Politics and International Relations, 2018-19

POL9: Conceptual issues and texts in politics and international relations

Paper organiser
Dr Chris Bickerton <[email protected]>
Department of Politics & International Studies

Aims and Objectives

The paper gives students an opportunity under examination conditions to show what
they have learned about politics over three years of study, and to write an extended
piece of work. It tests students' accumulated political understanding through the
analysis of an unseen (and unattributed) text or in answer to a general question.

Paper Content

This is solely an examination paper. It is intended for those who have taken Politics
and International Relations in Part IIA, and so by the time of the exam will have
studied politics for at least two years, and in most cases for three. Candidates are
required to answer one question from a choice of ten: five inviting discussion of an
unseen and unattributed text in politics, and five inviting answers to general
questions. POL9 gives candidates the opportunity to think about different kinds of
general questions in politics and to use the knowledge and understanding they have
acquired in other taught papers and in assessed work to reflect on these and
develop arguments of their own at length. The exam paper draws upon different
texts and themes that are taught in the papers of Part II, and represents the broad
variety of papers: it is set to avoid advantaging or disadvantaging any particular
choice of papers elsewhere in Part II. Some questions can be answered from a
knowledge of political thought, some from a knowledge of practical or empirical
politics. Most questions encourage candidates to connect critical reflection on
political concepts with the analysis of features of modern politics.

There will be a short introductory talk about the paper on Wednesday 3rd
October 2018, at 12 noon in SG1 of the Alison Richard Building. The main teaching
though is a series of classes in Lent term. Students will be assigned to a group for
classes in that term, and will be notified of the format by e-mail just before the start of
Lent. The classes are to discuss how to approach the paper and will take examples
from previous examination papers (below). These classes should be sufficient to
prepare for this paper, but you are also advised to develop your reading for this
paper based on what you have studied so far, and to draw out broader questions
and themes that respond to your interests. Your Director of Studies has been
encouraged to organise two supervisions for you after these classes are complete.
The course organiser can be consulted in the event of any specific concerns.

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Mode of Assessment

One three-hour examination paper, which is undivided. Candidates are asked to

answer one question from a choice of ten.

Summary of advice on this paper from past examiners’ reports

General

1. This paper is challenging, and the way to perform highly on it is to be prepared to

think broadly about politics and its different features, in order to develop an
independent and critical answer to the question or passage selected. Essays should
draw on the understanding and knowledge developed in the previous years of your
study, and substantiate their arguments through the use of examples and by
supporting the claims they make with evidence. The best answers are those which
understand the complexity and ambiguity of real world politics; which, in setting out
their own argument, take account of the strongest arguments against it; and which
succeed in combining broad conceptual analysis with careful political explanation.

2. The opportunity to think and plan your answer for an hour should be used to the
full. A coherent, sustained, and well-structured argument (or set of arguments) that is
focused on the question or the passage is necessary for the essay. This can only be
assured if you have a clear plan before you start writing.

3. This paper invites you to draw upon material you have studied for other papers.
You are not expected for this paper to research new topics that don’t come out
of your studies for other courses, but instead to think about the general issues
and larger questions that come out of those studies. The questions and
passages are usually general in nature, and need, at least partly, to be addressed as
such. For this reason, answers for this paper cannot be simply supervision essays or
exam answers for other papers; they have to remain engaged with the question or
passage if they are to stay relevant. There is a formal restriction on overlap between
different assessed pieces of work (exams, long essays and dissertations), in that you
should not be submitting identical or near-identical passages of text for assessment
of one or more paragraphs of length. It is not a prohibition on discussing the same
theories, concepts, countries, historical episodes or authors across more than one
examination. As long as you are addressing the question or responding closely to
the passage, the account you give will necessarily differ between examinations, and
so problems of overlap should not arise.

4. It is not enough to set out what different theorists might think about a question,
without engaging as to whether or not these theorists’ claims are persuasive or not.
The purpose of the paper is to test your ability to engage in political argument, not

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your accuracy in undertaking political exposition. If you want to make a point by
saying that a particular theorist is right about something, then you need to explain
why you think that theorist is right and deal with the strongest counter-argument that
can be made against that position. Similarly, you should deploy examples to make
an argument, rather than as a decorative illustration of a supposedly self-evident
abstract truth. Almost all examples from real-world politics will expose some political
complexity and accordingly need to be unpacked. Using the same example both to
make an argument and to deal with the counter-argument can be an effective
method of both capturing that complexity and presenting a persuasive line of
reasoning.

5. Avoid generalisation without evidence. It is surprisingly easy to make claims that

have no empirical basis. Always seek to provide evidence for your claims.

6. In preparing for this paper you should spend some time thinking about some of the
basic categories and distinctions of politics that have animated your studies hitherto.
These may include time and space, power and virtue, conflict and co-operation,
reason and desire, hope and fear, judgement and will, good and evil, chance and
fate, the state and the international.

7. Because the paper asks you to make a detailed argument, it is very important to
write at sufficient length. It is difficult to receive a mark higher than a 2.2 if your
answer is shorter than about 2,200 words (eight sides of average-sized handwriting).

Passages

1. The authors of the passages are not identified and it is not necessary to know who
wrote the passage.

2. You should read the text carefully, set out the distinct propositions in the text and
reconstruct the reasoning of each argument. If there are parts of the text that are
unclear to you or ambiguous in their meaning, it is necessary to explain how they are
unclear or ambiguous, and to develop a reasoned argument for what you think the
author could be saying. You should engage with the persuasiveness of those
propositions in ways that goes beyond the immediate content of the passage itself,
for example by drawing in evidence or examples that the author could use to develop
the argument.

3. Answers need to show intellectual ambition and rise above exposition of the
propositions and simple critique of them. Examples of good approaches are to
develop implications of an argument that the author appears reluctant to do; to
question the author’s assumptions about the past and future and attitudes to the
present; and to question the alleged facts, and the interpretation of the alleged facts,
on which the author’s case is based.

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4. You should not rely too much on accounts of what different political theorists
would have thought of the claims in the passages. Rather you should make your own
arguments and use different theoretical claims and empirical evidence to that end.

5. Common failings include not analysing the propositions systematically, not moving
on from awareness that there are elements of ambiguity in the text, reading things
into the text that are not there, and missing things that are.

Questions

1. The best answers sustain an argument or set of arguments, which display

conceptual sophistication, deploy interesting and pointed examples, and arrive at a
satisfying and persuasive conclusion.

2. Common failings include writing at too high a level of generality, falling back on
polemic and assertion, failing to engage with the terms of the question, displaying
only shallow knowledge of the empirical material that is being drawn upon for
examples, and using exposition of what different theorists would have thought about
the questions asked rather than developing your own argument.

Previous exam papers

In and before 2016, the exam paper contained eight questions. From 2016-17, the
paper contains ten questions. The expansion was a response to the broader scope
of taught papers now within POLIS. The best indicator of the structure and scope of
the 2019 exam are the 2017 and 2018 exam papers, although the earlier papers
contained below will also be useful to consult for examples of texts and questions.

The general instruction is that candidates must answer one question. For the texts,
candidates should consider the coherence, force and where possible the truth of the
argument in the text; they may wish to use arguments and evidence from outside it.
For the questions, candidates are advised to use one or more examples.

The 2018 exam paper

1. Some take the view that deficiencies of human nature are responsible for war,
for economic crises and for the destruction of the planet – think of the
tendency for people to blame the latest financial crisis on ‘greed’. But if we are
serious about taking a historically-informed approach to such questions, we
are more likely to see these arguably universal human traits as interacting
with highly variable social conditions, including political and economic
institutions, which make a vast difference to the way in which those traits
manifest themselves and to the sort of collective existence that is achieved. It
may be convenient to pin onto human nature our more catastrophic failures to

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 live together in a way that is minimally humanly acceptable, but it’s not terribly
plausible, in the face of immense social and historical variation. The kind of
pessimism that insists otherwise is not the understandable gloom or anxiety
about the fate of human societies, but a mask for a misanthropy so profound
as to be incompatible with any serious interest in either political philosophy or
political action.

2. If we view racialized and gendered violence as one aspect of the broader

undermining of moral security sustained through institutionalized racial and
sexual discrimination, then combating discrimination and racialized and
gendered violence should be viewed as part of the state's duty to protect
citizens’ security. Given that many accounts of security view a right to security
as a fundamental human right, this suggests that the state's duty to protect
citizens’ moral security through the dismantling of discrimination is more
urgent than has been acknowledged. Certainly, this suggests that accounts
that prioritize security over equality are mistaken, since equality is a
necessary step toward moral security. This offers a starting point from which
to rethink the relationship between equality and security, and how states
should prioritize security in relation to other important political goals and
values, such as liberty, utility, and justice.

3. One of the great ironies of the twentieth century is that the most powerful
country on earth was for the first time located outside its largest landmass. As
yet this changed little about the central importance of the latter. It was almost
as if Eurasia was now faced with a mirror reflecting its political and
geographical realities, or as if an external observer had arrived who could
acquire a more objective perspective on the course of events. Almost
everything the United States did during the Cold War, at the height of its
powers, was to think about Eurasia, to contemplate its future and to try to
determine its final shape. Today too, in the age of Trump, Eurasia is the main
question for American political life, which is discovering a world in which
relations with Europe, Russia and China are being redesigned and need to be
considered as a single whole.

4. There is one basic or primitive conception of freedom: this is freedom as

power, action unimpeded, in particular, by other people. Some thinkers
believe that this is the conception of freedom, and that it contains all that one
knows or needs to know about its value. But this is to identify the seed and
the plant, or the rhythm and the dance; it does not get us very far in answering
questions about freedom as a political value. Primitive freedom is not in itself
a political value at all, perhaps not even a social one. A social value implies a
social space in which that value can be intelligibly claimed, and to claim
freedom must always involve more than simply claiming power. It is no news
to anyone ever that people want the means to do what they want to do. If I
make a claim in the name of freedom, then I must do more than say that I
want power. I must provide some reason why specifically I should be able to

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 do some certain thing to you, or you should not be able to do some certain
thing to me.

