Quiz: The Poverty of Philosophy

11 questions drawn at random. Score 80% for a silver medal.

1. 1. What name does Proudhon give his personified society, as Marx mocks?

   Hercules Leviathan Adam Prometheus
2. 2. How does Marx sum up Proudhon at the end of the section on method?

   He is only the petty bourgeois, tossed between capital and labour A conservative aristocrat, longing for the feudal order A great revolutionary, the theorist of the proletariat’s emancipation A proletarian thinker, speaking for the workers against all capital
3. 3. When, according to Marx, will social evolutions cease to be political revolutions?

   Never When universal suffrage is won and the democratic republic secured When the workers have won a majority in the national parliament Only when there are no longer classes or class antagonism
4. 4. What “double error” about Proudhon does Marx’s brief preface protest against?

   He is thought both rich and poor French think him a German philosopher; Germans think him a French economist He is taken both for a socialist and for a Manchester liberal He is thought both a devout Catholic and a militant atheist
5. 5. What are economic categories, according to Marx?

   Ideas existing in impersonal reason before society itself Arbitrary inventions of economists to justify the existing order of property Theoretical expressions, abstractions, of social relations of production Eternal laws of nature, holding true independently of any historical society
6. 6. What does Marx call the latest phase of exchange, when even virtue, love and conscience are sold?

   The time of general corruption, universal venality The age of reason and enlightened self-interest The era of barter The golden age of trade
7. 7. Complete Marx’s phrase about labour in modern industry: “Time is everything, man is …”

   everything too nothing a machine free
8. 8. To what formula does Marx say Proudhon reduces Hegel’s dialectic?

   Subject, object and spirit Thesis, antithesis and synthesis Quantity, quality and measure Being, nothing and becoming
9. 9. With which words, from George Sand, does the book end?

   “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” “Le combat ou la mort; la lutte sanguinaire ou le néant” “Après nous le déluge” “La propriété, c’est le vol”
10. 10. In England, with which political party does Marx say the trade unions are linked?

    The Anti-Corn Law League The Tory Radicals The Chartists The Whigs of Lord John Russell
11. 11. Against which charge does Engels’s 1884 preface mostly defend Marx?

    That he plagiarised Rodbertus That he was a Hegelian That he plagiarised Proudhon’s own ideas That he misquoted Ricardo’s figures