MMW 14
Chang Track
Winter 2014
Midterm Exam Review Guide
(This is meant to be a review guide, not the exam itself. Ultimately, you are accountable for all the
key materials in the readings and lectures.)
REVIEW SESSION: Sunday, February 9th from 8:30 to 9:30 pm in Center Hall 119
Exam will be designed for 1 hour 20 minutes (PLEASE REMEMBER TO BRING AN UNMARKED
BLUEBOOK FOR EXCHANGE. DO NOT ARRIVE LATE TO THE EXAM)
Part I. Objective Part (40%)
You need to be familiar with the historical context and significance of the following names and terms from
your readings and lectures. Be sure you are able to address the appropriate “who?” “what?” “where?” and
“when?’, and most importantly, “why?” questions associated with each one. Multiple Choice and
Matching Terms questions will be drawn from this guide. BUT, this is also very useful for the passage
identifications.
Examples of Matching Terms format:
Please match the terms or names from each column that are most closely related in significance and
historical context. Write a 3-4 sentence explanation of their relationship (BE CONCISE AND PRECISE)
J. Alfred Prufrock
Ahimsa
Gandhi
Divided Self
1. Gandhi advocated the principle of ahimsa, which is the traditional Jainist notion of doing no harm
to all creatures. He used this principle as the basis of his “non-violent” resistance towards British
rule in India, which he launched in the 1940s. Holding this moral high-ground was crucial for the
ultimate success of India’s independence movement.
2. Prufrock is the protagonist in T.S. Eliot’s modernist poem, “The Love-song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
In his ambivalence towards action and paralysis in life, Prufrock symbolizes for Eliot the modern
condition of the “divided self.” This is a debilitating sense of alienation from the self and from
society that many 20th century psychoanalysts, such as Sigmund Freud and Erich Fromm,
associated with industrial society.
Key Terms and Names
An Economic Premise for 1750-1914
Rise of national monarchies
Markets vs. Market system
Land as real estate
Labor as commodity
Capital as investment
Social Contract Theory
Louis XIV and Absolutism
Glorious Revolution 1689
The English Bill of Rights
Newton’s impact on the Enlightenment
Thomas Hobbes
Leviathan 1651
State of nature
Role of self-interest
Sovereignty in “common power to fear”
John Locke
State of nature
Inconvenient presence of self-interest
Sovereignty in common-wealth
Interests of the propertied class
Parliamentary government
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
State of nature
Critique of absolutist monarchy
Argument against slavery
On Social contract
Sovereignty of the General Will
View on private property
From Theory to Revolution
Britain’s fiscal crisis
Tea Act of 1773
Adams’s use of Locke
Franklin’s defense of laissez-faire
Taxation of the French aristocracy
Estates General 1789
Three Estates
Cahiers de Doléances
Symbolic detachment of Versailles
“Tennis Court Oath”
Bread Riots
Marquis de Lafayette
Formation of the National Assembly
New “revolutionary” calendar
Social Implications of Revolution
Maximilien Robespierre
Purifying power of terror
Sans-culottes
The mobile guillotine
Paris plebiscite and Napoleon
Edmund Burke
Concept of a “just revolution”
Thomas Paine’s retort
English exceptionalism
Magna Charta
View of the French Revolution
Critique of revolution’s leaders
Olympe de Gouge
Role in the French Revolution
Rights gained, rights denied
Mary Wollstonecraft
Vindication of the Rights of Women
Dilemma of the “despotic ladies”
Intellectual independence
Revolution in the Western Hemisphere
French colony of Saint-Dominique
Code Noir
Political consciousness of the gens de couleur
Toussaint Louverture
Haitian Independence 1804
Appropriating nativism
Creoles vs. peninsulares
Simón Bolívar
“Unnatural” bond with Spain
Confederation or independent republics?
Gran Columbia
Spanish laws against miscegenation
Selling of “pardos”
Impact of Napoleonic wars on colonies
The Cortes of Cadiz 1810
Revolution in Economic Behavior
Adam Smith
Francois Quesnay’s “Physiocracy”
Wealth of Nations 1776
Social conditions in Smith’s time
“Invisible hand” of the self-regulating market
Positive role of self-interest
Law of competition
Law of natural pricing
Law of supply and demand
Law of accumulation
Law of population
Impediments to free competition
Cartels and monopolies
“Secrets in trade”
Division of labor
Benefits to industry
Potential hazards
Smith’s views on taxation
Critical Responses to Industrial Capitalism
Crystal Palace Exhibition 1851
Increase in industrial productivity
Andrew Ure
Advantages of industrial production
Obsolescence of skilled labor
Luddites’ Movement
Rationale for child labor
Malthusian peril
Unemployment crisis of 1816-1820
Robert Owen
“Man is the creature of circumstance”
New Lanark
Villages of Cooperation
“New Harmony” in Indiana
Charles Fourier
“Little Hordes”
“Phalansteres”
Grand National of 1833
Saint-Simone on unequal distribution
John Stuart Mill
“High stationary plateau”
Social adjustments to wealth distribution
The communist alternative in 1848
The Socialist Challenge
Social uprisings of 1848
Hegelian historical dialectic
Dialectic materialism
Modes of production and exchange
Base and superstructure
Das Kapital
Dismantling the sanctity of “private property”
“Revolving door” of labor wages
Proletariat vs. bourgeoisie
Pierre Proudhon
“Reactionary” bourgeois values
True value vs. surplus value of labor
Labor-saving machinery
The “business cycle” of crisis and renewal
Gradual demise of capitalism
Imperialism and the Crisis of Capitalism
“A world after its own image”
International division of labor
Colonized as the “proletariats’ proletariat”
J.A. Hobson
Problem with excess savings
Outlet for capital investment
New markets for goods
Equivocal rhetoric of “Nationalism”
Imperialism as catalyst to world conflict
Pressures of competition for post-1870 Britain
Protectionist policies of competitors
“The White Man’s Burden”
Cecil Rhodes
Social Darwinism and Racial Ideology
Karl Pearson’s “Grammar of Science”
Science as the consummate discipline
The advent of the “social sciences”
Herbert Spencer
Natural selection in human society
Theory of evolutionary progress
Racial division of labor
Patterns of migrations in 19th century
Etienne Serres’s Theory of Recapitulation
Biological determinism and racial ranking
Louis Agassiz
Theory of monogeny vs. polygeny
Fear of miscegenation and “half-breeds”
View on public education
Part II: Passage Identifications (20%)
Three passages from the following selection will be included on the midterm. You will choose two to
write on. In your response, you must identify the economic or social context, in which each passage occurs
(e.g. speaker, subject, occasion, purpose, general time period). Whenever possible, you need to explain
HOW it connects to a key theme in our course so far (sovereignty, revolution, capitalism, imperialism,
etc.). Each response should be one paragraph long (roughly half a page in length). Be specific and
succinct!