5. Humanitarianism both legitimates and mitigates violence through the

codification of duties of repair and protection in the midst of violence. Violence
continues not only in the failure of states to ‘do something’ in the light of
systemic human rights abuses, but also in the provision of humanitarian aid.
The violence of humanitarian action is interwoven with the ordering of
imperium, to the point where we can consider humanitarian NGOs to be
acting within a liberal assemblage of occupation. In doing so, humanitarianism
acts to legitimize an unequal distribution of power through governance
practices that reinforce political conditionality. The increasing activism of
humanitarian organizations gives rise to concerns that the conventional
humanitarian practice of neutrality has become organized ethical confusion
and precedes attempts to restructure social relations which are in themselves
inherently political.

6. Why have democratic politicians found it so difficult to reduce economic

inequalities?

7. To what extent is a modern state’s foreign policy a reflection of its domestic

politics?

8. Is political obligation an obligation of prudence?

9. Can the category of national culture ever be useful when explaining how
forms of government work, or fail to do so?

10. Should aspirations for a peaceful world order governed by global institutions
now be laid to rest?

The 2017 exam paper

1. For democracy to function meaningfully, majorities and minorities alike must

be able to recognize the fairness of political processes even when they
disagree with the outcomes. What is needed is an underlying sense of
collective identity: a sense that we are part of a discursive community with the
inclinations and abilities to discuss our differences. Beyond sanitizing public
discourse and conforming to certain rules, forging trust across divides of race,
class, and culture is a matter of collectively developing habits and skills of
public reason. This does not mean that minorities ought to simply assimilate
their perspectives into that of a homogeneous public. Rather, perhaps the
most pressing task for realizing a democracy is for majorities to better
understand the distinct and legitimate perspectives of minorities.

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2. In the contemporary state system, inequalities of power are veiled under an
international legal system founded upon the idea of formal equal sovereignty.
Equal sovereignty often provides a legitimising framework within which
powerful states are capable of influencing the domestic and foreign policy of
weaker ones without much cost. This makes current forms of interstate
domination less visible, and more insidious, than historical ones. Nor have all
institutions of global governance necessarily helped reduce domination.
Supranational institutions often act as channels that amplify, rather than bind,
interstate power. Powerful countries have been able almost unilaterally to
shape those very institutions – whose self-declared aim is to promote a more
multilateral form of global governance – to their advantage. As a result,
developing countries are unable to experiment with policy making, by way of
trial and error, in the way that is essential to find one’s own working recipe for
growth.

3. The study of politics and international relations should be approached with

humility. There is no single theory that makes understanding politics easy, no
magic methodological bullet that yields robust results without effort, and no
search engine that provides mountains of useful and reliable data on every
question that interests us. We therefore favour a diverse intellectual
community where different theories and research traditions co-exist. Given
how little we know, and how little we know about how to learn more, over-
investing in any particular approach seems unwise. What matters most,
however, is whether we create more powerful theories to explain key features
of politics and international relations. Without good theories, we cannot trust
our empirical findings, whether quantitative or qualitative in nature. There are
many roads to better theory, but that should be our ultimate destination.

4. The political use of culture to legitimate conflict is the outcome of two distinct
processes. The first is that the ideology of violence requires rational cause,
which is most easily provided by reference to notions of differences rooted in
culture. Such logic is implacable: because we are different we cannot resolve
our problems peacefully. The second is that we need to protect that which
makes us distinct, or unique, which is our culture. Any sign of hostility towards
us is, therefore, an attack on that culture. The conflation of these two
processes has led political scientists to suppose that culture could be the
‘cause’ of conflict, whereas in reality it is only the language in which it is
expressed. If this is true, then it can be argued that ideology is in large part
the political exploitation of culture.

5. If you don’t like something you see in a shop you can go elsewhere, but in
politics the only way to get something is to use voice – to express your
concerns in concert with others – and that carries far more costs than the exit

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 mechanism available to us in market transactions. People generally don’t like
making a lot of effort for little reward. Accordingly offloading responsibility on
to others, as we have seen, is a very common coping mechanism in political
exchanges. But expressing your interest or opinion is only the start of a more
general challenge in politics. You have not only to make your views known,
you also have to listen. Politics is not about individual choice; it is about
collective decision. Politics often involves a stumbling search to find a
collective response to particular problems. It is not the most edifying human
experience. It is rarely an experience of self‐actualisation and more often an
experience of accepting second‐best. The results tend to be messy,
contingent and inevitably create a mix of winners and losers.

6. Can we engage meaningfully with the world through the expression of political
solidarities?

7. Are illiberal democracies sustainable?

8. What if anything in politics can be explained primarily through the reference to

socio-economic class?

9. Do any foundational political concepts require rethinking in light of the digital

revolution?

10. Does modern politics leave any space for the imagination?

The 2016 exam paper

1. ‘If democracy means that social justice must not be reduced to market justice,
then the main task of democratic politics should be to reverse the institutional
devastation wrought by four decades of neoliberal progress, and as far as
possible to defend and repair what is left of the institutions with whose help
social justice might be able to modify or even replace market justice. It is only
in this context that it seems meaningful to speak of democracy today, since it
alone makes it possible to escape being fobbed off with the ‘democratisation’
of institutions that have no power to decide anything. Today democratisation
should mean building institutions through which markets can be brought back
under the control of society: labour markets that leave scope for social life,
product markets that do not destroy nature, credit markets that do not mass-
produce unsustainable promises. But before something like that can really
come onto the agenda, at the least there will have to be years of political
mobilisation and lasting disruption of the social order that is today taking
shape before our eyes.’

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2. ‘A person must have a very clouded vision, or view human society from a very
misty distance, to cherish the notion that the uniform regulation of life would
automatically ensure a uniform distribution of happiness. He or she must be
pretty far gone in delusion if she or he imagines that equality of income, or
equal opportunities for all, would have approximately the same value for
everyone. But, if he or she were a legislator, what she or he do about all those
people whose greatest opportunities lie not without, but within? If he or she
were just, he or she would have to give at least twice as much money to the
one person as to the other, since to the one it means much, to the other little.
No social legislation will ever be able to overcome the differences between
human beings, this most necessary factor for generating the vital energy of a
human society.’

3. ‘In the age of liberal order, revisionist struggles are a fool's errand. Indeed,
China and Russia know this. They do not have grand visions of an alternative
order. For them, international relations are mainly about the search for
commerce and resources, the protection of their sovereignty, and, where
possible, regional domination. They have shown no interest in building their
own orders or even taking full responsibility for the current one and have
offered no alternative visions of global economic or political progress. That's a
critical shortcoming, since international orders rise and fall not simply with the
power of the leading state; their success also hinges on whether they are
seen as legitimate and whether their actual operation solves problems that
both weak and powerful states care about. In the struggle for world order,
China and Russia (and certainly Iran) are simply not in the game. ‘

4. ‘We cannot expect to find in our society a single set of moral concepts, a
shared interpretation of the moral vocabulary. Conceptual conflict is endemic
in our situation, because of the depth of our moral conflicts. Each of therefore
has to choose both with whom we wish to be morally bound and by what
ends, rules, and virtues we wish to be guided. These two choices are
inextricably linked. In choosing to regard this end or that virtue highly, I make
certain moral relationships with some other people, and other moral
relationships with others impossible. Speaking from within my own moral
vocabulary, I shall find myself bound by criteria embodied in it. These criteria
will be shared with those who speak the same moral language. And I must
adopt moral vocabulary if I am to have any social relationships. For without
rules, without the cultivation of virtues, I cannot share ends with anyone else. I
am doomed to social solipsism. Yet I must choose for myself with whom I am
to be morally bound. I must choose between alternative forms of social and
moral practice.’

5. Is progress inevitable?

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 6. Is sovereignty a necessary conditions of modern politics?

7. Is the age of party democracy over?

8. Whose interests does democracy serve?

The 2015 exam paper

1. ‘Plainly we cannot escape the maze of contemporary democracy by retracing

our steps. We cannot reverse time, and very few of us wish to return to any
ancien régime. We also cannot hope to remove the myriad other sources of
confusion in the real political world we inhabit by recognising the route we
have followed to get where we now are. What we could still reasonably hope
to do is to break the hypnotic spell the term democracy now casts by
recognising how it casts that spell. It is by any human standards absurd to
have ended up with a single term for judging where we are in the politics of
the world, and what to value and strive for within those politics, a term that
carries such pretension to authority but also equivocates so uncontrollably
between the official regime name for particular states as these actually are
and the most appropriate basis for deciding the most important decisions that
bear on the life chances of human beings across the globe.’

2. ‘The most important factor that makes a rising civilisation work is mimesis—
the universal human habit by which people imitate the behaviour and attitudes
of those they admire. As long as the political class of a civilisation can inspire
admiration and affection from those below it, the civilisation thrives, because
the shared sense of values and purpose generated by mimesis keeps the
pressures of competing class interests from tearing it apart. Civilisations fail,
in turn, because their political classes lose the ability to inspire mimesis, and
this happens in turn because members of the elite become so fixated on
maintaining their own power and privilege that they stop doing an adequate
job of addressing the problems facing their society. As those problems spin
further and further out of control, the political class loses the ability to inspire
and settles instead for the ability to dominate. Outside the political class and
its hangers-on, in turn, more and more of the population becomes an internal
proletariat, an increasingly sullen underclass that still provides the political
class with its cannon fodder and labour force but no longer sees anything to
admire or emulate in those who order it around.’

3. ‘Again and again between these catastrophes of blood and terror the cry rises
up for the reconciliation of the peoples and for peace on earth. Like as we
may the wish towards all this, we must have the courage to face facts as they

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 are. Life if it would be great, is hard; it lets us choose only between victory and
ruin, not between war and peace, and to the victory belong the sacrifices of
victory. For that which shuffles querulously and jealously by the side of the
events is only literature – written or thought or lived literature – mere truths
that lose themselves in the moving crush of facts. History has never deigned
to take notice of these propositions.’

4. ‘There seems to have been a profound contradiction between the political

imperative of establishing capitalism as the only possible way to manage
anything, and capitalism’s own unacknowledged need to limit its future
horizons lest speculation, predictably, goes haywire. Once in 2008 it did, and
the whole machine imploded, we were left in the strange situation of not being
able to even imagine any other way things might be arranged. About the only
thing we can imagine is catastrophe. To begin to free ourselves, the first thing
we need to do is to see ourselves again as historical actors, as people who
can make a difference to the course of world events.’

