Quiz: The Housing Question

All 35 questions. A perfect score earns the gold medal; 80% earns silver.

1. 1. From which book of Proudhon’s does Engels say all of Mülberger’s positive proposals come?

   The Federative Principle of 1863 What Is Property?, his first memoir of 1840 The System of Economic Contradictions Idée générale de la Révolution
2. 2. How does Mülberger describe the modern proletarian, compared with the troglodyte and the Indian?

   Better housed than any savage Happier than his ancestors “Suspended in mid-air”, with no place he can call his own Free of all ties
3. 3. Whose book does Engels take as representative of bourgeois housing reform in Part II?

   Gustav Schmoller’s Lujo Brentano’s Dr. Emil Sax’s Victor Aimé Huber’s
4. 4. How many people had the London building companies housed, according to Engels?

   None About 100,000 Over a million Under 15,000
5. 5. How, according to Engels, could the housing shortage be remedied immediately in a social revolution?

   By fixing rents by law below the market price and fining landlords who refuse to let rooms By encouraging emigration to the colonies until the demand for dwellings falls to the supply By expropriating some luxury dwellings of the rich and quartering people in the rest By building new workers’ towns in the countryside with state credit, away from the big cities
6. 6. To what does Engels compare the use of “justice” as an explanation in social science?

   Keeping the terminology of the phlogiston theory in modern chemistry Using the terms of alchemy to describe the modern chemical industry Explaining disease by the four humours in modern scientific medicine Keeping the vocabulary of astrology in modern astronomical science
7. 7. Where, according to Engels, does Proudhon take refuge instead of explaining economic facts?

   In history and an appeal to the customs of the old village commune In the sphere of law and an appeal to eternal justice In statistics and the reports of the factory inspectors In religion and an appeal to the Gospel’s condemnation of usury
8. 8. Which manufacturer does Engels name as already selling workers houses paid for in instalments, to tie them down?

   Alfred Krupp M. Dollfus of Mulhouse Robert Owen Titus Salt
9. 9. For which paper did Engels write the three parts of The Housing Question in 1872–73?

   The Neue Zeit The Neue Rheinische Zeitung The Volksstaat, published in Leipzig The Vorwärts of Berlin
10. 10. Which Manchester slum, cleared for a railway station, reappeared across Oxford Road?

    Little Ireland Deansgate Angel Meadow Ancoats
11. 11. Where does Engels say petty-bourgeois socialism still has representatives in 1887?

    Nowhere Only in France, among the surviving followers of Proudhon In the party’s own parliamentary group in the Reichstag In the Prussian government and the Catholic Centre party
12. 12. Who was the author of the Proudhonist articles that Engels answers?

    Dr. Emil Sax Eugen Dühring of Berlin University Dr. A. Mülberger of Württemberg Ferdinand Lassalle
13. 13. What does the German domestic worker’s owning a house, garden or field allow employers to do, according to Engels?

    Tax the family’s produce as a condition of giving out work to the household Pay in kind from the company store, recovering the wage through inflated prices Deduct what the family grows from wages, paying infamously low piece-rates Lay the worker off each winter, since his garden will feed the family until spring
14. 14. Why are centrally situated workers’ dwellings pulled down in big towns?

    Sanitary laws condemn them as breeding grounds of disease, and their owners must demolish them The workers themselves leave the centre for cheaper rents and cleaner air on the outskirts Their owners can no longer find tenants once the factories move out of the old town centres Rising land values make it pay to clear them for shops, offices and public buildings
15. 15. Which Proudhonist proposition does Engels call “totally false”?

    “As the peasant is in relation to the landlord, so is the artisan in relation to the merchant prince” “As the wage-worker is in relation to the capitalist, so is the tenant in relation to the house-owner” “The wage-worker sells his labour-power to the capitalist at its value, and no more” “The housing shortage is an evil that the oppressed classes of all times have suffered”
16. 16. How does Engels characterise the housing shortage at the start of Part I?

    A passing disorder of the building boom, which the market will cure within a few years An old evil shared by all oppressed classes in all ages, not peculiar to the modern proletariat A problem peculiar to the factory proletariat, which peasants and artisans never suffered A wholly new evil, created by modern industry and unknown to earlier oppressed classes
17. 17. Whom does Engels say approached “the definite concrete conditions of society” more closely than anyone?

    Proudhon Mülberger himself Marx in Capital, after twenty-five years of study Lassalle
18. 18. What does Engels say the state is, in explaining why it will not solve the housing plague?

