AQA Politics

Paper 3
Political Ideas
Practice Questions

Liberalism
Conservatism
Socialism
Feminism
 Core Ideology 1: Liberalism

9 mark questions

 Explain and analyse three ways that Liberal thinkers have viewed state intervention.
 Explain and analyse three ways that Liberal thinkers have viewed human nature.
 Explain and analyse three ways that Liberal thinkers have viewed society.
 Explain and analyse three ways that Liberal thinkers have viewed government.
 Explain and analyse three ways that Liberal thinkers have viewed the economy.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of individualism is significant to Liberal
thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of liberty is significant to Liberal thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of freedom is significant to Liberal thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of laissez-faire is significant to Liberal
thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of equality is significant to Liberal thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of rationalism is significant to Liberal
thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of reason is significant to Liberal thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of tolerance is significant to Liberal
thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of representation is significant to Liberal
thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of democracy is significant to Liberal
thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of government is significant to Liberal
thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of limited government is significant to
Liberal thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of social justice is significant to Liberal
thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of human rights is significant to Liberal
thinkers.
25 mark extract Questions

A Vindication of the rights of Women

From the respect paid to property flow, as from a poisoned fountain, most of the evils and
vices which render this world such a dreary scene to the educated mind. For it is in the most
polished society that reptiles and venomous snakes lurk under the rank herbage; and there
is voluptuousness pampered by the still sultry air, which relaxes every good disposition
before it ripens into virtue.

One class presses on another; for all are aiming to procure respect on account of their
property: and property, once gained, will procure the respect due only to talents and virtue.
Men neglect the duties incumbent on man, yet are treated like demi-gods; religion is also
separated from morality by a ceremonial veil, yet men wonder that the world is almost a
den of oppressors.

There is a homely proverb, which speaks a shrewd truth, that whoever the devil finds idle he
will employ. And what but habitual idleness can hereditary wealth and titles produce? For
man is so constituted that he can only attain a proper use of his faculties by exercising them,
and will not exercise them unless necessity, of some kind, first set the wheels in motion.

Virtue likewise can only be acquired by the discharge of relative duties; but the importance
of these sacred duties will scarcely be felt by the being who is cajoled out of his humanity by
the flattery of sycophants. There must be more equality established in society, or morality
will never gain ground, and this virtuous equality will not rest firmly even when founded on
a rock, if one half of mankind be chained to its bottom by fate, for they will be continually
undermining it through ignorance or pride.

Extract adapted from ‘A vindication of the rights of women’ by Mary Wollstonecraft,

published in 1792.

Analyse, evaluate and compare the arguments being made in the above extract over the
means of achieving equality in a liberal society. In your answer you should refer to the
thinkers that you have studied. (25 marks)
 Liberty and the individual

What, then, is the rightful limit to the sovereignty of the individual over himself? Where
does the authority of society begin? How much of human life should be assigned to
individuality, and how much to society?

Each will receive its proper share. To individuality should belong the part of life in which it is
chiefly the individual that is interested; to society, the part which chiefly interests society.

Though society is not founded on a contract, and though no good purpose is answered by
inventing a contract in order to deduce social obligations from it, everyone who receives the
protection of society owes a return for the benefit, and the fact of living in society renders it
indispensable that each person should be bound to observe a certain line of conduct
towards the rest.

This conduct consists, first, in not injuring the interests of one another; or rather certain
interests, which, either by express legal provision or by tacit understanding, ought to be
considered as rights; and secondly, in each person's bearing his share (to be fixed on some
equitable principle) of the labours and sacrifices incurred for defending the society or its
members from injury and molestation. These conditions society is justified in enforcing, at
all costs to those who endeavour to withhold fulfilment.

Nor is this all that society may do. The acts of an individual may be hurtful to others without
going to the length of violating any of their constituted rights. The offender may then be
justly punished by opinion, though not by law. As soon as any part of a person's conduct
affects prejudicially the interests of others, society has jurisdiction over it, and the question
whether the general welfare will or will not be promoted by interfering with it, becomes
open to discussion.

But there is no room for entertaining any such question when a person's conduct affects the
interests of no persons besides himself. In all such cases, there should be perfect freedom,
legal and social, to do the action and stand the consequences.