5. In politics is everything contingent?

6. Are modern democracy and modern technology compatible?

7. Is politics personal?

8. Do organised interests corrupt politics?

The 2014 exam paper

1. I do not see how our societies can be kept going unless people are willing to
acknowledge in some way the idea of a public order that means more than is what is
simply “out there”. This would mean seeing others as citizens and not just as
residents or wanderers on the same patch of ground. But the sense of shared
citizenship that we need does not exclude or even weaken individual rights, such as
the right to privacy. On the contrary, it requires them. We have a sense of
citizenship only if we think that others are like us, and one way in which we know
they are like us is that they need to be protected, as we want to be, from destructive
and unpredictable intrusions, whether by the state or other agencies.

2. It is widely contended that economic and social development creates pressure

for democratization that an authoritarian state structure cannot contain. There is
also the view that “closed societies” may be able to excel in mass manufacturing but
not in the advanced stages of the information economy. The jury on these issues is
still out, because the data set is incomplete. Imperial and Nazi Germany stood at the
forefront of the advanced scientific and manufacturing economies of their times, but
some would argue that their success no longer applies because the information

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economy is much more diversified. Non-democratic Singapore has a highly
successful information economy, but Singapore is a city-state, not a big country. It
will take a long time before China reaches the stage when the possibility of an
authoritarian state with an advanced capitalist economy can be tested. All that can
be said at the moment is that there is nothing in the historical record to suggest that
a transition to democracy by today’s authoritarian capitalist powers is inevitable,
whereas there is a great deal to suggest that such powers have far greater economic
and military potential than their communist predecessors did.

3. Free-marketeers who repose their faith in market institutions forget that they
are artefacts of human actions which human action can undo. In this they forget a
crucial Hobbesian truth: the very integrity of market institutions, and ultimately their
very survival, depend on the efficiency of coercive authority, in the absence of which
market institutions collapse or else suffer capture by exploitative predators. Market
institutions depend, in other words, on Hobbesian peace for their very existence.
The office of government, in this connection, is the superintendence of market
institutions, with the aim of ensuring that their workings are not self-defeating or such
as to endanger themselves.

4. Violence, being instrumental by nature, is rational to the extent that it is

effective in reaching the end that must justify it. And since when we act, we never
know with any certainty the eventual consequences of what we are doing, violence
can remain rational only if it pursues short-term goals. Violence does not promote
causes, neither history nor revolution, neither progress nor reaction; but it can serve
to dramatize grievances and bring them to public attention.

5. Is technocracy compatible with democracy?

6. What makes a good politician?

7. Can there be a global politics?

8. Why vote?

The 2013 exam paper

1. Politics is a craft or a skill, and ought not to be analysed, as Plato’s Socrates

assumes, as the mastery of a set of principles or theories. This does not imply that
political agents do not use theories. Rather, part of their skill depends on being able
to choose skilfully which models of reality to use in a certain context, and to take
account of the ways in which various theories are limited and the ways in which they
are useful or fail. The successful exercise of this skill is often called “political
judgment”. Political judgment means, among other things, the ability to determine
which analogies are useful, which theories abstract from crucial aspects of the
situation. No further theory will help you avoid the need to judge.

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2. The view that states and markets are in opposition to each other is the
obverse of the truth. The world needs more globalization, not less. But we will only
have more and better globalization if we have better states. Above all, we must
recognise that inequality and persistent poverty are the consequences not of the still
limited integration of the world’s economy but of its political fragmentation. If we
wish to make our world a better place, we must look not at the failures of the market
economy, but at the hypocrisy, greed and stupidity that so often mar our politics, in
both developing and developed countries.

3. Democracy could be a way of giving people control and making them freer, if
only human beings were not the way they are. Actual human beings are wired not to
seek truth and justice but to seek consensus. They are shackled by social pressure.
They are overly deferential to authority. They cower before uniform opinion. They are
swayed not so much by reason as by a desire to belong, by emotional appeal, and
by sex appeal. We evolved as social primates who depended on tight in-group
cooperative behaviour. Unfortunately this leaves us with a deep bent towards
tribalism and conformity. Too much and too frequent democracy threatens to rob us
of our autonomy.

4. Institutions initially appear for what in retrospect were historically contingent

reasons. But certain ones survive and spread because the meet needs that are in
some sense universal. This is why there has been institutional convergence over
time, and why it is possible to give a general account of political development. But
the survival of institutions involves a lot of contingency as well: a political system that
works well for a country whose population’s median age is in the twenties may not
work so well for a stagnant society where a third of the citizenry is at retirement age.
If the institution fails to adapt, the society will face crisis or collapse, and may be
forced to adopt another one. This is not less true of a liberal democracy than of a
nondemocratic political system.

5. Does democracy require partisanship?

6. Is the West in political decline?

7. To what extent do the rights of citizens still depend on the nation state?

8. What makes peace secure?

The 2012 exam paper

1. So long as human exchange and specialisation are allowed to thrive

somewhere, then culture evolves whether leaders help it or hinder it, and the result is
that prosperity spreads, technology progresses, poverty declines, disease retreats,
fecundity falls, happiness increases, violence atrophies, freedom grows, knowledge
flourishes, the environment improves. Human nature will not change. The same old

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dramas of aggression and addiction, of infatuation and indoctrination, of charm and
harm, will play out but in an ever more prosperous world. The human race will
continue to expand and enrich its culture, despite setbacks and despite individual
people having much the same evolved, unchanging nature. The twenty-first century
will be a magnificent time to be alive.

2. A free press is not an unconditional good. Press freedom is good because

and insofar as it helps the public to explore and test opinion and to judge for
themselves whom and what to believe and trust. If powerful institutions are allowed
to publish, circulate and promote material without indicating what is known and what
is rumour, what is derived from a reputable source and what is invented, what is
standard analysis and what is speculation, which sources may be knowledgeable
and which are probably not, they damage our public culture and all our lives. Good
public debate must not only be accessible to but also assessable by its audiences.

3. The case for reviving the state does not rest uniquely upon its contributions to
modern society as a collective project; there is a more urgent consideration. We
have entered an age of fear. Insecurity is once again an active ingredient of political
life in Western democracies. Insecurity born of terrorism, of course; but also, and
more insidiously, fear of the uncontrollable speed of change, fear of the loss of
employment, fear of losing ground to others in an increasingly unequal distribution of
resources, fear of losing control of the circumstances and routines of our daily life.
And, perhaps above all, fear that it is not just we who can no longer shape our lives,
but that those in authority have also lost control, to forces beyond their reach.

4. The search for a definitive European identity and a permanent answer to what
Europe means is, in fact, a wild goose chase. Identities are not freely chosen in
some history-less nirvana, but they cannot be imposed, even by mass conversion.
Nor are they matters of blood and soil, or unquestioned traditions. Traditions help to
make us what we are, but they are never unquestioned: they have to be interpreted
and reinterpreted in the light of changing circumstances. Shared identities are
always in flux. Those who lose the argument today may win it tomorrow.

5. Are the most successful societies the most equal societies?

6. Is it dangerous to have convictions in politics?

7. Does power ultimately rest on opinion?

8. Do politicians ever learn from the past?

The 2011 exam paper

1. There is nothing fanciful about the idea that people believe things about
others, in particular about candidates at an election, without having any reasonable

14
grounds for that belief. It is rare indeed for people to form their beliefs by a process
of logical deduction from facts ascertained by a rigorous search for all available
evidence and a judicious assessment of its probative value. In greater or in less
degree according to their temperaments, their training, their intelligence, they are
swayed by prejudice, rely on intuition instead of reasoning, leap to conclusions on
inadequate evidence and fail to recognise the cogency of material which might cast
doubt on the validity of the conclusions they reach.

2. It is not only with dismay that Promethean man regards the future. It is also
with a kind of anger. If after so much effort, so little has been accomplished; if before
such vast challenges so little is apt to be done – then let the drama proceed to its
finale, let mankind suffer the end it deserves. Such a view is by no means the
expression of only a few perverse minds. On the contrary, it is the application to the
future of the prevailing attitudes with which our age regards the present. When men
can generally acquiesce in, even relish, the destruction of their living
contemporaries, when they can regard with indifference or irritation the fate of those
who live in slums, rot in prison, or starve in lands that have meaning only insofar as
they are vacation resorts, why should they be expected to take the painful actions
needed to prevent the destruction of future generations whose faces they will never
live to see? Worst yet, will they not curse these future generations whose claims to
life can be honoured only by sacrificing present enjoyments; and will they not, if it
comes to a choice, condemn them to non-existence by choosing the present over
the future?

3. If justice is something which might and should be done, it must be true that it
actually could be done. Economic or political justice cannot be precluded in principle
by economic or political causality, however unlikely it might be for the time being in
particular economic or political circumstances. Justice is an intensely political subject
matter – political all the way down. Modern conceptions of human good, as
elaborated in the academy, do not offer a sound basis for understanding what it
might be for a given society to be just. In the attempt to achieve theoretical
determinacy they set out from conceptions of the individual or community that are
disastrously ingenuous – insensitive to the reality of either the individual or
community because so obtuse about the dense relations between the two.

4. That various cultures, or cultural attitudes, will persist is obvious enough, and
their contribution to a loosely united world is a very positive thing – broad variety not
being the same as mutual antipathy. But we cannot in the long run accept the
supposed corollary – that rogue regimes and movements produced in these cultures
can be tolerated in principle, any more than could the National Socialist equivalent
produced in Western culture. On the contrary, only pluralist versions, or versions
incorporating or evolving towards pluralism, can be seen as real components of a
future world. None of this is to say the complex tactical problems of foreign policy
can be solved by simplistic confrontations. But a long-term strategy must maintain
this general aim, not dismiss it as impossible.

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5. What do politicians know?

6. Does power necessarily destroy itself?

7. Are there economic limits to the possibilities of modern politics?

8. Can politicians be honest?

The 2010 exam paper

1. There never has been a society in which the public interest ruled supreme. So
long as men are not angels there never will be. But it is also true that there has never
been a society which was not, in some way, and to some extent, guided by this ideal,
no matter how perverse its application. A democratic society, with its particular
encouragement to individual ambition, private appetite, and personal concerns has a
greater need than any other to keep the idea of the public interest before it.
Democracy, after all, is government by public opinion. And for public opinion
genuinely to exist, it must be (a) opinion, not fancy or prejudice, and (b) public – i.e.
directed toward the common good rather than to private benefits.

