Social and Political Philosophy
What to master
Political philosophy asks about legitimacy, justice, liberty, and obligation. Understand the social contract tradition: Hobbes on security and sovereign power, Locke on natural rights and consent, Rousseau on the general will. Know Rawls's justice as fairness, the original position, the veil of ignorance, and the two principles, plus Nozick's entitlement critique and the difference between patterned and historical theories. Cover liberty: negative versus positive liberty, Mill's harm principle, and the limits of paternalism. Address distributive justice (egalitarianism, luck egalitarianism, sufficiency), communitarianism versus liberalism, and feminist and multicultural critiques of the public/private split. Include civil disobedience and the duty to obey the law.
Traps to expect
Rawls's veil of ignorance is a device for impartiality, not a claim that people lack all knowledge. Negative liberty is absence of interference; positive liberty is capacity for self-mastery, and conflating them misreads the debate. Locke's consent is not majoritarian democracy in the modern sense. Nozick objects to end-state patterns, not to justice itself.
Worked example
If asked why Rawls rejects utilitarianism, answer that it may sacrifice basic liberties for aggregate welfare, whereas the two principles lexically prioritise equal basic liberties. Rule of thumb: locate a theory's justificatory device (contract, entitlement, harm) before evaluating its conclusions.