Text References in brackets will NOT be provided on the actual exam
1) “And yet it may be true, perhaps, that the accommodation of an European prince does not always
so much exceed that of an industrious and frugal peasant, as the accommodation of the latter
exceeds that of many an African king, the absolute master of the lives and liberties of ten thousand
naked savages.” (Adam Smith The Wealth of Nations)
2) “The most extreme sans-culottes did not use the term ‘aristocrat’ for the old nobility, but for the
bourgeoisie. On May 21, 1793, a popular orator from the Mail section declared that ‘aristocrats
are all the people with money, all the fat merchants, all the monopolists, law students, bankers,
pettifoggers and anyone who has something.’” (Albert Soboul “The Sans-Culottes”)
3) “The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to compromise the wealth created by them.
And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand, by enforced destruction of
a mass productive forces; on the other, by the conquests of new market, and by the more thorough
exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more
destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crisis are prevented.” (Marx and Engels
Communist Manifesto)
4) “Or it may, like Great Britain, neglect its agriculture, allowing its lands to go out of cultivation,
and its population to grow up in towns, fall behind other nations in its methods of education and in
the capacity of adapting to its uses the latest scientific knowledge, in order that it may squander its
pecuniary and military resources in forcing bad markets and finding speculative fields of
investment in distant corners of the earth, adding millions of square miles and of unassimilable
population to the area of the Empire.” (Hobson Imperialism)
5) “Women, commonly called ladies, are not to be contradicted, in company, are not allowed to exert
any manual strength; and from them, the negative virtues only are expected—patience, docility,
good humour, and flexibility—virtues incompatible with any vigorous exertion of intellect.
Besides, by living more with each other, and seldom being absolutely alone, they are more under
the influence of sentiments than passions.” (Wollstonecraft Vindication of the Rights of Women)
Part Three: Short Essays on Course Theme (40%)
So far in our course, we have addressed the ideological tension that can often arise between freedom and
equality as goals for society. On the one hand, those who argue for free trade, free markets, government
laissez-faire, the free-play of supply and demand, etc. insist that the preservation of individual liberty
should be the highest priority of civil society; on the other hand, those who decry the nature of entrenched
class privilege, the disparities in access and capital, the exploitation of labor by management, the need for
greater government intervention, etc. regard the pursuit of economic equality as their primary social
agenda.
The two passages below, one by Samuel Adams and the other by Robert Owen, capture this tension well.
Select one individual from the following list who would agree with Adams and explain the reasons for that
agreement. Likewise, choose another individual from the same list who would agree with Owen and
explain the reasons for that agreement. In sum, you will write on TWO individuals from the list. Focus
mostly on the ideas of the individuals you have chosen by providing specific examples to show the
confluence.
The key challenge is to demonstrate that you have engaged the readings closely and are able to relate them
to key themes in a coherent, reflective, and concrete manner (i.e. make specific references to parts of
text). (Suggested length for each response: 1-1.5 blue-book page, single-spaced—do not go beyond)
Samuel Adams on freedom:
“When the grand end of civil government, from the very nature of its institution, is for the support,
protection, and defence of those very rights; the principal of which, as is before observed, are Life, Liberty,
and Property. If men, through fear, fraud, or mistake, should in terms renounce or give up any essential
natural right, the eternal law of reason and the grand end of society would absolutely vacate such
renunciation. The right to freedom being the gift of God Almighty, it is not in the power of man to alienate
this gift and voluntarily become a slave.”
Robert Owens on equality:
“That any community may be arranged, on a due combination of the foregoing principles, in such a
manner, as not only to withdraw vice, poverty, and in a great degree, misery, from the world, but also to
place every individual under circumstances in which he shall enjoy more permanent happiness than can be
given to any individual under the principles which have hitherto regulated society.”
Individuals you can write on: Locke, Adam Smith, Rousseau, J.S. Mill, Spencer, Marx, Wollstonecraft,
and Burke. (Choose a different one for each viewpoint)
Please bring an unmarked bluebook to the exam