Week 2 — Three Answers to One Question: A Social-Contract Report — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 2 of the term — work four short problems on this week's three social-contract texts and the Velmora case, analyze what each text claims, and explain to someone outside political science why power is not the same as a right to rule.

This week you learned to tell power, authority, and legitimacy apart, to sort authority with Weber's three types, to check a place against the four criteria of a state, and to read three famous answers to the question of why anyone should obey. Last week you learned to sort a claim as empirical or normative; this week you use that sort on Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. In this assignment you work four short problems on the week's texts and the Velmora case, analyze what each text claims, and explain a claim to someone who has never studied political science. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Political Analysis Workshop practice the same ideas from other angles.

The task

You will use these texts and this case, all from this week's chapter:

• Hobbes (1651), Leviathan, Chapter XIII: "where every man is Enemy to every man" and "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short" (the pinned edition keeps the 1651 spelling).
• Locke (1689), Second Treatise of Government: section 95, "by nature, all free, equal, and independent, no one can be put out of this estate, and subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent"; and section 6, "no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions".
• Rousseau (1762), The Social Contract, Book I, Chapter 1: "Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains."
• The illustrative country of Velmora, built for this course (not a real place): a dictatorship has fallen and no functioning government has replaced it; other states still treat Velmora as independent, while no one holds supreme authority at home.

Work these four problems, showing your arithmetic:

1. Hobbes's Leviathan appeared in 1651 and Locke's Second Treatise of Government appeared in 1689. How many years separate the two works?
2. Locke's Second Treatise of Government appeared in 1689 and Rousseau's The Social Contract appeared in 1762. How many years separate the two works?
3. Illustrative Velmora is checked against the 4 criteria of a state: it lacks 1 criterion (a functioning government) and 1 criterion is split (sovereignty). How many of the 4 criteria does it fully meet?
4. This week's 5 pinned fragments include 2 normative fragments from Locke and 1 mixed fragment from Rousseau. How many of the 5 fragments carry at least one normative part?

Beside each answer, add the analysis that goes with it. For problem 1, credit each Hobbes fragment and the section 95 fragment to the right thinker, and state each thinker's fear and remedy. For problem 2, say where Rousseau locates sovereignty and contrast that with Locke's answer. For problem 3, say what happened to Velmora's government, state, and nation, and name which kind of sovereignty holds and which is in doubt. For problem 4, sort all 5 fragments as empirical-leaning, normative, or mixed, splitting Rousseau's line into its two halves; then argue which lens should guide Velmora, stating the strongest case for one other lens first and labelling one empirical claim and one normative claim in your argument.

Explain it to a non-expert

Your cousin has never studied political science and shares a video clip that says, "Locke proved that life without government is nasty, brutish, and short, so any strong ruler is legitimate." Write a 3–5 sentence message to your cousin that fixes the attribution, explains in everyday words the difference between power and legitimacy, says which part of the clip's claim is a value question rather than a fact, and names one limit, such as that the state of nature is a thought experiment. Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one accurate wording can be defensible.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a coworker who says, "Our new manager can fire any of us, so everything she says is legitimate." Model answer: "I'd say 'Our manager has the power to fire us,' not 'everything she says is legitimate.' Power means she can make us comply. Legitimacy is the shared belief that the company's way of choosing and directing managers deserves our cooperation, and the two can come apart: a boss who rules by threats may get compliance and still lose the staff's trust. Whether we ought to follow a particular order is a separate question about values, not something her power settles."

Use that pattern for your message to your cousin, with your own wording and evidence.

Show your arithmetic. A reader should be able to reproduce every number you report from the values above without guessing which values or steps you used.

Deliverables

Submit a single social-contract report containing:

• the four answers, each with the arithmetic shown and its analysis;
• your message to your cousin, fixing the attribution, explaining power versus legitimacy in everyday words, saying which part is a value question, and naming one limit; and
• a one-line restatement of the values you used, so your results are reproducible.

Keep it to roughly one page. Clear and correct beats long.

Choose how you show it. Present your report as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about three minutes with a transcript, or as a labelled chart of the five fragments sorted by thinker and kind with a short note. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the computations, the analysis, and the writing yourself, without any AI tool. Quote the three thinkers only in the fragments printed above. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's report, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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