Extract from On Liberty (1859) by John Stuart Mill

Analyse, evaluate and compare the arguments being made in the above extract over the
struggle between state and individual in a Liberal society. In your answer you should refer to
the thinkers that you have studied. (25 marks)
 Freedom, individuals and society

We shall probably all agree that freedom, rightly understood, is the greatest of blessings;
that its attainment is the true end of all our effort as citizens. But when we thus speak of
freedom, we should consider carefully what we mean by it. . . .If the idea of true freedom is
the maximum of power for all members of human society alike to make the best of
themselves, we are right in refusing to ascribe the glory of freedom to a state in which the
apparent elevation of the few is founded on the degradation of the many. . . .

Our modern legislation then with reference to labour, and education, and health, involving
as it does manifold interference with freedom of contract, is justified on the ground that it is
the business of the state, not indeed directly to promote moral goodness, for that, from the
very nature of moral goodness, it cannot do, but to maintain the conditions without which a
free exercise of the human faculties is impossible. . . .

Now we shall probably all agree that a society in which the public health was duly protected,
and necessary education duly provided for, by the spontaneous action of individuals, was in
a higher condition than one in which the compulsion of law was needed to secure these
ends. But we must take men as we find them. Until such a condition of society is reached, it
is the business of the state to take the best security it can for the young citizens growing up
in such health and with so much knowledge as is necessary for their real freedom.

Extract adapted from Thomas Hill Green "Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract"
(1861)

Analyse, evaluate and compare the arguments being made in the above extract over the
role of the state in a Liberal Society. In your answer you should refer to the thinkers that you
have studied. (25 marks)
 A Just society
Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory
however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and
institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they
are unjust. Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of
society as a whole cannot override. For this reason justice denies that the loss of freedom
for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the
sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by
many. Therefore in a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the
rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social
interests.”
“The natural distribution is neither just nor unjust; nor is it unjust that persons are born into
society at some particular position. These are simply natural facts. What is just and unjust is
the way that institutions deal with these facts.

Extract from ‘A Theory of Justice’ (1971) by John Rawls

Analyse, evaluate and compare the arguments being made in the above extract over the
means of achieving liberty and freedom in a Liberal Society. In your answer you should refer
to the thinkers that you have studied. (25 marks)
 The Role of Women

In her present incarnation, the 1950s housewife is a bit of a joke: a self-ironising, Cath
Kidston-clad figure of kitsch domesticity. Yet to Betty Friedan the "life-restricting, future-
denying" cult of the housewife that gripped the US was about as funny as the Holocaust. In
the most immoderate passage of her seminal 1963 book, she writes: "The women [...] who
grow up wanting to be 'just a housewife', are in as much danger as the millions who walked
to their own deaths in the concentration camps..." This comparison may be absurd, but
given Friedan's findings, it is at least partly understandable. She offers up chilling case
studies and heartbreaking testimonies of women infantilised, suppressed and made suicidal
by the misery of "occupation: housewife". For the most part, Friedan controls her passion
and directs it towards clear-eyed and persuasive arguments against the glorification of
housewifery. As Lionel Shriver writes in her elegant introduction to this new edition, Friedan
"upended western women's vision of what constitutes the good life" and in so doing was
one of the most important architects of second wave feminism.

Friedan's most significant conclusion, that "education, and only education, has saved [...]
American women from the great dangers of the feminine mystique", struck her
contemporaries as dangerously radical. Now, the view that education destroys femininity
and that any woman who desires a career is pathological is (thankfully) laughable. Yet The
Feminine Mystique remains important as more than an exercise in "look how far we've
come". Its message – that "women, as well as men, can only find their identity in work that
uses their full capacities" – is wise and timeless.

A review of ‘The Feminine Mystique’ published in the Guardian newspaper, 2010

Analyse, evaluate and compare the arguments being made in the above extract over the
methods of achieving individualism. In your answer you should refer to the thinkers you
have studied. (25 marks)
 TH Green and Nineteenth century Liberalism

T.H. Green, writing in the 1870s, attempted to adapt liberalism, and its language of freedom
and rights, so as to give the government a positive role in a much wider range of social
activities. Accepting older liberalism and its defence of property and the free market had
itself encouraged not only development and property and prosperity and wretchedness and
poverty, he attempted to realise the traditional goal of self-fulfilment by the use of the new
means of state interference for social purposes.
Green believed that the state’s role is thus not one that limits freedom but one which
encourages its full development. He argued that liberals must discard their traditional
distrust of the law as the vehicle for privilege, and begin to see it as the instrument of
freedom, the creation of those conditions that are necessary for the development of men’s
full potential.
Enlightened state action was inserted into the liberal tradition as a means of democratising
and making practical its old appeal to freedom which, in the face of industrialisation,
urbanisation and the free market, was seen by many as an empty and outmoded concept.