2. In all human societies of any magnitude – states, nation, empires, federations,

whatever they may be called – force is an inevitable, therefore normal and natural
ingredient: inevitable both for the preservation of internal order and for defence
against external threats. From a practical standpoint, everyone knows this, even
liberals; a nation wouldn’t survive two hours if all its instrumentalities of force and
coercion suddenly disappeared. But though liberals know this insofar as they act in
practical affairs, their doctrine does not take account of it. Force is inevitable in
society because there are ineradicable limits, defects, evils and irrationalities in
human nature, with resultant clashes of egos and interests that cannot be wholly
resolved by peaceful methods of rational discussion, education, example, negotiation
and compromise.

3. No society is immortal. As Rousseau said, “If Sparta and Rome perished,

what state can hope to endure forever?” Even the most successful societies are at
some point threatened by internal disintegration and decay and by more vigorous
and ruthless external “barbarian” forces. In the end, the United States of America, for
example, will suffer the fate of Sparta, Rome, and other human communities.
Historically the substance of this kind of identity has involved four key components:
race, ethnicity, culture (most notably language and religion) and ideology. The racial
and ethnic Americas are no more. Cultural America is under siege. And as the Soviet
experience illustrates, ideology is a weak glue to hold together people otherwise
lacking racial, ethnic, and cultural sources of community.

4. The twentieth century innovation has been to give new expression to fairness
as the pursuit of equality of opportunity for all, unfair privileges for no one. And in this

16
century there is an even richer vision of equality of opportunity challenging people to
make the most of their potential through education, employment and in our economy,
society and culture. Charities can and do achieve great transformative changes, but
no matter how benevolent, they cannot, ultimately, guarantee fairness to all. Markets
can and do generate great wealth, but no matter how dynamic, they cannot
guarantee fairness to all. Individuals can be and are very generous, but by its nature
personal giving is sporadic and often conditional. Fairness can be guaranteed only
by a government that is enabling.

5. How should the success of political leadership be judged?

6. Can war lay the foundations of peace?

7. Are politics and virtue reconcilable?

8. Do complex constitutions undermine political stability?

The 2009 exam paper

1. If citizens are regarded as potential candidates for public office, election

appears to be an inegalitarian method, since, unlike lot, it does not provide every
individual seeking such office with an equal chance. Election is an aristocratic or
even oligarchic procedure in that it reserves public office for eminent individuals
whom their fellow citizens deem superior to others. Furthermore, the elective
procedure impedes the democratic desire that those in government should be
ordinary persons, close to those they govern in character, way of life, and concerns.
However, if citizens are no longer regarded as potential objects of electoral choice,
but as those who choose, election appears in a different light. It then shows its
democratic face, all citizens having an equal power to designate and dismiss their
rulers. Election inevitably selects elites, but it is for ordinary citizens to define what
constitutes an elite and who belongs to it.

2. Compared to the problems faced by the planet and the human species, the
capacities of politics seem woefully inadequate. There are deep structural obstacles
to tackling the causes of inequality and poverty, and effecting even very modest
redistribution of resources and opportunities. The development of the global market
has outpaced the development of the institutional forms of governance. There is no
point in seeking to stop the development of the global market. But there is every
reason for trying to make sure that political development catches up with it.
Preserving and extending the realm of the political, creating a transnational public
domain, is a condition for any prospect of improving the way in which the global
market is governed. It does not ensure it. But it creates the space in which it
becomes possible. Whether it is realised depends upon the emergence of new forms
of political participation, and the wide dissemination of information and knowledge.

17
3. The categories provided by the state give people ways to respond to
countless existing and new situations. Some of these will be laws, others rules, still
others norms. Although the state’s power rests in part on the symbolic abstractions
with which it legitimates itself, these abstractions become real in its day-to-day work
in the thousands of offices, police stations or classrooms where the state’s business
is done, in things like road signs and markings governing traffic, or the civil laws
governing behaviour. Strong norms have evolved to define how individuals should
behave with a policeman, a teacher or a judge. In these situations, state power is
rarely considered or rejected through detached reason by independent citizens
applying abstract moral principles. Rather, it is made and remade in the daily
situations where people assume given roles, play them out, and sometimes
challenge them – for example invoking the state’s own claimed morality against its
real practices. Most of the time upbringing and habit make people automatically align
their beliefs and behaviour with what the state demands. For the rest of the time,
inertia is enough.

4. Insecurity, conflict and war are uncontroversially destroyers of economic

value, and security measures normally entail significant non-productive economic
costs. But, as with preserving the value of freedom, so the prospects for economic
improvement, which is itself dependent on permitting a relatively free flow of goods,
services and people, require a significant degree of insecurity. The liberal doctrines
of free trade, on which the dynamics of globalisation depend, are themselves
arguments against the security impediments constructed by states to inhibit such
trade. But it is also recognised that economic interdependence has ambiguous
effects and that, as much as it benefits honest and productive businesses, it also
strengthens the capacity and malign influence of global mafias and international
terrorists.

5. Is violence always the result of political failure?

6. Are there plausible political alternatives to democracy?

7. Is it ever possible to escape the politics of fear?

8. How utopian is the idea of global justice?

The 2008 exam paper

1. Born in the American and French Revolutions, liberal democratic

constitutionalism has struggled against the odd for two centuries – against
monarchy, against Nazism, against Communism – to achieve an uncertain
hegemony. No competing ideal has the same universal appeal. Only the most
fervent fanatic dreams of the day when all mankind worships Christ or Allah, but the
most pragmatic pragmatist cannot dismiss the possibility that, in a century or two, the
entire world will be governed by variations on themes first elaborated by John Locke
18
and Immanuel Kant. We are dealing only with a possibility, not a probability, much
less a certainty. But for the first time in world history, the fate of Enlightenment
constitutionalism depends more on us than our enemies. The greatest threat is the
implosion of liberal democratic values in the heartland, not the destruction by hostile
forces from the periphery.

2. The paradox of globalisation is that as the world becomes more integrated so

power becomes more diffuse. Thanks to the dynamics of international capitalism, all
but the poorest people in the world have significantly more purchasing power than
their grandfathers dared dream of. The means of production were never more
productive or more widely shared. Thanks to the spread of democracy, a majority of
people in the world now have markedly more political power than their grandfathers.
The democratic means of election were never more widely accepted as the optimal
form of government. The means of education too are accessible in most countries to
much larger shares of the population than was the case two or three generations
ago; more people than ever can harness their own brainpower. All these changes
mean that old monopolies on which power was traditionally based – monopolies on
wealth, political office and knowledge – have in large measure been broken up.
Unfortunately thanks to the proliferation of modern means of destruction, the power
to inflict violence has also become more evenly distributed.

3. There are indeed universal paradigms of injustice and unreason. They consist
of people using power to coerce other people against their will to secure what the
first people want simply because they want it, and refusing to listen to what other
people say if it goes against their doing so. This is a paradigm of injustice because
institutions of justice, wherever and whatever they may be, are intended to stand
precisely against this. “Might is not in itself, right” is the first necessary truth, one of
few, about the nature of right. Simply in this form, the universal paradigm excluded
many bad things, but it is indeterminate about what it requires: it says not much more
than that coercion requires legitimation and that the will of the stronger it not itself a
legitimation. It is already clear, however, how long a journey the liberal would have to
make to arrive at the conclusion that morality in his sense and its notion of autonomy
provide the only real alternative to injustice and unreason. He would have to show
that the only considerations that could count as legitimation were those of liberal
consent. In fact he would have to show something stronger, that only his
considerations could even decently be supposed to count as legitimation. That
seems, as it surely is, a wildly ambitious or even imperialistic claim.

4. The glaring failure of the scientific view of human behaviour to conform with
what we see life to be like is what causes suspicion of scientists when they attempt
to generalise about history or politics. Their theories are condemned as foolish and
doctrinaire and Utopian. What is meant is that all reforms suggested by such
considerations, whether of the left or the right, fail to take into account the only
method by which anything is ever achieved in practice, whether good or bad, the
only method of discovery, the answer to the questions which are proper to historians,

19
namely: What do men do and suffer, and why and how? It is the view that answers to
these questions can be provided by formulating general laws, from which the past
and future of individuals and societies can be successfully predicted, that has led to
misconceptions alike in theory and practice: to fanciful, pseudo-scientific histories
and theories of human behaviour, abstract and formal at the expense of the facts,
and to revolutions and wars and ideological campaigns conducted on the basis of
dogmatic certainty about their outcome – vast misconceptions which have cost the
lives, liberty and happiness of a great many innocent human beings.

5. Is everything in politics mortal?

6. What purposes does honour serve in politics?

7. Could we live without the state?

8. What wins elections?

The 2007 exam paper

1. It is hard to derive good rules for the interaction of all parts of any international
political and social order. The more people are worried about inequality, the more
they demand clear rules about what distribution of property is right, and the more
they find the idea of mutual toleration of various and different lifestyles immoral and
repulsive. The demand can produce a single ideology. It can also produce a demand
for a single source of order to deal with the threats of violence, that emerge
especially in the periphery. The rule-based order is strained when it has to deal with
inequality, and also when it has to deal with rapid change. The two challenges are
likely to come in combination with each other. Dealing with both questions requires
constant regulatory and rule-making innovation, in the course of which rules are
likely to become more complex, less transparent, and thus more open to the charge
of masking concrete and particular interests. In reality, most attempts to produce
rules for international order are messy. The result is to produce a suspicion of the
international order, which increases with more international contacts.

2. There are, of course, limits to what story telling can achieve. It is best at
seeing politics as a scenario of subtle interactions, and it is therefore an addition, not
a substitute, for more abstract models of analysis. To establish general laws or
models to explain and judge political conduct is particularly necessary for assessing
the rational consistency and consequences of specific decisions or policy choices.
There is, however, much ritual, display, social exchanging, and acting out in the
public arena by officials and citizens, and here story telling may offer more
appropriate theories. The drama is saturated with politics not only because the
subject is inherently fascinating. The subject also lends itself to the stage because it
is almost pre-packaged for that purpose. Especially when politics and morals, the
public and the personal, meet, we can do worse than find the right character to
20
perform and endure all the implications of any net of ideas. Active embodiment can
bring out all the improvisations, dodges, adaptations, twists, and turns of politics, and
also, of course, its enormous violence.

