Political Philosophy
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50 free Political Philosophy trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Political philosophy asks the questions that sit underneath every election and every law: who should rule, what makes a government legitimate, and how much freedom a person can fairly be asked to give up. The arguments are more than two thousand years old, and many of the words we use for politics come straight out of them. This quiz moves from the city-states of ancient Greece, through the age of revolutions, to the debates of the twentieth century. It covers the famous thinkers and the books that made their names, the key ideas and thought experiments, and the stories behind terms that are now part of everyday speech. It is written for students revising a politics or philosophy course, for teachers who want a ready-made review round, and for anyone curious about where modern political arguments began. Every question comes with a short explanation, so a wrong answer teaches something too.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which pair of political labels comes from where deputies sat in France's National Assembly in 1789?
Left and right
Left and right began as a seating plan: defenders of the old regime gathered on one side of the chairman, partly to escape the shouting from the other side of the hall.
Q 02Which 1651 book by Thomas Hobbes, named after a sea monster in the Book of Job, defends absolute rule?
Leviathan
Leviathan was written during the English Civil War, and its title page shows the state as a crowned giant whose body is made up of hundreds of tiny people.
Q 03Which Florentine diplomat wrote The Prince, advising rulers that it is safer to be feared than loved?
Niccolò Machiavelli
Niccolò Machiavelli wrote it after losing his government post and never saw it in print: the book appeared five years after his death, and his name became a byword for cunning.
Q 04In Plato's Republic, which group does Socrates say must become rulers before an ideal city can exist?
Philosophers
Philosophers alone grasp what is truly good, the argument runs. Plato later tried coaching a real ruler, the young tyrant of Syracuse, who proved an unwilling student.
Q 05John Locke wrote of life, liberty and estate; which phrase ends the Declaration of Independence's trio?
The pursuit of happiness
The pursuit of happiness closes Jefferson's most famous sentence. Scholars argue over whether he was reworking Locke, for whom protecting property was the whole point of government.
Q 06Which 1848 pamphlet by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels closes with a call for the world's workers to unite?
The Communist Manifesto
The Communist Manifesto was commissioned by a small league based in London, and Marx ran so late with the draft that its leaders sent him an ultimatum.
Q 07Which word did Thomas More coin in 1516 for an imaginary island, from Greek meaning no place?
Utopia
Utopia is a pun: More pointed out that it sounds like the Greek for good place. His first name for the island was Nusquama, Latin for nowhere.
Q 08Which American writer's night in jail for refusing to pay a poll tax led to his 1849 essay Civil Disobedience?
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau withheld the tax in protest at slavery and the Mexican–American War. His essay later shaped the campaigns of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.
Q 09Which word for rule by the talented did Michael Young's 1958 satire popularise as an insult?
Meritocracy
Meritocracy began as a warning, not praise: Young was mocking an exam-sorted school system in which a person's worth came down to IQ plus effort.
Q 10Which ideology is named after a bundle of rods and an axe carried before magistrates in ancient Rome?
Fascism
Fascism took its name from Mussolini's movement, yet the fasces long stood for lawful authority: a pair of them decorates Abraham Lincoln's chair at the Lincoln Memorial.
Q 11Thomas Hobbes called life in which imagined condition solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short?
State of nature
State of nature was his name for it, and he pictured it as a war of all against all. Only handing power to one strong ruler, he argued, would let people stop fearing their neighbours.
Q 12Which Greek thinker, tutor to the young Alexander the Great, famously called man a political animal?
Aristotle
Aristotle meant that people can only flourish inside a city-state, the polis. The title of his book on the subject gave English the word politics.
Q 13Which English-born pamphleteer wrote Common Sense in 1776, urging the American colonies to break from Britain?
Thomas Paine
Q 21Which English thinker's 1859 essay On Liberty holds that power may be used over others only to prevent harm?
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill credited much of the essay to his wife Harriet, who died just before it was finished. A 2022 analysis of its style backed her claim to be co-author.