This extract is adapted from ‘Liberalism’ Chapter 12; Political Theory in Retrospect by
Geraint Williams, 1991.
Analyse and evaluate the arguments being made in the above extract over the role
of the state in liberalism. (25 marks)
Rawls’s “A Theory of Justice” sold over half a million copies, reinvigorated political
philosophy and anchored debates between liberals for decades to follow. It posited a
thought experiment: the veil of ignorance. Behind the veil, people do not know their talents,
class, gender, or even which generation in history they belong to. By thinking about what
people would agree to behind the veil, Rawls thought, it is possible to ascertain what is just.
To begin with, Rawls argued, they would enshrine the most extensive scheme of inalienable
“basic liberties” that could be offered on equal terms to all. Basic liberties are those rights
that are essential for humans to exercise their unique power of moral reasoning. Much as
Isiah Berlin thought the power to choose between conflicting ideals was fundamental to
human existence, so Rawls argued that the capacity to reason gives humanity its worth.
Basic liberties thus include those of thought, association and occupation, plus a limited right
to hold personal property.
But extensive property rights, allowing unlimited accumulation of wealth, do not feature.
Instead, Rawls thought the veil of ignorance yields two principles to regulate markets. First,
there must be equality of opportunity for positions of status and wealth. Second,
inequalities can be permitted only if they benefit the least well-off—a rule dubbed the
“difference principle”. Wealth, if it is to be generated, must trickle all the way down. Only
such a rule, Rawls thought, could maintain society as a co-operative venture between willing
participants. Even the poorest would know that they were being helped, not hindered, by
the success of others. “In justice as fairness”—Rawls’s name for his philosophy— “men
agree to share one another’s fate.”

This extract is adapted from the Economist – ‘Three post-war liberals strove to establish
the meaning of freedom: Berlin, Rawls and Nozick put their faith in the sanctity of the
individual

Analyse and evaluate the arguments being made in the above extract over the role of the
freedom within liberalism. (25 marks)
 The Liberal view of the state

Locke’s work explained that, within a state of nature there would be clashes of interests
between individuals pursuing their own egotistical agendas. Being a rational species, Locke
argued, mankind would recognise the need for a mechanism to arbitrate competing claims
of individuals. As a result, Locke envisaged that individuals would enter into a ‘social
contract’. The informal state of nature would thus give way to the ‘state’ as we understand
it today – one that Locke dubbed the state of law.

Locke insisted that the principle of consent was ongoing and not just foundational. So if
citizens believed the original contract was broken by governments they could withdraw
their consent.

Locke believed that political power should only be dispersed to property owners.

For classical liberals like Locke liberty was negative, denoting the absence of restrain. As
such the state should take a generally laissez-faire approach to society and the economy,
minimizing laws, spending and taxation.

Extract summarising the work of John Locke 1632-1704

Analyse, evaluate and compare the arguments being made in the above extract over the
liberal view of the role of the state. In your answer, you should refer to the thinkers you
have studied.

(25 marks)
 What is Liberalism?

Liberalism as a political philosophy is historically a very American ideology. Its foundational

framework, espoused by Enlightenment Thinkers such as John Locke, holds that
government’s role is to protect the natural rights of the people, rights such as life, liberty
and property. If government does not uphold this responsibility, the people are justified to
throw off such government…
As a political theory, liberalism developed precisely in response to tyrannical, absolutist
governments depriving individuals of their freedom. It was Locke’s ideas that were the
cause of the Glorious Revolution, the American Revolution and the French Revolution. The
most fundamental values of our American Democracy outlined in the constitution and
Declaration of Independence such as freedom of religion, speech, self-determination,
equality, all stem from the liberal tradition.”
“Liberalism today, however, means that we are not free from the government any longer.”