3. The more demanding the conception of citizenship, the more intrusive the
public policies needed to promote it. There is the story of the Spartan mother with
five sons in the army. A helot arrives with the news that all have been slain in battle.
“Vile slave”‚ she retorts, “was that what I asked you?” “We have won the victory‚” he
replied, whereupon the Spartan mother hastened to the temple to give thanks to the
gods. That, it has been said, was a citizen. The example may seem far- fetched, but
the point is clear. The more our conception of the good citizen requires the sacrifice
of private attachments to the common good, the more vigorously the state must act
(as Sparta did) to weaken those attachments in favour of devotion to the public
sphere. (This point applies to other demanding concepts of citizenship based on
ideals such as autonomy, critical rationality, and deliberative excellence).

4. Politics is not tragic, either in part or in whole: tragedy belongs to art, not to
life. And further, the imperfectability of man is not tragic, nor even a predicament,
unless and until it is contrasted with a human nature susceptible to a perfection
which is, in fact, foreign to its character, and rationalism rears its ugly head once
more in any arguments which assumes or asserts this contrast. To children and to
romantics, but to no-one else, it may appear tragic that we cannot have Spring
without Winter, eternal youth or passion always at the height of its beginning. And
only a rationalistic reformer will confuse the imperfections which can be remedied
with the so-called imperfections which cannot, and will think of the irremovability of
the latter as a tragedy. The rest of us know that no rationalistic justice (with its
project of approximating people to things) and no possible degree of human
prosperity can ever remove mercy and charity from their place of first importance in
the relations of human beings and know also that this situation cannot properly be
considered either imperfect or a tragedy.

5. ‘All government is oligarchy. Different oligarchies tell different stories.’

6. Are constitutions necessary?

7. Is there a place in politics for hope?

8. Why are there more nations than states?

The 2006 exam paper

1. There are some flaws in the assumptions made for democracy. It is assumed
that all men and woman are equal, or should be equal. Hence one-man one-vote.
But is equality realistic? If it is not, to insist on equality must lead to regression. If we
had a world government for this small interdependent world, will one-man-one-vote

21
lead to progress or regression? All can immediately see that the developed and
educated peoples of the world will be swamped by the undeveloped and
uneducated, and that no progress will be possible. Indeed if the UK and US had
given universal suffrage to their peoples in the nineteenth century, then economic
and social progress might well have been less rapid. The weakness of democracy is
that the assumption that all men are equal and capable of equal contribution to the
common good is flawed. This is a dilemma. Do we insist on ideals when they do not
fit into the practical realities as we know them? Or do we compromise and adjust to
realities?

2. Nearly five hundred years ago, Europe invented the most effective form of
political organisation in history: the nation-state. Through a series of wars and
conquests, this form of political organisation spread like a virus, so that by the
twentieth century it was the only way of organising politics and eliminating empires,
city-states, and feudal systems. Because nation-states were most comfortable
dealing with other nation-states, other political systems faced a stark choice: become
a nation state, or get taken over by one. In the second half of the twentieth century,
Europeans started to reinvent this model. As the EU develops ever greater global
clout and spreads to take over a continent, other countries have been faced with an
equally stark choice: join the European Union, or develop your own union based on
the same principles of international law, interfering in each other’s affairs, and peace
as an ideology. By the end of the twenty-first century, in the new regional world, you
will need to be part of a club to have a seat at the table. The world that emerges will
be centred around neither the United States nor the United Nations, but will be a
community of interdependent regional clubs. As the momentum for regional
organisation picks up, great powers like the United States will inevitably be sucked
into the process of integration. They might be able to slow the process, but they
won’t be able to stop it. As this process continues, we will see the emergence of a
‘New European Century’. Not because Europe will run the world as an empire, but
because the European way of doing things will have become the world’s.

3. It is not, however, supreme coercive power, simply as such, but supreme

coercive power, exercised in certain ways and for certain ends, that makes a state;
viz. exercised according to law, written or customary, and for the maintenance of
rights. The abstract consideration of sovereignty has led to these qualifications being
overlooked. Sovereignty = supreme coercive power, indeed, but such power as
exercised in and over a state, which means with the qualification specified: but the
mischief of beginning with an inquiry into sovereignty, before the idea of a State has
been investigated, is that it leads us to adopt this abstract notion of sovereignty as
merely supreme coercive power, and then, when we come to think of the state as
distinguished by sovereignty, makes us suppose that supreme coercive power is all
that is essential to a state, forgetting that it is rather the state that makes the
sovereign than the sovereign that makes the state. Suppose that one man had been
master of all the slaves in one of the states of the American Union, there would have

22
been a multitude of men under one supreme coercive power, but the slaves and the
master would have formed no state, because there would have been no (recognised)
rights of slave against slave enforced by the master, nor would dealings between
master and slaves have been regulated by any law, and in consequence the
multitude consisting of slaves and masters would not have been a state.

4. The ingredients of a politics that embraces the whole of life are exposed as
they emerge from the dissociation of the spiritual and the temporal realms. The
process of their dissociation has not been a process of the secularisation of politics.
Rather, throughout that process, first, the spiritual apparatus has sought freedom
from its dependence on the territorial rulers, in an attempt to conquer direct
ascendance over the administration of society; thereafter, the territorial apparatus
has retrieved, in different ways and degrees, some influence over the formation of
ultimate ends. This reappropriation of the right of defining ultimate ends is more
radical for those weak nations that fight to overcome their disadvantages. It meets
less resistance when a weak civil society is unable to propose alternative
identifications to satisfy the need for long-term certainties. Similarly, groups, classes,
or movements, when they are weak, need to explicitly and forcefully propose long-
term ends, to overcome their weakness. Thus at times the means of a politics that
embraces the whole of life (the capacity to induce devotion, self-sacrifice, long-term
commitment, hopes or illusions of transforming reality) are in the hands of
movements or groups. At times they are in the hands of states or other collectivities
controlling the use of force. This is a most threatening case.

5. What is it effectively to lead a democracy?

6. Is there virtue in empire?

7. Does context explain all in politics?

8. Can the political ever be moral?

The 2005 exam paper

1. One understands of course why the role of the individual in history is

instinctively played down by a would-be egalitarian society. We are, quite naturally,
afraid of being victimised by reckless adventurers. To avoid this we have created the
myth of the ineluctable mass which governs all. Science, we are told, is not a matter
of individual inquiry but of collective effort. Even the surface storminess of our
elections disguises a fundamental indifference to human personality: if not this man,
then that one; it’s all the same; life will go on. Up to a point there is some virtue in
this; and though none can deny that there is a prevailing greyness in our placid land,
it is certainly better to be non-ruled by mediocrities than enslaved by Caesars. But to
deny the dark nature of human personality is not only fatuous but dangerous. For in
our insistence on the surrender of private will to a conception of the human race as
23
some sort of virus in the stream of time, unaffected by individual deeds, we have
been made vulnerable not only to boredom, to that sense of meaninglessness which
more than anything else is characteristic of our age, but vulnerable to the first
messiah who offers the young and bored some splendid prospect, some Caesarean
certainty. That is the political danger, and it is a real one.

2. Today Europe has moved on a stage further. In a global economy in which

the distinction between ‘domestic’ and ‘foreign’ has been eroded and in which our
well-being depends so much on the open system of trade and investment, the costs
of major military disruption are greater than ever before. This does not make peace
inevitable – there are no limits to anger, greed and stupidity – but it does mean that
the policy goals of the developed world are different from those of earlier ages. The
strong preference for a peaceful environment is why intervention in other people’s
civil wars is increasingly frequent and why troops are trained for peacekeeping as a
professional skill and why today police as well as troops are often deployed abroad.
That an army – a quintessential foreign policy instrument – should take on law and
order duties abroad is in some sense the final triumph of the domestic over the
foreign.

3. In self-deception, there is a kind of conspiracy between deceiver and

deceived, and in those terms there can be such a thing as collective self-deception.
This applies to the representation of politics in our societies now. The status of
politics as represented in the media is ambiguous between entertainment and the
transmission of discoverable truth, and rather as the purveyor of living myth is in
league with his audience to tell a tale into which they will enter, so politicians, the
media and the audience conspire to pretend that important realities are being
seriously considered, that the actual world is being responsibly addressed. However,
there is a difference. Those who heard the songs about Troy, when these conveyed
living myths, were not at Troy, but when we are confronted with today’s politics, we
are supposed to be in some real relation to today. This means that in our case, more
than with living myth, the conspiracy comes closer to that of self-deception, the great
enemy of truthfulness, because the wish that is expressed in these relations is
subverting a real truth, that very little of the world under consideration, our present
world, is in fact being responsibly addressed. We cannot after all simply forget the
need for our relations to that world to be truthful, or give up asking to what extent our
institutions, including the institutions of freedom, help them to be so.

4. The fact is that during the past two hundred years we have thought little about
the institutional design of democracy. Since the great explosion of institutional
thinking, when the present democratic institutions were invented – and they were
invented – there has been almost no institutional creativity. Except for never
implemented provisions for workers’ comanagement in the odd constitution, the
discovery of proportional representation in the 1860s was the last major institutional
invention. All democracies that have sprung up since the end of the eighteenth
century, including the most recent ones, just combine in different ways, often

24
piecemeal, the pre-existing institutions. Hence, there is lots of room for institutional
creativity.

5. Does politics always end in failure?

6. Do political parties have a future?

7. Is democracy ever not the best form of rule?

8. Who is political theory for?

The 2004 exam paper

1. To ask for a foundation for democracy is, typically, to ask for a reason why we
should be inclusive in our moral and political concerns rather than exclusive—why,
for example, we should try to broaden our moral and political community so as to
include non-landowners, non-whites, non-males and non-straights, and so on. This
request is equivalent to asking for a reason why the language of communities
influenced by the Christian ethic of love is more worthy to survive than that of
communities dominated by the notion of honour, or by pride in gender or in race.
From a Darwinian point of view, this demand is as pointless as asking for a reason
why the primitive mammals were more worthy to survive than the giant reptiles.
Worthiness does not come into it, because there is no standpoint outside the
accidents of evolution from which to judge worth. [Those of us opposed to the idea of
foundations] think that once we give up on the answer “God wills that we love each
other”, there is no good answer to the question about the worth of inclusivity and
love. So we see the foundationalists’ question as a symptom of what [has been]
called “supernaturalism”, defined as “the confusion of ideals and power”.

