Mahatma Gandhi and the Prisoner’s Dilemma: Strategic Civil Disobedience and Great Britain’s Great Loss of Empire in India

This paper examines the relationship between statutory monopoly and collective action as a multi-person assurance game culminating in an end to British Empire in India. In a simple theoretical model, it is demonstrated whether or not a collective good enjoys (or is perceived to enjoy) pure jointness of production and why the evolutionary stable strategy of non-violence was supposed to work on the principle that the coordinated reaction of a ethnically differentiated religious crowd to a conflict between two parties (of colonizer and colonized) over confiscatory salt taxation would significantly affect its course. Following Mancur Olson (1965) and Dennis Chong (1991), a model of strategic civil disobedience is created which is used to demonstrate how collective action can be used to produce an all-or-nothing public good to achieve economic and political independence.confiscatory taxation; multi-person assurance game; strategic civil disobedience

Mahatma Gandhi and the Prisoner’s Dilemma: Strategic Civil Disobedience and Great Britain’s Great Loss of Empire in India

This paper examines the relationship between statutory monopoly and collective action as a multi-person assurance game culminating in an end to British Empire in India. In a simple theoretical model, it is demonstrated whether or not a collective good enjoys (or is perceived to enjoy) pure jointness of production and why the evolutionary stable strategy of non-violence was supposed to work on the principle that the coordinated reaction of a ethnically differentiated religious crowd to a conflict between two parties (of colonizer and colonized) over confiscatory salt taxation would significantly affect its course. Following Mancur Olson (1965) and Dennis Chong (1991), a model of strategic civil disobedience is created which is used to demonstrate how collective action can be used to produce an all-or-nothing public good to achieve economic and political independence

Fantasm of Permanence and The Monologic of Empire

In order to understand criminal legislation, one needs to refocus from criminal legislation to its most modern form, the code ─ by turning one's historical attention to the significance of criminal codes, thereby reconnecting the analysis of law to the analysis of the state, jurisprudence to politics. Therefore, particular attention needs to be provided to two analytic distinctions ─ between private and public law, and between criminal and civil law. Modern criminal law scholarship fails to recognize that its subject in large part no longer represents a species of law at all. The category mistake, in other words, transcends that of law and extends to the range of coercive methods available to the modern state. Insofar as criminal law has been transformed into a mode of regulation, it has been transformed into a species of police, rather than of law. Not only the distinction between public and private law remains unclear and unexplored in English Criminal Law scholarship, so does the definition of law and its differentiation from other modes of state coercion. It is no surprise, then, that the greatest successes of English criminal codification would be criminal codes drafted by wise Englishmen (some of whom were experts in criminal law [Stephen], others not [Macaulay]) for various colonies, Canada and India in particular.criminal law, codification, civil law, coercion, jurisprudence, British colonies, English Criminal Law, MAcaulay, Legal Studies

Mahatma Gandhi and the Prisoner’s Dilemma: Strategic Civil Disobedience and Great Britain’s Great Loss of Empire in India

This paper examines the relationship between statutory monopoly and collective action as a multi-person assurance game culminating in an end to British Empire in India. In a simple theoretical model, it is demonstrated whether or not a collective good enjoys (or is perceived to enjoy) pure jointness of production and why the evolutionary stable strategy of non-violence was supposed to work on the principle that the coordinated reaction of a ethnically differentiated religious crowd to a conflict between two parties (of colonizer and colonized) over confiscatory salt taxation would significantly affect its course. Following Mancur Olson (1965) and Dennis Chong (1991), a model of strategic civil disobedience is created which is used to demonstrate how collective action can be used to produce an all-or-nothing public good to achieve economic and political independence.[MPRA WP, May 2005]confiscatory taxation, multi-person assurance game, strategic civil disobedience, freedom struggle India, economic independence, political independence, Economics, Political Science