Extract from ‘The Problem with Modern Liberalism’ by Matthew Weisenborn in Catholic
Journal, published 2017

Analyse, evaluate and compare the arguments in the extract above that liberalism is an
ideology based on freedom from government influence. [25 marks]
 Core Ideology 2: Conservatism

9 mark questions

 Explain and analyse three ways that Conservative thinkers have viewed the state.
 Explain and analyse three ways that Conservative thinkers have viewed human nature.
 Explain and analyse three ways that Conservative thinkers have viewed society.
 Explain and analyse three ways that Conservative thinkers have viewed government.
 Explain and analyse three ways that Conservative thinkers have viewed the economy.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of tradition is significant to Conservative
thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of authority is significant to Conservative
thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of Human Imperfection is significant to
Conservative thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that Empiricism is significant to Conservative thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of evidence over theory is significant to
Conservative thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that organicism is significant to Conservative thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of localism is significant to Conservative
thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of morality is significant to Conservative
thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of hierarchy is significant to Conservative
thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of paternalism is significant to Conservative
thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of property significant to Conservative
thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of order is significant to Conservative
thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of nation is significant to Conservative
thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the nation state is significant to Conservative thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the ruling class is significant to Conservative thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of ‘one nation’ is significant to Conservative
thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of Christian Democracy is significant to
Conservative thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of Supranationalism is significant to
Conservative thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of pragmatism is significant to Conservative
thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of Capitalism is significant to Conservative
thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of the anti-permissive state is significant to
Conservative thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of atomism is significant to Conservative
thinkers.
 An Analysis of Leviathan

Hobbes’s philosophy posited that the state was a superstructure, a composite organism
made up of many individual parts.

Those constituent parts were its inhabitants, its citizens, who were bound together by
aspects of shared identity and the agreement about their commonalities. Hobbes viewed
this organism of the state as being unstable and highly vulnerable in its native state,
however. “Commonwealths," he wrote, are “imperfect," and even when they are stabilized,
they are “apt to relapse into disorder…."

Societies, wrote Hobbes, are susceptible to internal chaos because of the competing and
disparate needs of the individual organisms who are subject to the whims of their own
passions and needs, whether actual or perceived. Among these passions and needs, Hobbes
enumerated several, including the abstractions of “appetite, desire, love, aversion, hate, joy,
and grief". Individuals are also governed, Hobbes argued, by what he referred to as “the
desire of ease", which the reader may understand as individuals trying to make the
realization of their passions and needs as easy as possible, exerting the least amount of
effort necessary.

For these reasons, Hobbes proposed that “a common power" was necessary “to keep [the
individuals] in awe (under control)". That common power was a government, and the
government, in turn, was headed—literally, in Hobbes’s metaphoric symbology of the
Leviathan—by a single figure in who power was invested by tacit social agreement. In a
democratic society, that social agreement would be forged by means of election.
Whether all of the individual organisms voted for the commanding authority was an
irrelevant consideration; the social contract was that the constituents would accept the
individual as a representative endowed with special powers and the right to guide them.

Article written by Nicole Smith (2012) for the ArticleMyriad website, a website dedicated
to the study of the Humanities

Analyse, evaluate and compare the arguments being made in the above extract over the
role of state and individual in a Conservative society. In your answer you should refer to
the thinkers that you have studied. (25 marks)
 The first important conservative thinker
Charles Moore reviews Edmund Burke by Jesse Norman

Edmund Burke, as Jesse Norman admits, could be self-righteous, and his intellectual
passions sometimes led him, as, in modern times, they sometimes led Enoch Powell, to be
too violent in his assaults on his opponents. He was not successful politically, and he never
rose above the rank of paymaster-general. When he died in 1797, he could enjoy only the
most melancholy of satisfactions – that, in the main argument of his public life, he had been
right.

The second section (of Norman’s book on Burke) distils Burke’s philosophical and political
wisdom, and applies it to what has happened since. Norman tackles head-on the charges of
inconsistency against Burke, and for the most part refutes them.

The lack of neatness is a good thing, he argues, because Burke developed his ideas from the
study of history rather than the brutal imposition of theory. Burke had an anti-theory
theory: ''Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to
every political principle its distinguishing colour and discriminating effect. The circumstances
are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.’’ He
therefore assailed the then fashionable idea of Jean-Jacques Rousseau that man had a
natural state in which he was good and free, which political society had stolen from him. For
Burke, almost the opposite was the truth – only through the social endeavour of civilisation
(which includes a good political order) could human beings acquire rights and dignity and do
justice. Rousseau’s were ''the ethics of vanity’’. People were not naturally virtuous in their
savage state. They became so through manners, tradition and mutual obligation. If they
destroyed their inheritance, they would destroy themselves.