    A neutral arbiter standing above the classes, too weak to override private property The servant of the whole people, which lacks the money to build dwellings for all The organised collective power of the possessing classes against the exploited An independent bureaucratic power with interests of its own, hostile to all reform
19. 19. Why does Engels call Mülberger’s lament for “hearth and home” reactionary?

    The worker’s tie to the land had to be cut to create the revolutionary proletariat Workers in the big towns have long since come to prefer rented flats to cottages and gardens Owning a home makes the worker a petty capitalist, who will then exploit tenants of his own The state already owns most of the land, so home ownership could never become general
20. 20. What economic circumstance does Engels say sharpened the housing shortage in Germany in 1872?

    The “rain of French milliards” after 1871 The Californian gold discoveries The cotton famine The repeal of the Corn Laws
21. 21. Which French model of workers’ housing does Engels examine and dismiss?

    Lyons Familistère of Guise The workers’ town of Mulhouse in Alsace Le Creusot
22. 22. Who, according to Engels, exploited the tendency of rising town land values “to the utmost” through Haussmann?

    The Vienna municipality The Prussian monarchy in Berlin The London County Council Bonapartism in Paris
23. 23. Which French faction does Engels say adopted the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat after the Commune?

    The Proudhonists The Jacobins of 1793 The Blanquists The Orleanists
24. 24. Whom do the English building societies mainly serve, according to Engels?

    Landed aristocrats, as a means of raising rents on their estates around the towns Clerks and the best-paid workers, as petty-bourgeois savings and speculation clubs Newly arrived Irish immigrants, as cooperative schemes for housing them cheaply The poorest unskilled labourers, as mutual-aid clubs run by the workers themselves
25. 25. What revealed the cellar dwellings of Squire’s Court in Manchester in 1872?

    A great flood A newspaper inquiry A fire A cholera outbreak
26. 26. Whose manufacture, according to Engels, are ready-made practical panaceas for all social evils?

    Trade-union leaders, seeking quick gains for their members within the existing order Bourgeois philanthropists, eager to reconcile the workers to the existing order Founders of sects, appearing while the proletarian movement was in its infancy Scientific socialists, who derive their programme from the study of political economy
27. 27. Why does Engels think Proudhonists seize on the housing question in particular?

    It is a question that can be settled within present society by a simple reform of rent law It touches only the factory workers, and so is the purest expression of proletarian suffering It is the form of exploitation that weighs most heavily on the workers, heavier than wages It is a suffering the workers share with other classes, especially the petty bourgeoisie
28. 28. How does Engels answer Mülberger’s claim that abolishing the antithesis of town and country is utopian?

    He says it is no utopia because the big towns can be abolished by decree immediately after the revolution He says it requires only that the countryside be industrialised entirely and agriculture abandoned No more utopian than abolishing the antithesis of capitalist and wage-worker He concedes it is utopian now, but says it will become practical once the towns have grown larger
29. 29. What does Engels say the bourgeois method of “Haussmann” does to the slums?

    It does not abolish them; it merely moves them It gives them to the workers It abolishes them for good by building new dwellings It turns them into parks and boulevards for the bourgeoisie
30. 30. What is Mülberger’s plan for abolishing the rented dwelling?

    Rents are frozen by law at their present level until wages have caught up with them The state builds dwellings on public land and lets them to workers at the cost of upkeep Houses are confiscated without compensation and handed over to the tenants who occupy them Rent is turned into instalments on the purchase price, so the tenant becomes the owner
31. 31. In Engels’s sketch, what does custom become as society develops?

    Law, which needs organs to maintain it: the state Morality, which is upheld by public opinion and needs no organs Contract, freely agreed between individuals without any authority Religion, which needs a priesthood to interpret and enforce it
32. 32. Which scientist does Engels cite as demanding the abolition of the antithesis of town and country?

    Pasteur Humboldt Liebig, in his writings on agricultural chemistry Darwin
33. 33. How does Engels describe the German bourgeois literature on public health and housing?

    An original science owing nothing to foreign predecessors A watery extract of mainly English predecessors The most thorough in Europe, which the English have copied A purely statistical science, without any political aims
34. 34. What first roused the bourgeoisie’s interest in workers’ housing, according to Engels?

    The prospect of profits from building cheap workers’ flats Pressure from workers’ unions striking for better housing Concern for workers’ morals, corrupted by overcrowding Fear of epidemics from the slums, which also reach the rich
35. 35. What would happen to wages, according to Engels, if workers generally owned their houses under capitalism?

    They would fall on average by the amount of rent saved They would rise by the value of the house and its garden They would be paid in kind They would stay the same, as the house is the worker’s own savings