CAT 2020 Slot 2 — VARC Question 22
The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage.
With the Treaty of Westphalia, the papacy had been confined to ecclesiastical functions, and the doctrine of sovereign equality reigned. What political theory could then explain the origin and justify the functions of secular political order? In his Leviathan, published in 1651, three years after the Peace of Westphalia, Thomas Hobbes provided such a theory. He imagined a “state of nature” in the past when the absence of authority produced a “war of all against all.” To escape such intolerable insecurity, he theorized, people delivered their rights to a sovereign power in return for the sovereign’s provision of security for all within the state’s border. The sovereign state’s monopoly on power was established as the only way to overcome the perpetual fear of violent death and war.
1. Thomas Hobbes theorized the emergence of sovereign states based on a transactional relationship between people and sovereign state that was necessitated by a sense of insecurity of the people.
2. Thomas Hobbes theorized the voluntary surrender of rights by people as essential for emergence of sovereign states.
3. Thomas Hobbes theorized the emergence of sovereign states as a form of transactional governance to limit the power of the papacy.
4. Thomas Hobbes theorized that sovereign states emerged out of people’s voluntary desire to overcome the sense of insecurity and establish the doctrine of sovereign equality.
Answer & solution
Answer: 1
Medium
The best summary keeps the passage's central idea while rejecting options that distort, add, or omit a key element. Here the core is Hobbes's theory: to escape the insecurity of a "war of all against all," people exchange their rights for the sovereign's protection - a give-and-take, i.e. a transactional relationship, driven by insecurity.
Lock the three must-haves. (i) the driver is the people's insecurity ("war of all against all", "perpetual fear of violent death"); (ii) the mechanism is a transaction - people deliver rights "in return for" security; (iii) the outcome is the sovereign state. Any faithful summary must keep all three.
Option 1 - keep. "Hobbes theorized the emergence of sovereign states based on a transactional relationship between people and sovereign state that was necessitated by a sense of insecurity." This captures all three elements - insecurity, transaction, sovereign state - precisely and without addition.
Why the others fail. Option 2 mentions only the "voluntary surrender of rights" and drops both the insecurity that causes it and the return of security - it omits the transaction. Option 3 adds a false purpose - "to limit the power of the papacy"; the papacy is only background (Westphalia), not the aim of the sovereign state. Option 4 keeps insecurity but loses the give-and-take ("in return for") and wrongly tacks on "establish the doctrine of sovereign equality," which the passage treats as a prior backdrop, not Hobbes's goal.
Best summary: 1.