2. Faith in progressive internationalism may have become impossible to

articulate in an intellectually respectable fashion. Power and law have been
entangled in much more complex relationships than the conventional imagery would
allow: if collective security in the League [of Nations] failed because it lacked the
support of power, the United Nations seems to have suffered from its becoming
indistinguishable from power. Critique of sovereignty ... is not proof of the beneficial
nature of one’s proposed politics. Intervention may still emerge from solidarity and
superiority and it is hard to tell which alternative provides the better framework of
interpretation. As the debate on [recent interventions] has shown, there may be very
little law in that direction anyway. And the doubt must remain that the abstract
subject celebrated as the carrier of universal human rights is but a fabrication of the
disciplinary techniques of Western ‘governmentality’ whose only reality lies in the
imposition on social relations of a particular structure of domination. Universality still
seems an essential part of progressive thought—but it also implies an imperial logic
of identity: I will accept you, but only on the condition that I may think of you as I
think of myself. But recognition of particularity may be an act of condescension, and
25
at worst a prelude for rejection. Between the arrogance of universality and the
indifference of particularity, what else is there apart from the civilised manners of
gentle spirits?

3. Most great statesmen were less distinguished by their detailed knowledge

(although a certain minimum is indispensable) than by their instinctive grasp of
historical currents, by an ability to discern amidst the myriad of impressions that
impinge on consciousness those most likely to shape the future ... Little in the era of
instantaneous communications encourages this ... The study of history and
philosophy, the disciplines most relevant to perfecting the art of statesmanship, are
neglected everywhere or given such utilitarian interpretations that they can be
enlisted in support of whatever passes for conventional wisdom. Leaders rise to
eminence by exploiting and manipulating the mood of the moment. They define their
aims by consulting focus groups rather than following their own perceptions. They
view the future as the projection forward of the familiar. The computer has solved the
problem of storing knowledge and making a vast amount of data available.
Simultaneously it exacts the price of shrinking perspective ... [Politicians] are
tempted to wait on events and to be distracted by their echo in the media. Indeed,
they have few other criteria by which to judge their performance. In the process, a
view of the future is too often submerged in tactics. The problem is not the
inadequacy of individual leaders but rather the systemic problem of their cultural
preparation.

4. “Nation” and “nationalism” are no longer adequate terms with which to

describe, let alone to analyse, the political entities described as such, or even the
sentiments once described by these words. It is not impossible that nationalism will
decline with the decline of the nation-state, without which being English or Irish or
Jewish, or a combination of all these, is only one way in which people describe their
identity among the many others which they use for the purpose, as occasion
demands. It would be absurd to claim that this day is already near. However, I hope
it can at least be envisaged ... The owl of Minerva which brings wisdom, said Hegel,
flies out at dusk. It is a good sign that it is now circling round nations and
nationalism.

5. Must political explanation take account of the past?

6. Can politicians know what they are doing?

7. Is there political virtue?

8. Does power corrupt?

The 2003 exam paper

26
1. This professional ruler is an “innocent” tool of an “innocent” anonymous
power, legitimised by science, cybernetics, ideology, law, abstraction and
objectivity—that is, by everything except personal responsibility to human beings as
persons and neighbours. A modern politician is transparent: behind his judicious
mask and affected diction there is not a trace of a human being rooted by his loves,
passions, interests, personal opinions, hatred, courage or cruelty in the order of the
natural world. All that he, too, locks away in his private bathroom. If we glimpse
anything at all behind the mask, it will be only a more or less competent power
technician. System, ideology, and apparat have deprived humans—rulers as well as
the ruled—of their conscience, of their common sense and natural speech and
thereby, of their actual humanity. States grow ever more machine-like, men are
transformed into statistical choruses of voters, producers, consumers, patients,
tourists or soldiers. In politics, good and evil, categories of the natural world and
therefore obsolete remnants of the past, lose all absolute meaning; the sole method
of politics is quantifiable success. Power is a priori innocent because it does not
grow from a world in which words like guilt and innocence retain their meaning.

2. A moment’s reflection about, say, constitutional systems, should make it clear

that there is no way of resolving “once and for all” every or even most questions of
political authority. Consider only that for any existing or feasible constitutional
system, it is possible to imagine all kinds of constitutional crises where no one would
know what to do ... States, then, are not sovereign. Seldom does even a significant
majority of the members of a particular state acknowledge one ultimate source of
authority with the right to settle fundamental issues. Rather, there typically are a
variety of sources of authority, many not recognised by the state in question. It is
true, of course, that, given sufficient disagreement, a state or even other forms of
social order cannot exist. But this is not to say that the agreement required for a
state to exist be of the sort that Hobbes, Rousseau, and others have sought. What is
required is merely sufficient agreement on a significant number of significant issues
to permit conflicts to be resolved in an orderly manner, without bloodshed. In most
situations, this agreement must include a conditional willingness to compromise and
to accommodate oneself to the claims of others. Striving for “ultimate” sources of
political authority is not only futile; it downplays and hides from view the cooperation
and accommodation needed for social order. To build one’s political thinking around
the concept of sovereignty is to encourage the strange and vicious notion that the
truth of politics lies neither in joint nor in mutual accommodation but in command.

3. Debates about economic and humanitarian intervention are in many ways a

continuation of arguments about colonialism and decolonisation. When scholars,
policy makers, and citizens propose intervening to save failed states or to halt
humanitarian disasters, they may do so because they fear the instability that can
result from such crises. But interveners also often articulate a moral religious
obligation to act to protect others. The impulses and arguments in favour of
intervention are thus not dissimilar to colonial arguments: advocates of intervention

27
pose justifications that recall the civilising mission of colonialism, whilst the subjects
of these interventions also often articulate uneasiness with their conduct, likening
them to recolonisation.

4. After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the
people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule, is not
because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the
majority, but because they are physically the strongest. But a government in which
the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men
understand it. Can there not be a government in which majorities do not virtually
decide right and wrong, but conscience?—in which majorities decide only those
questions to which the rule of expediency is applicable? Must the citizen ever for a
moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has
every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects
afterwards. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the
right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I
think right.

5. Is political explanation necessarily comparative?

6. Must politics be just?

7. Must a successful politics rest on fictions?

8. ‘States are too large to address the small problems and too small to address
the large ones.’

The 2002 exam paper

1. Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different

nationalities. Among a people without fellow feeling, especially if they read and
speak different languages, the united public option, necessary to the workings of
representative government, cannot exist ... Their mutual antipathies are generally
much stronger than jealousy of the government. That any of them feels aggrieved by
the policy of the common ruler is sufficient to determine another to support that
policy. Even if all are aggrieved, none feel that they can rely on the others for fidelity
in a joint resistance ... Above all, the grand and only effectual security in the last
resort against the despotism of government is in that case wanting; the sympathy of
the army with the people ... Soldiers to whose feelings half or three-fourths of
subjects of the same government are foreigners will have no more scruple in mowing
them down, and no more desire to ask the reason why than they would have in doing
the same thing against declared enemies.

2. For many years, representation appeared to be founded on a powerful and

stable relationship of trust between voters and political parties, with the vast majority

28
of voters identifying themselves with, and remaining loyal to, a particular party.
Today, however, more and more people change the way they vote from one election
to the next, and opinion surveys show an increasing number of those who refuse to
identify with any existing party. Differences between the parties once appeared to be
a reflection of social cleavages. In our day, by contrast, one gets the impression that
it is the parties imposing cleavages on society, cleavages that observers detail as
“artificial”. Each party used to propose to the electorate a detailed programme of
measures which it promised to implement if returned to power. Today, the electoral
strategies of candidates and parties are based instead on the construction of the
vague impulses, prominently featuring the personality of the leaders. Finally, those
moving in political circles today are distinguished from the rest of the population by
their occupation, culture and way of life. The public scene is increasingly dominated
by media specialists, polling experts and journalists, in which it is hard to see a
typical reflection of society. Politicians generally attain power because of their media
talents, not because they resemble their constituents solely or are close to them. The
gap between government and society, between representatives and represented,
appears to be widening.

3. Successful foreign policy requires the management of nuances in a

continuous process; domestic politics is about marshalling interests and passing
laws which are subsequently enforced by an accepted judicial system. In foreign
policy, achievement expresses itself in the willingness to persevere through a series
of steps, each of which is inevitably incomplete in terms of the ultimate goal.
Domestic politics measures its achievements in shorter time frames and more
absolute terms.

4. Politics everywhere, in its essentials, is much the same. People do not greatly
differ. They want security, wealth and the power through which to get them. They
have particular interests and ambitions which they try to achieve, and which in some
ways conflict, in others coincide, with the interests and ambitions of others. They
band together with other people, either as a matter of convenience or as part of more
permanent groups to which they acknowledge some kind of loyalty or obligation.
Other groups, similarly formed, they regard with indifference, suspicion or downright
hostility. And in seeking these interests, and forming these groups, they gain power
over others and are subjected to power themselves, either directly through the
imposition of physical force, or indirectly through the organisation of their
surroundings in ways which reduce, and perhaps almost entirely remove, their
capacity for individual choice. Any form of organisation, essential though it may be
for the achievement of group and individual goals, and the management of conflict
between competing interests, itself produces inequalities of power, and thus further
differences of interest between those who have more power and those who have
less.

5. Are there general political truths?

29
6. Are states in the modern world to be identified with their governments or their
peoples?

7. Can politics ever escape from the past?

8. If politics is 'the art of the possible', can one know in advance what is
possible?

The 2001 exam paper

1. For democracy means much more than popular government and majority rule,
much more than a system of political techniques to flatter or deceive powerful blocks
of voters. The true democracy, living, growing and inspiring, puts its faith in the
people—faith that the people will not simply elect men who will represent their views
ably and faithfully, but also elect men who will exercise their conscientious
judgement—faith that the people will not condemn those whose devotion to principle
lead them to unpopular courses, but will reward courage, respect honour and
ultimately recognise right.

