Revolutionaries, despots, and rationality

Nicolas Olsson-Yaouzis
Additional contact information
Nicolas Olsson-Yaouzis: Stockholm University, Sweden, niklas.olsson-yaouzis@philosophy.su.se

Rationality and Society, 2010, vol. 22, issue 3, 283-299

Abstract: The role of groups has often been invoked as an explanation of how successful revolutions can be the outcome of rational action. This paper attempts to show that the focus on groups fails to incorporate an important aspect of oppression, namely the oppressive regime itself. If rational choice theory is to be taken seriously and if it is assumed that the potential revolutionaries are rational, then similar assumptions should be made about the despot. If this is done, then it is far from obvious that groups help to solve the free-rider problem. Rather it is shown that in this case the revolutionaries become subject to a higher order free-rider problem.

Keywords: free-rider problems; rational choice theory; revolutions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1043463110374497 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:ratsoc:v:22:y:2010:i:3:p:283-299

DOI: 10.1177/1043463110374497

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Rationality and Society
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().