Books & Authors Quiz: Books on Economics and Politics

The correct answer is B, Adam Smith. The Scottish thinker Adam Smith published this book in 1776, and it is treated as the starting point of economics as a separate subject, which is why he is called the father of economics; its most quoted idea is the invisible hand, by which the self-interest of individuals is said to serve the wider good. Option A is wrong because David Ricardo wrote Principles of Political Economy and Taxation in 1817 and is remembered for comparative advantage and the theory of rent. Option C is wrong because Thomas Robert Malthus wrote An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798 on the race between population and food. Option D is wrong because John Stuart Mill wrote Principles of Political Economy and the essay On Liberty, both later works of a different character.

The correct answer is C, Kautilya. Kautilya, also known as Chanakya and as Vishnugupta, was the minister and guide of Chandragupta Maurya, and his Arthashastra is a manual of statecraft that deals with the duties of a king, the organisation of the treasury, taxation, trade, spying, law and war; it is the earliest Indian work usually placed under economics and politics together. Option A is wrong because Chandragupta Maurya was the ruler served by Kautilya and not the author. Option B is wrong because Kalidasa was the Sanskrit poet and dramatist of works such as Abhijnanasakuntalam and Meghadutam. Option D is wrong because Megasthenes was the Greek ambassador at the Mauryan court whose own account of India was called Indica, a different book altogether. The Arthashastra was rediscovered in 1905 by R. Shamasastry, who found a manuscript of it in Mysore and published it.

The correct answer is B, Dadabhai Naoroji. Dadabhai Naoroji, honoured as the Grand Old Man of India and the first Indian to be elected to the British House of Commons, brought together his writings in this book and showed with figures that a large part of India's wealth was being carried away to Britain every year through salaries, pensions, interest and the cost of the army, a case known as the drain theory. Option A is wrong because Gopal Krishna Gokhale is remembered for his budget speeches and for founding the Servants of India Society, not for this book. Option C is wrong because Romesh Chunder Dutt wrote The Economic History of India, a separate work along the same lines. Option D is wrong because Ranade wrote Essays on Indian Economics and is called a pioneer of Indian economic thought.

The correct answer is B, Karl Marx. Karl Marx published the first volume of Das Kapital in 1867 as his full critique of the capitalist mode of production, built around surplus value and the exploitation of labour; the later volumes were edited and brought out by Friedrich Engels after Marx died. Option A is wrong because Engels was Marx's lifelong collaborator and co-author of The Communist Manifesto of 1848, but Das Kapital is credited to Marx himself. Option C is wrong because Lenin's own writings, such as Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism and The State and Revolution, came half a century later. Option D is wrong because Friedrich Hayek argued on the opposite side in The Road to Serfdom, warning that central planning leads to the loss of liberty.

The correct answer is B, John Maynard Keynes. Written during the Great Depression and published in 1936, this book argued that an economy can settle at a level of high unemployment on its own, and that the remedy is to raise effective demand through government spending; it created macroeconomics as we know it and the whole school called Keynesian economics. Option A is wrong because Alfred Marshall wrote Principles of Economics in 1890 and shaped the earlier neo-classical approach to demand and supply. Option C is wrong because Paul Samuelson wrote the famous textbook Economics and was the first American to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Option D is wrong because Milton Friedman, author of Capitalism and Freedom, led the monetarist reply to Keynes rather than writing this book.

The correct answer is B, Niccolo Machiavelli. The Florentine writer Machiavelli wrote The Prince in 1513 and it was published in 1532; it advises a ruler to judge an action by whether it preserves the state rather than by whether it is virtuous, and for this it is called the first work of modern political realism and its author the father of modern political thought. Option A is wrong because Thomas Hobbes wrote Leviathan in 1651, arguing for an absolute sovereign as the escape from the state of nature. Option C is wrong because John Locke wrote Two Treatises of Government in defence of natural rights, consent and limited government. Option D is wrong because Montesquieu wrote The Spirit of the Laws, which gave the world the doctrine of the separation of powers between the legislature, the executive and the judiciary.

