Optional theme: Social philosophy practice questions.

Foucault takes Bentham's panopticon as the model of a form of power that

• works by rendering the subject permanently visible, so that she supervises herself
• operates through the sovereign's public and spectacular punishment of offenders
• rests on the ownership of the means of production and the extraction of surplus labour
• is exercised through rational-legal authority written down in bureaucratic rules

Answer: works by rendering the subject permanently visible, so that she supervises herself

Disciplinary power in Foucault's sense is productive and internalised: the inmate cannot tell when he is watched, so he behaves as though he always were. That is the contrast with sovereign power, which shows itself in the spectacle of punishment.

A school treats familiarity with classical music and formal speech as marks of ability, and pupils from professional households arrive with both. Bourdieu describes the advantage those pupils bring as

• anomie, the loosening of the shared norms that would otherwise regulate their conduct
• alienation, the separation of producers from the products of their labour
• communicative action, conduct oriented towards reaching a shared understanding
• cultural capital, converted into educational success by the school's own criteria

Answer: cultural capital, converted into educational success by the school's own criteria

Cultural capital names dispositions and competences that function as assets because institutions recognise them; Bourdieu's point is that the school converts an inherited familiarity into a certified merit, which is how a structure reproduces itself without anyone intending it.

A printed slip of paper counts as a banknote only because those who use it collectively accept that it does. Searle analyses such cases as

• brute facts, which would obtain even if no human being had ever agreed to anything
• institutional facts, created by a constitutive rule of the form 'X counts as Y'
• social facts, external to individuals and exercising constraint upon them
• regulative rules, which order an activity that already exists without them

Answer: institutional facts, created by a constitutive rule of the form 'X counts as Y'

Constitutive rules make an activity possible rather than merely ordering it, and collective acceptance is what assigns the status function. Durkheim's social facts, by contrast, are picked out by external constraint rather than by an assigned status.

A researcher holds that every statement about an institution is in the end a statement about the actions and beliefs of individual people. This commitment is

• methodological holism, on which social wholes have properties no individual has
• historical materialism, on which the economic base conditions the superstructure
• methodological individualism, defended in the tradition of Weber
• structuration, on which structure and agency each presuppose the other

Answer: methodological individualism, defended in the tradition of Weber

The dispute is about explanation, not about whether institutions matter: an individualist can grant that institutions constrain people while denying that they are entities over and above them. Durkheim's insistence that social facts are irreducible is the holist counterpart.

A recruitment scheme removes every formal barrier to applying but leaves untouched the very unequal preparation that applicants bring with them. The ideal it realises is

• formal equality of opportunity, often summarised as careers open to talents
• fair equality of opportunity, which also corrects for unequal social starting points
• equality of outcome, on which the positions themselves are distributed equally
• equality of welfare, on which the satisfaction people finally achieve is equalised

Answer: formal equality of opportunity, often summarised as careers open to talents

Formal equality of opportunity is satisfied by non-discriminatory procedures alone, which is exactly why Rawls adds the fair version: those with the same talent and the same willingness to use it should have the same prospects whatever class they were born into.

Iris Marion Young argues that oppression is not a single relation but a family of distinct conditions. Which of the following does she treat as one of its faces?

• Statistical discrimination, the use of group averages to predict an individual's productivity
• A distribution of income that fails to satisfy Rawls' difference principle
• Anomie, the weakening of the norms that would otherwise regulate conduct
• Cultural imperialism, the imposition of a dominant group's experience as the norm

Answer: Cultural imperialism, the imposition of a dominant group's experience as the norm

Young's argument is that a purely distributive account cannot capture conditions of this kind, since what is at stake is whose experience counts as the standard one rather than who holds how much.