Charles Moore was previously editor of the Daily Telegraph, and Sunday Telegraph. This
review of Jesse Norman’s book on Burke was printed in the Daily Telegraph in 2013.

Analyse, evaluate and compare the arguments being made in the above extract over the
role of tradition and order in a Conservative society. In your answer you should refer to
the thinkers that you have studied. (25 marks)
 The Changing Face of British Conservatism

Many of Conservatism’s enduring ideas, contrary to perceptions today, were forged in the
heartland of the industrial north of England.

A progressive Irish MP, Edmund Burke, was horrified by events on the other side of the
Channel - and in his response to the French revolution, you can detect the beginnings of
modern British conservatism.

Burke was no reactionary but in the French Revolution, he saw such a destructive threat to
the existing order that he felt the need to step back and work out what was good about
British life, from the role of the Church to the way landowners were represented in
Parliament.

And his reaction influenced the dominant belief system of the British - a "small-C"
conservatism. As Britain entered the Victorian era, the Industrial Revolution brought radical
reforms - and violent unrest.

To some, it threatened just as terrifying an upheaval in British certainties as the revolution

in France.

The young future Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli was deeply influenced by Burke, and his
own sense of the English feudal past. And in the face of the campaign for Free Trade, which
would leave farmers exposed to international competition, Disraeli fought back and
defended the old social systems.

Some of this drive back to the past was quite uncompromising - but other conservatives
were more moderate. Like the man who adopted the word to rename the old Tory Party as
the Conservative Party - Robert Peel.

Faced with radical unrest, he opened up the idea of conservatism to the urban middle class
who might have thought it was just for the old Tory landowners.

No, said Peel - if you believe in the Church and the monarchy and good order, you too hold
conservative values.

Article written by Anne McElvoy in 2013, a BBC Radio 4 Producer of a 10 part radio series
looking at the history of Conservatism in the UK.

Analyse, evaluate and compare the arguments being made in the above extract over the
role of tradition and order in a Conservative society. In your answer you should refer to
the thinkers that you have studied. (25 marks)
 The Changing Face of British Conservatism

Many of Conservatism’s enduring ideas, contrary to perceptions today, were forged in the
heartland of the industrial north of England.

A progressive Irish MP, Edmund Burke, was horrified by events on the other side of the
Channel - and in his response to the French revolution, you can detect the beginnings of
modern British conservatism.

Burke was no reactionary but in the French Revolution, he saw such a destructive threat to
the existing order that he felt the need to step back and work out what was good about
British life, from the role of the Church to the way landowners were represented in
Parliament.

And his reaction influenced the dominant belief system of the British - a "small-C"
conservatism. As Britain entered the Victorian era, the Industrial Revolution brought radical
reforms - and violent unrest.

To some, it threatened just as terrifying an upheaval in British certainties as the revolution

in France.

The young future Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli was deeply influenced by Burke, and his
own sense of the English feudal past. And in the face of the campaign for Free Trade, which
would leave farmers exposed to international competition, Disraeli fought back and
defended the old social systems.

Some of this drive back to the past was quite uncompromising - but other conservatives
were more moderate. Like the man who adopted the word to rename the old Tory Party as
the Conservative Party - Robert Peel.

Faced with radical unrest, he opened up the idea of conservatism to the urban middle class
who might have thought it was just for the old Tory landowners.

No, said Peel - if you believe in the Church and the monarchy and good order, you too hold
conservative values.

Article written by Anne McElvoy in 2013, a BBC Radio 4 Producer of a 10 part radio series
looking at the history of Conservatism in the UK.