Q 22Which Dublin-born MP, often called the founder of conservatism, attacked the French Revolution in 1790?
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke was no simple defender of authority: years earlier he had criticised the British government for the way it taxed its American colonies.
Q 23Which French visitor was sent to study American prisons in 1831 and came home to write Democracy in America?
Thomas Paine published it anonymously, and the 47-page pamphlet became an instant sensation that was read aloud in taverns and meeting places.
Q 14Which Scottish thinker's 1776 book The Wealth of Nations described an invisible hand guiding trade?
Adam Smith
Adam Smith used his most famous image only once in the whole book, in a passage about merchants who prefer to invest at home.
Q 15Which French baron's 1748 book The Spirit of Law argued for splitting government power into branches?
Montesquieu
Montesquieu published the book anonymously and the Catholic Church banned it, yet its scheme of divided powers went on to shape the United States Constitution.
Q 16Which English writer's 1792 book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman demanded a full education for girls?
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft wrote it in reply to a French report saying girls needed only domestic training. She died days after the birth of her daughter, the future author of Frankenstein.
Q 17Which thought experiment did John Rawls make famous in his 1971 book A Theory of Justice?
Veil of ignorance
The veil of ignorance was Rawls's own coinage: people who cannot know whether they will end up rich or poor, he argued, will choose rules that are fair to everyone.
Q 18In Plato's Republic, Glaucon tells of a shepherd who finds which object that lets its wearer turn invisible?
A ring
A ring lets the shepherd seduce a queen and seize a throne unseen. Glaucon tells the tale to ask whether anyone would stay honest with no risk of being caught.
Q 19Which form of government, whose Greek name means rule of the best, has oligarchy as its corrupted version?
Aristocracy
Aristocracy at first had nothing to do with titles or birth: the Greeks who coined it meant rule by the most able citizens, and frowned on power simply being inherited.
Q 20John Locke, a physician by training, is often called the father of which political tradition?
Liberalism
Liberalism owes Locke its claim that rulers govern only with the people's consent. He published the book making that case anonymously, just after England's Glorious Revolution.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville spent nine months roaming as far as the Michigan frontier and New Orleans, and he did hand in his report on penitentiaries before the famous book.
Q 24Which theory of how government began links Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, who each gave a different version?
Social contract
Social contract theories begin by imagining life with no government at all. Hobbes found that prospect so grim that he thought people would give a sovereign absolute authority to escape it.
Q 25Which doctrine, championed in print by England's James I, held that a monarch answers to no earthly authority?
Divine right of kings
Divine right of kings meant that trying to depose a monarch defied God's will. James wrote his textbooks on it while ruling Scotland, before he inherited the English throne.
Q 26Which German-born thinker coined the phrase the banality of evil while reporting on Adolf Eichmann's trial?
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt covered the trial for The New Yorker. She had fled Germany herself when Hitler rose to power and lived for a time as a stateless refugee.
Q 27Which word, built from Sanskrit for holding firmly to truth, did Gandhi give his nonviolent resistance?
Satyagraha
Satyagraha grew out of a newspaper contest: Gandhi's South African news-sheet asked readers to name the movement, and a relative of his won the prize with a word Gandhi then adjusted.
Q 28Which circular prison design by Jeremy Bentham did Michel Foucault make a symbol of modern surveillance?
Panopticon
The Panopticon let one unseen guard watch every cell, so inmates would behave as if always observed. Bentham first sketched it while visiting his brother in the Russian Empire.
Q 29Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who declared that property is theft, was the first person known to adopt which label?
Anarchist
Anarchist was the label he chose, and many now call him the father of the movement. He was largely self-taught, having educated himself while working as an artisan.
Q 30Which Chinese doctrine, first used by the Zhou to justify toppling the Shang, said bad rulers forfeit power?
Mandate of Heaven
The Mandate of Heaven turned floods and famines into political threats: disasters were read as signs that a ruler had lost his claim to the throne, and revolts often followed them.