuals morally owe each other (individual ethics), but what makes political authority a different kind of power with a different kind of claim on us. Every major thinker in the tradition — Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Rawls — is, at some level, answering this question.

Question 2

Hobbes and Locke both use social contract theory but reach very different conclusions about the scope of legitimate government power. What is the most fundamental reason for this difference?

• A. They used different definitions of the word 'contract'
• B. They held different views about the state of nature — whether pre-political life is catastrophically dangerous or merely inconvenient and insecure
• C. Hobbes was a monarchist and Locke was a democrat, so their conclusions were politically motivated
• D. Locke wrote later and had more historical evidence about how governments actually behave

Answer: (B)

The divergence in their theories begins with divergent pictures of pre-political life. Hobbes's state of nature is a war of all against all — without authority, life is 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.' This horror justifies authorizing a sovereign with near-unlimited power to maintain order, because almost any government is better than that baseline. Locke's state of nature already has natural law and some security; only insecurity of property and rights motivates forming civil government, which therefore has limited, conditional authority that can be revoked if it violates natural rights.

Question 3

Political philosophy is essentially individual ethics applied to large groups — to understand what a just government should do, we can simply scale up principles about what individual people should do to each other.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

This is the misconception the topic directly addresses. When millions of people interact under coercive rules, aggregate effects and systemic incentives arise that no individual's choices capture. Political philosophy asks what the rules themselves should be — the basic structure of society, the constitution, property rights, the distribution of opportunities. These structural questions require distinct concepts (legitimacy, sovereignty, general will, distributive justice) that cannot be derived by scaling up individual ethics. This is why the tradition produced genuinely novel theory rather than just applying pre-existing moral frameworks.

Question 4

Social contract theory answers the question of political legitimacy by grounding political authority in some form of consent or mutual agreement among the governed.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: True

This is the common core across the variations of social contract theory in Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. All three argue that legitimate political authority must trace back to an agreement — explicit, tacit, or hypothetical — among the people subject to it. What differs is the nature of that agreement: Hobbes's is a one-time authorization of a sovereign; Locke's is conditional on the sovereign respecting natural rights; Rousseau's requires that laws express the general will of the community. But the basic answer to 'why should political authority differ from coercion?' is: because it is (in some sense) consented to.

Question 5

What distinguishes political philosophy from both descriptive political science and individual ethics, and why does each distinction matter?

Model answer: Political philosophy differs from political science in that political science describes how governments and political systems actually work — empirically and causally — while political philosophy evaluates whether they are just, legitimate, and rightly structured. The former is descriptive; the latter is normative and principled. Political philosophy differs from individual ethics in that ethics asks what an individual should do, while political philosophy asks what the rules and institutions governing everyone should be. Individual ethics cannot answer structural questions because when millions interact under coercive rules, aggregate effects and systemic incentives matter in ways no individual choice captures. Both distinctions matter because collapsing them leads to category errors: treating descriptive political science as normative guidance, or treating structural injustice as just a collection of individual moral failures.

The practical implication is that political philosophy requires its own methods and concepts. You need ideas like legitimacy, sovereignty, the general will, and distributive justice that don't appear in individual ethics and aren't derived from empirical political science. This is why reading Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau — rather than, say, political surveys or individual moral case studies — is the appropriate entry point into the discipline.