Analyse, evaluate and compare the arguments being made in the above extract over the
role of tradition and order in a Conservative society. In your answer you should refer to
the thinkers that you have studied. (25 marks)
 The Meaning of Michael Oakeshott’s Conservatism

What then were the essential components of Oakeshott’s conservatism? Oakeshott’s view
that politics is, and ought to be, a limited activity: i.e., that all of life should not be
conducted in the mode of “the political.” A tendency to politicize everything was prevalent
in his day, but it appears to be even more so in ours. Politics has become for many of us the
litmus test for friendship and association. Oakeshott would have seen this emphasis on
politics as a flattening of experience.” One major lesson to be drawn from Oakeshott’s work
is that, like Hume before him, Oakeshott found meaning outside the world of politics.
Oakeshott was a sceptic who believed that social life could not be perfected in this world,
and that our “Rationalist” tendency to think it can was a dangerous mistake.
Second, although Oakeshott’s conservatism was sceptical, it was no harsh, ascetic
scepticism. It was particularly English. It was expressly traditional and rooted in a particular
culture. Feaver does not imply that Oakeshott’s idea of conservatism could have
meaning only in an English context, but situating it geographically helps readers to
understand what Oakeshott meant when he spoke (as he often did) of traditions and
“practices.” English life possessed a continuity that many other societies did not. Its
character, writes Feaver, was marked by “a deeply ingrained patriotism and sense of place,
a habitual preference for the practical over the theoretical, an inbred regard for context in
advance of generalization, and an abiding love of the English language.”
The third point is related to the English character of his thought, and it is perhaps one of the
most conventionally conservative aspects of his thinking. Oakeshott saw that authentic
engagement in a tradition could only be cultivated over successive generations. It required
an investment in the past and particularly in liberal education,
Especially toward the end of his life, he began to see that much in modern society tended
toward, in a memorable phrase, “barbaric affluence”. Education, Oakeshott thought,
increasingly leaned in the direction of socialization and utility, narrowing human possibilities
into the channels of profit and conformity.

Extract adapted from a review of ‘The Meaning of Michael Oakeshott’s Conservatism’ by

Elizabeth Campbell Corey (Associate Professor of Political Science at Baylor University. She is
author of Michael Oakeshott on Religion, Aesthetics, and Politics (Missouri, 2006).)

Analyse, evaluate and compare the arguments being made in the above extract over the
role of tradition and sceptiscism in Conservative thought. In your answer you should refer
to the thinkers that you have studied. (25 marks)
 Free Market

In a free economy, where no man or group of men can use physical coercion against
anyone, economic power can be achieved only by voluntary means: by the voluntary choice
and agreement of all those who participate in the process of production and trade. In a free
market, all prices, wages, and profits are determined—not by the arbitrary whim of the rich
or of the poor, not by anyone’s “greed” or by anyone’s need—but by the law of supply and
demand. The mechanism of a free market reflects and sums up all the economic choices and
decisions made by all the participants. Men trade their goods or services by mutual consent
to mutual advantage, according to their own independent, uncoerced judgment. A man can
grow rich only if he is able to offer better values—better products or services, at a lower
price—than others are able to offer.

Wealth, in a free market, is achieved by a free, general, “democratic” vote—by the sales and
the purchases of every individual who takes part in the economic life of the country.
Whenever you buy one product rather than another, you are voting for the success of some
manufacturer. And, in this type of voting, every man votes only on those matters which he is
qualified to judge: on his own preferences, interests, and needs. No one has the power to
decide for others or to substitute his judgment for theirs; no one has the power to appoint
himself “the voice of the public” and to leave the public voiceless and disfranchised.

Extract taken from ‘Capitalism, the unknown ideal ‘ by Ayn Rand, published in 1986.

Analyse, evaluate and compare the arguments being made in the above extract over the
means of achieving a free market economy. In your answer you should refer to the thinkers
that you have studied. (25 marks)
 Core Ideology 3: Socialism

9 mark questions
 Explain and analyse three ways that Socialist thinkers have viewed human nature.
 Explain and analyse three ways that Socialist thinkers have viewed society.
 Explain and analyse three ways that Socialist thinkers have viewed government.
 Explain and analyse three ways that Socialist thinkers have viewed the economy.
 Explain and analyse three ways that Socialist thinkers have viewed the state.
 Explain and analyse three ways that Socialist thinkers have viewed democracy.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of class is significant to Socialist thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of revolution is significant to Socialist
thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of struggle is significant to socialist thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of class struggle is significant to Socialist
thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of equality is significant to Socialist
thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of collectivism is significant to Socialist
thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of common ownership is significant to
Socialist thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of social justice is significant to Socialist
thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of centralism is significant to Socialist
thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of history is significant to Socialist thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of democratic centralism is significant to
Socialist thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of social democracy is significant to socialist
thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of class consciousness tice is significant to
socialist thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of capitalism is significant to socialist
thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of the proletariat is significant to socialist
thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of state intervention is significant to
socialist thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of freedom is significant to socialist
thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of a fairer society is significant to socialist
thinkers.
 Explain and analyse three ways that the concept of ‘positive liberty’ is significant to socialist
thinkers.
 The Marxist Perspective on Society