The correct answer is B, The Social Contract. Jean-Jacques Rousseau published The Social Contract in 1762 with the opening claim that man is born free yet everywhere is in chains, and he held that legitimate authority rests only on the general will of the whole people, an idea that fed directly into the French Revolution and into the modern notion of popular sovereignty. Option A is wrong because Hobbes in Leviathan placed sovereignty in a single ruler to whom subjects surrender their rights permanently. Option C is wrong because Plato's Republic describes an ideal state ruled by philosopher kings and says nothing of a general will. Option D is wrong because On Liberty by John Stuart Mill is an argument for the freedom of the individual against interference by the state or by society, which is a different question altogether.

The correct answer is B, Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi wrote Hind Swaraj, also published in English as Indian Home Rule, in 1909 while sailing from London to South Africa, and he cast it as a dialogue between a reader and an editor; in it he rejects industrial civilisation and modern machinery, and argues that true self-rule means rule over oneself achieved by non-violent means. Option A is wrong because Bal Gangadhar Tilak wrote Gita Rahasya while imprisoned at Mandalay, along with The Arctic Home in the Vedas. Option C is wrong because Gokhale, Gandhi's own political mentor, is remembered for his speeches and for the Servants of India Society rather than for a book of this kind. Option D is wrong because Lala Lajpat Rai wrote Unhappy India and Young India, which are separate works.

The correct answer is B, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. Azad, who presided over the Congress during the Quit India years and became independent India's first Education Minister, dictated this account of the last phase of the freedom struggle and of Partition; his birthday, the eleventh of November, is observed as National Education Day. Option A is wrong because Jawaharlal Nehru's own books are The Discovery of India, Glimpses of World History and the autobiography published as Toward Freedom. Option C is wrong because Rajendra Prasad wrote India Divided and an autobiography of his own. Option D is wrong because Sardar Patel, who integrated the princely states and is called the Iron Man of India, left speeches and letters rather than a memoir of this name.

The correct answer is A, B. R. Ambedkar. Ambedkar, trained as an economist before he became the chief architect of the Constitution, submitted this study at the London School of Economics and published it in 1923; it traces the history of Indian currency and argues for a stable measure of value, and its reasoning fed into the debate from which the Reserve Bank of India emerged. Option B is wrong because M. Visvesvaraya, the engineer and Diwan of Mysore, wrote Planned Economy for India in 1934. Option C is wrong because C. D. Deshmukh was the first Indian Governor of the Reserve Bank and later Finance Minister, and his own book is the memoir The Course of My Life. Option D is wrong because V. K. R. V. Rao is known for his work on national income and for founding the Institute of Economic Growth.

The correct answer is B, Gunnar Myrdal. The Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal published this long three-volume study of South and South East Asia in 1968, examining why the region stayed poor and pointing to institutions, land relations, administration and what he called the soft state; the title deliberately echoes Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. Option A is wrong because Amartya Sen's books are Poverty and Famines, Development as Freedom, The Argumentative Indian and, with Jean Dreze, An Uncertain Glory. Option C is wrong because Simon Kuznets is remembered for national income accounting and for the curve named after him rather than for this book. Option D is wrong because W. Arthur Lewis is known for his model of a dual economy with surplus labour, which is a theoretical contribution and not this study.

The correct answer is B, Amartya Sen. Amartya Sen published this book in 1981 and showed, using the Bengal famine among other cases, that famines occur not merely because food is short in a country but because groups of people lose the ability to command food, which he called a failure of entitlement; the work was central to the Nobel Memorial Prize awarded to him in 1998. Option A is wrong because Jean Dreze is Sen's co-author on Hunger and Public Action and An Uncertain Glory, not on this book. Option C is wrong because Abhijit Banerjee wrote Poor Economics and Good Economics for Hard Times together with Esther Duflo. Option D is wrong because Thomas Piketty wrote Capital in the Twenty-First Century, a study of the concentration of income and wealth in rich countries.