2. There is now, more than ever, some need for utopia, in the sense that men
need—as they have always needed—some vision of their potential, some manner of
fusing passion with intelligence. Yet the ladder to the City of Heaven can no longer
be a “faith ladder”, but an empirical one: a utopia has to specify where one wants to
go, how to get there, the costs of the enterprise, and some realisation of, and
justification for the determination of who is to pay.

3. It is as difficult [now] as it would have been to predict the Westphalian system

before it took shape. What feels clear is that something profound is underway, since
the sovereign-state system does not work in important ways for the majority of the
world's population. The latter's opinion may not yet (or ever) be decisive; more
importantly, the ideological underpinnings of state sovereignty and independence are
being daily subverted by globalisation, independence and regionalisation, while the
material conditions of world politics will, short of amazing discoveries, become
characterised by the growth of limits. Something profound is taking place, but the
post-Westphalian pattern of global governance has yet to be worked out. Whether
what evolves produces the cosy image of a global village, or a global Johannesburg
(a tense city held together, and apart, by razor wire), or any other urban metaphor for
our future remains to be seen. But what seems beyond doubt is the verdict that the
rationality of statism—the belief that all decision-making power and loyalty should be
focused on the sovereign (for the most part multi-nation) state—has reached its
culminating point, and that future patterns of global governance will involve complex
decentralisation below the state level, functional organisations above the state level,
and a growing network of economic, social and cultural interdependencies at the
level of transnational civil society outside the effective control of governments.

30
4. If the whole of the community had the same interests, so that the interests of
each and every portion would be so affected by the action of the government that the
laws which oppressed or impoverished one portion would necessarily oppress and
impoverish all others—or the reverse— then the right of suffrage, of itself, would be
all-sufficient to counteract the powers, and of course, would form, of itself, a perfect
constitutional government. The interest of all being the same, by supposition, as far
as the action of the government was concerned, all would have like interests as to
what laws should be made and how they should be executed. All strife and struggle
would cease as to who should be elected to make and execute them. The only
question would be, who was most fit, who the wisest and most capable of
understanding the common interest of the whole. ... But such is not the case. On the
contrary, nothing is more difficult than to equalise the action of the government in
reference to the various and diversified interests of the community; and nothing more
easy than to pervert its powers into instruments to aggrandise and enrich one or
more interests by oppressing and impoverishing the others; and this, too, under the
operations of laws couched in general terms and which, on their face, appear fair
and equal.

5. Are states legal fictions?

6. Can political leaders transcend the context in which they lead?

7. Is political thought unavoidably historical?

8. What in politics remains inexplicable?

Examiners’ reports

These are reports for seven recent examinations, chosen because they make
different and complementary points. It is strongly recommended that students
consult these.

2018

POL9 is a challenging paper, as everyone who takes or teaches for it is aware, but it
is also a paper that often brings out some of the most innovative and intricate work
that POLIS undergraduate students write during their time here. This year saw both
a general improvement in the quality of essays, both in respect of those on gobbets
and those in response to questions, and a significant number of top-quality essays.
Of the 15 essays (out of 96 candidates) that received an average mark of 70 or
higher, four of them received a mark of 80 or higher from one or both of their
markers. There were only two overall marks below 50, both in the high 40s. The full
range between those ends was used, with 28 scripts in the 65-69 range, 27 in the
60-64 range, and 24 in the 50-59 range.

31
There was a fairly good balance between those who took gobbets (41) and those
who answered questions (55). Each of the 10 options was answered by at least 5
people. The most popular was question 6 (on economic inequalities), which drew 17
answers. Gobbet 1 (on human nature explanations: 13 responses) and question 7
(on foreign policy: 12 responses) also attracted a good number of essays. The large
majority of the essays developed detailed and coherent arguments, with a good
range of evidence and/or theoretical development carrying the essay forward. Only a
small number were short, including the two which received marks lower than 50,
both of which were the length expected of a one-hour exam essay, rather than the
sort of work that can be produced in the three hours available to POL9 students for
planning and writing.

In terms of the subject matter within the essays, there was a broad range of issues
brought into the discussions, reflecting the diversity of topics taught in Part II POLIS.
It was pleasing to see in some essays detailed arguments being made about
particular countries and regions of the world, including the UK and Western Europe
which in the past have been underrepresented in POL9 essays; and, in other
essays, a close and critical engagement with key thinkers. Few students fell back on
simple theoretical exposition or reliance on descriptive narratives. All the top essays
had clear arguments to make, and many did so through engaging with other
compelling arguments in the academic literature but showing how those fall short of
providing a fully plausible answer.

Two more general problems were as follows. With the questions, essays which did
not develop sufficiently what key concepts in the questions do or may mean (eg
‘national culture’, ‘prudence’, ‘domestic politics’) often left the answers in a state of
vagueness. And with the gobbets, some essays did not seem to think with the author
enough about how their argument could be developed – it is barely a conclusive
criticism to make that the author doesn’t explain their terms or provide enough
evidence, when only a paragraph is being quoted.

There were more specific issues or limitations with some questions. It was striking
that only one of the 17 students who took the question on economic inequalities
mentioned wealth or income inequalities between men and women. With the options
that engage with issues of international relations, principally gobbet 3 and question
7, it was noticeable that quite a few essays did not seriously consider how
international politics can be argued to have dynamics that are distinct from domestic
politics – or just made a fleeting and dismissive reference to realism to cover that
possibility. Gobbet 2 drew a number of answers which asserted that responsibility for
security and non-discrimination should not lie with the state, without providing any
sense of how otherwise violence and discrimination can be countered. Gobbet 4
elicited quite a few essays that simply recounted how a diverse selection of thinkers
would set up the concept of freedom, contrasting them in turn with the approach of
the passage but without evaluating those approaches.

32
In general, most of those taking POL9 seem to have assimilated the idea that this
paper encourages you to draw in material that is part of other taught courses, and
that the gobbets and questions are aligned with the papers taught by POLIS in Part
II. A few essays still however display little indication of having studied the topic in a
systematic way that is being discussed, particularly those making polemical
arguments and which make no reference to academic literature. Using material that
forms part of taught courses (or assessed work), often taking it from more than one
paper, and developing it to a level of detail that answers in other examined papers
do not allow due to time restraints, is a significant feature of how this paper is often
best approached. It is perfectly legitimate to bring in other material as well, but
students who do so should be confident that their understanding of that material is
robust enough to withstand critical scrutiny.

2015

56 candidates took the paper in 2015. There were 8 agreed firsts and 2 more
candidates where a candidate received one first class mark. There were also 8
agreed lower seconds and 2 more candidates received one lower second mark. This
year there were no third class scripts.

The scripts in aggregate showed a significant improvement on 2014. There were

proportionately fewer short answers although a number of the lower seconds were
still awarded to candidates who wrote less than five pages. Within the upper second
range, proportionately more candidates received a mark of 65 or above.

This year far more candidates answered a text question than in 2014. Generally, the
text questions were also answered better at least at the top end. All the agreed firsts
came on a passage question. Candidates seemed to focus their answers more
clearly and precisely on passages than on the general questions. In part this
disparity arose because many candidates did not answer the general questions very
directly. For example, only one candidate on the question about contingency really
got to grips with the contingency versus necessity antithesis on which the notion of
contingency relies. No candidate made a clear distinction between that which could
or could not be otherwise by virtue of political agency and that which could have
been otherwise by virtue of chance in the material world. Similarly, most answers on
the compatibility of modern democracy and modern technology paid rather little
attention to modern technology itself. Here nobody got much beyond the internet,
and several candidates tried to answer the question as if technology were itself the
fundamental issue in democracy’s ability to adapt to crisis.

Certainly the best answers, especially on the passages, showed a considerable

analytical flair and engaged directly and intelligently with specific material.
Otherwise promising answers of both kinds, however, were rather let down by an
apparent unwillingness to make arguments through a command of detail about

33
something of substance. Many examples were under-developed, and too many
candidates still fell back at least in part of their essays on rehashing various political
theorists’ approaches to the issue at hand. Candidates need to think harder about
the way they make arguments so that their essays both use evidence through cases
more effectively and have a sharper analytical structure. On this paper this requires
candidates to reflect more on the pertinence of the material they bring to bear on
either the propositions on the passage or the analytical terms of the general
questions.

2014

80 students took the exam this year. The division between texts and questions was
more unbalanced than in previous years, with 64 opting for questions and 16 for the
texts. The most popular questions were no. 6 and no. 7 (on what makes a good
politician and whether there can be a global politics). The question that produced
the highest average mark was no. 5 on democracy and technocracy. The question
that produced the lowest average mark, by some distance, was no. 8: ‘Why vote?’
Too many answers to this question showed no knowledge of any relevant literature
and seemed to be based solely on its topicality, leading to thin and insubstantial
answers. I’ll return to this below.

The overall spread of marks showed that this paper continues to stretch students at
both ends of the scale. There were not any of the truly outstanding scripts that we
have sometimes seen in previous years but there were still a good number of very
strong scripts and fourteen agreed firsts were awarded. However, there were also a
significant number of scripts that received agreed 2.2 marks or 3rds. The weaker
scripts almost all tended to fall down on two fronts:

(i) Length: too many answers were too short, often only 6-8 sides of
handwritten text and sometimes as few as 4. This is insufficient for a three
hour exam that is designed to give students the opportunity to show the
range and depth of their knowledge after three years of studying politics.
We expect answers to contain detailed analysis and to back up the case
being made with substantive discussions of relevant examples. Too many
answers lacked this detail and consisted simply of generalisations coupled
with very brief or sketchy examples.
(ii) Choice of question: too many students chose questions that they were
not equipped to answer. This was especially true of q. 8 (‘Why vote?’).
Questions should be chosen that allow the student to develop an
argument in some detail that relates to an area in which they have
particular knowledge and interest. General questions are not intended to
produce only general answers or answers based on a recapitulation of
material covered in the first year course. For that reason, some students
this year might have been better choosing a passage to write about, since
the passages require a greater attention to detail and the development of a

34
 range of different points. Students should avoid questions that appeal
simply because they seem topical or relevant to current events (many of
the answers to q. 8 were focussed on UKIP’s electoral success the
previous week). Topicality can be an asset in a well-grounded essay but
topicality on its own is no substitute for broad knowledge and detailed
analysis.