Under Capitalism there are two basic classes- The Bourgeois and The Proletariat. The
relationship between these two classes is exploitative because the amount of money the
employer pays the worker is less than the total value of goods that worker produces.
The difference between the two is called surplus value. Marx thus says that the capitalist
extracts surplus value from the worker. To Marx, Profit is basically the accumulated
exploitation of workers in capitalist society.

According to Marx those who have economic power control all other institutions. During
Marx’s day there was some evidence to suggest this was true – Voting was restricted to
men with property; The Bourgeois use their control of institutions to keep the masses
ignorant of their exploitation – this is known as ideological control, this results in False
Consciousness – individuals not being aware (conscious) of their true class position or
their exploitation by the ruling class. They are in a state of illusion.

Marx argued that the Capitalism had within it the seeds of its own destruction – it would
eventually create the social conditions that would lead to its downfall. In order to stay
competitive, Capitalists would have to sell goods at lower prices, which would mean
reduced profit. This would then encourage Capitalists to seek to reduce wages and
increase efficiency– making the working conditions of the proletariat ever worse. Marx
theorised that increasing numbers of increasingly exploited proletarians crammed into
ever expanding cities (where factories were based) would eventually lead to a violent
revolution – in which the proletariat would throw off their oppressors.
Following the overthrow of the Bourgeois – society would eventually organise itself
along Communist lines – where the means of production are collectively owned (no
private property) and everyone has equal wealth.

Extract adapted from the revise sociology website (2016), designed for second year A
level students

Analyse, evaluate and compare the arguments in the above extract about the role of the
economy in achieving a socialist state. [25 marks]
 Criticisms of the Traditional Marxist View of Society

The class structure today is more complex than Bourgeois-Proletariat. In most Western
Nations and increasingly in developing nations there is an extensive middle class who have
stocks and shares invested in Corporations run by what Marxists would call the ‘Capitalist
Class’. Also in Britain 70% of people own their own homes and see these homes (our private
property) as ‘economic assets’ so many of us are, in a sense, petit-capitalists.

Capitalism today is less exploitative – Two historical examples of this are when Henry Ford,
the famous car manufacturer, realised that paying his workers good wages would generate
demand for the cars he produced – a process which lead to workers being less exploited and
‘buying into’ the Capitalist system. A second example is the move towards ‘Keynsian
Economics’ in which the state came to play a more central role in regulating Capitalism to
ensure that worst excesses of exploitation, inequality and insecurity that pure Capitalism
generates were minimised. Part of this involved the introduction of the welfare state in
many European Countries after the Second World War. In the United Kingdom the state
now provides universal health care, education, pensions and social security, as well as
guaranteeing a minimum wage. All of these things act as a safety net to ensure that the
worst excesses of Capitalist exploitation are ameliorated.

Extract adapted from the revise sociology website, designed for second year A level
students (2016)

Analyse, evaluate and compare the arguments in the above extract over the relevance of
Marx’s ideas to a modern society. [25 marks]
 The Problems of Dictatorship

Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party –
however numerous they may be – is no freedom at all

When all this is eliminated, what really remains? In place of the representative bodies
created by general, popular elections, Lenin and Trotsky (leaders of the Russian revolution)
have laid down the soviets (workers councils) as the only true representation of political life
in the land as a whole,

Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a
free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance
of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element. Public life gradually
falls asleep, a few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy and boundless experience
direct and rule.

Among them, in reality only a dozen outstanding heads do the leading and an elite of the
working class is invited from time to time to meetings where they are to applaud the
speeches of the leaders, and to approve proposed resolutions unanimously – at bottom,
then, a clique affair – a dictatorship, to be sure, not the dictatorship of the proletariat but
only the dictatorship of a handful of politicians, that is a dictatorship in the bourgeois sense

Extract adapted from "The Problem of Dictatorship" by Rosa Luxembourg (1918)

Analyse, evaluate and compare the arguments in the above extract about the role of
democracy in a socialist state. [25 marks]