Overall, students taking this paper need to make sure that they select a question that
gives them the best opportunity to show the range of their knowledge and
understanding acquired over three years, and particularly during the two years of
their degree when they have been specialising in politics. They should be prepared
to write at some length and to develop their arguments in detail. This means
choosing to write on a topic about which they have some detailed knowledge. There
should be sufficient scope across the eight questions for this paper to give all
candidates the opportunity to do that.

2013

There were 77 candidates for this paper. The distribution of answers was fairly even
between passages (33 in total) and essay questions (44 in total). There was also a
relatively even mix between answers that focussed on political theory and those that
drew primarily on comparative/empirical studies. The most popular passage was no.
3 on democracy and the most popular question was no. 6 on the decline of the West.
Overall there was a pleasing number of first-class scripts, with 12 agreed firsts being
awarded. A number of these were extremely impressive and the very best answers
showed an excellent mix of knowledge, insight and analytical precision. This exam
remains a good test of the ability of students to sustain and develop an argument
over an extended time period. Many showed that they were able to do this but a
number of answers seemed to run out of steam quite early. There were a surprising
number of relatively short scripts (6-8 sides) for a three hour exam (though having
said that a couple of the very best answers were of that length). Students should be
reminded that this exam is an opportunity to show the range of their reading and
interests and it is disappointing when answers become repetitive or simply tail off. It
should be possible for all politics finalists to draw on a wide range of material when
writing for this paper.

The answers to text passages were sometimes a little formulaic: these essays would
break the passage down into its component claims but said too little about how and
why these claims went together. The best answers were alive to the structural
tensions and ambiguities in the passage as a whole. Some answers also neglected
aspects of the passage in question: for instance, too many answers to question 3
neglected the implications of the final sentence about ‘too much’ democracy; in the
case of question 4 answers tended to ignore the demographic claim at the heart of
the passage or decide that it was incidental to the main point. It is important when
writing about these passages to be alive to the full range of what is being said and to

35
explore how and why particular illustrations or iterations of the argument might be
there.

The essay answers on the whole made good use of examples though these were
sometimes a little general and lacking in detail. The best examples don’t simply
reinforce the case being made but develop and when necessary complicate it.
Students should not be afraid of using complex examples to show the limits of
general answers to the question being asked. In some cases there was also a
tendency to spend too much time focussing on the terms of the question. For
instance, with question 6, a number of essays devoted an excessive amount of
space to inconclusive definitions of ‘political’, ‘decline’ and ‘West’; likewise, with
question 8 too many answers circled around the problem of defining peace without
pursuing a particular line on it. Essays for this paper do not need extended
definitional or scene-setting introductions. It is better to get on with answering the
question in a forthright way and then developing variations or complications on that
theme.

2011

There were 63 candidates for this paper. There was one starred first, 8 firsts, 41
upper seconds and thirteen lower seconds. There were 17 answers on the passages
and 46 answers on the general questions. The average mark on the passages was
61.8 and on the general questions 63.6. Question 1 was answered least well and
question 8 most effectively. Around 60 per cent of candidates performed in the same
class on this paper as their overall class, around 30 per cent performed one class
below, and around 6 per cent one class above. One candidate performed two
classes below his/her overall class but the mark for this paper did not determine
his/her class because there were compensating marks on other papers. Of the 2.2
scripts, 12 were significantly short answers and one contained a significant amount
of discussion that was irrelevant to the question.

The length of answers on this paper has proved a significant weakness for some
candidates over the past few years. Candidates are expected to produce at least
eight pages of single-spaced average-sized handwriting. Candidates have three
hours for one question and cannot expect to receive upper second marks for
answers that are significantly shorter than that. Candidates also must offer
conclusions to their essays to achieve upper second marks or above.

The relatively weak answers on the first passage stemmed from an almost uniform
failure to read the passage accurately. All but one answer attributed a normative
argument about the problem of democracy and/or the common good to the author
that is not there in the text and failed to set out the individual propositions of the
argument that is in the text. These answers generally read as though they were
prepared answers on democracy that had been put on to this question rather than
direct engagement with the argument in the passage.

36
Across the passages and questions there was a general weakness in dealing with
the relationship between the question asked, the argument made, and the examples
used in the making that argument. Too many candidates moved to their examples
too quickly, particularly on the general questions. Candidates need to offer some
general discussion of the question in setting up and then to reflect on the relevance
of the examples they wish to use in engaging with that question. This requires some
discussion of the limitations and issues created by using particular examples.
Candidates need to think hard about what the terms of particular questions require in
this respect. ‘Can politicians be honest’ is not the same question as ‘Should
politicians be honest?’ And ‘Does power necessarily destroy itself’ is not the same
question as ‘Does power destroy itself?’. Examples need to be directed at the
question as asked and to be reflected on as examples in that context. Candidates
need to return in the conclusion of the essays to the issues raised by the examples
they have used in relation to the question.

More generally, a significant number of candidates struggled in setting questions up

and missed some obvious distinctions. Rather few candidates distinguished between
the power of states internationally and domestically in discussing the nature of the
power of the state. A number of candidates got into a muddle trying to define
‘economic’ in a way that could be used in answering question well.

Finally, there is still a tendency among some candidates to offer answers that lack
the architecture and language of an argument. Some candidates describe arguments
rather than make them by presenting a particular author’s argument as evidence
itself that the claims in it are persuasive. Some candidates also use the words
through which arguments are made – thus, therefore, however, nonetheless, yet,
but, consequently – in incorrect ways. In particular there was a tendency among
some candidates to use ‘therefore’ ‘thus’ and ‘however’ as conjunctions and
undermine their own arguments in doing so.

2009

There were 60 candidates for the paper. The examiners gave nine agreed firsts, 36
agreed upper seconds, and 10 agreed lower seconds. Three candidates received a
first class mark paired with an upper second. Generally, the scripts were very
encouraging compared to recent years. There were more firsts, fewer lower
seconds, and no thirds. More than half the candidates who got agreed firsts for this
paper achieved an overall first in the Tripos because of their performance on Pol13.

Candidates directed their answers to the questions and used a broader and more
imaginative range of examples than they have for some time. Candidates were also
more willing to tackle the general questions than they were last year, and most of the
first class answers came from this part of the paper. Whilst it is crucial that
candidates set out the propositions in the text in answering the passage questions,
they also should be willing to engage with the persuasiveness of those propositions

37
in ways that goes beyond the immediate content of the passage. Examples can be
deployed as effectively here as on general questions. It was striking that the question
about fear was so much better answered than the question about hope in 2007 when
substantively they were exactly the same question. Here candidates did engage with
the nature of fear before embarking upon an answer and generally reasoned their
way to a set of conclusions that answered the question. The contrast with the
previous answers on hope suggests that candidates help themselves when they
contain any urge they may have to use Pol13 as a space to polemicise.

Despite the improvement in quality in this year, there are some long-standing failings
that remain. Setting out what different theorists would think about a question, without
engaging as to whether or not these theorists’ claims are persuasive or not, is not
making an argument but offering exposition and will not suffice. If candidates want to
make a point by saying that a particular theorist is right about something, then they
need to explain why they think that theorist is right and deal with the strongest
counter-argument that can be made against that position. Similarly, candidates need
to deploy examples to make an argument, not as decorative illustration of some
supposedly self-evident truth. They also need to remember that virtually all examples
from real-world politics will expose some political complexity and accordingly need to
be unpacked. Using the same example both to make an argument and to deal with
the counterargument can be an effective method of both capturing that complexity
and presenting a persuasive line of reasoning. Finally, candidates are still sometimes
too willing to generalise. This was particularly true this year when discussing
globalisation, development, and the international economy and it led some
candidates into some claims that are entirely empirically untenable. Pol13 gives
candidates enough time to think hard about each claim made in an essay and
candidates need to use that time profitably to ask themselves about the
persuasiveness of everything that they want to say.

2007

There were fifty candidates for the paper. The examiners gave one agreed starred
first, 2 agreed firsts, 17 agreed upper seconds, 17 agreed lower seconds, 4 agreed
thirds. Three candidates received a first class mark paired with an upper second,
and 6 an upper second paired with a lower second.

For the first time since this paper began the answers were very unevenly distributed
between texts and general questions. 14 candidates answered a text question and
36 a general question, with 24 of those taking a general question writing about hope.
Given that the answers on hope were of a variable quality and that the majority of the
candidates failed to establish any real analytical purchase on what hope might mean,
the disposition to this question did not on balance do a service to candidates. The
average mark for text questions was higher than for general questions. Whilst there
was no mark lower than 52 on the texts, there were 4 thirds for general questions.

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The question on constitutions was particularly poorly answered with no script
receiving two marks above lower-second quality.

The two best scripts showed once again just what candidates can achieve on this
paper when they pursue the question or text with vigour and rigour and use the time
available to think through their answer before beginning to write. That one of these
scripts was on a question (oligarchy) that nobody else answered also suggests that
the apparently obvious or easy question to answer might not always be the wisest
choice.

The questions on hope and constitutions produced virtually all the weakest answers.
On both several candidates dumped what were clearly supervision essays or exam
answers for other papers. The examiners cannot emphasise strongly enough that
such answers on Pol13 will meet low marks. This almost invariably has deleterious
consequences. At least five candidates dropped a class in Part IIB because of their
performance in Pol13. The risk is not simply a pair of third class marks, which cannot
be compensated for an upper second degree, but of low lower second mark which
reduces a candidate’s overall average below the 59 threshold required for an upper
second. Of the better lower-second answers, too many candidates wrote at too high
a level of generality, fell back on polemic and assertion, or failed to engage with the
terms of the question. This was particularly striking on the answers on hope, which
was taken to mean a multitude of different things, some of which bore little relation to
any definition of hope as the wish for something in the face uncertainty. No
candidate stopped to distinguish between hope as a reasoned belief and hope as an
emotion, or between the relationship between hope and politics in the context of the
hope-possessing agent having power and in a context in which that agent is without
power. Some fairly simple distinctions would get answers to general questions off to
a good start and provide a clearer analytical structure to answers than many
candidates are deploying. Too many candidates this year gave the impression that
they had embarked on answers before getting their general thoughts under control,
or having worked out how to use specific empirical and theoretical points to make
their arguments. As the examiners said last year, the opportunity to think for an hour
should be used to the full.

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