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The Rebel's Dilemma. By Mark Irving Lichbach. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1995, pp. 514. $45.00. ISBN 0-472-10532-9.
David A. Latzko
Wilkes University
Because potential rebels have an incentive to free ride, rational dissidents will not voluntarily contribute to the public good of either forcing the government to redress grievances or capturing the state. If individuals receive the benefits regardless of whether they actively participate in the activities of a dissident group, why participate and pay any costs?
Collective action theories teach that rational people ought never rebel. Yet, collective dissent does occur. This book is about solutions to the rebel's dilemma of mobilizing collective dissent: under what conditions are they adopted and when they 1e effective. Lichbach, a political scientist, identifies nearly two dozen solutions to the rebel's dilemma and places them within a typology of market, community, contract, and hierarchy.
Market solutions alter the parameters of a dissident's decision-making situation. They include increasing benefits, lowering costs of engaging in dissent, improving the productivity of tactics, and increasing the probability of winning. Market solutions to the rebel's dilemma assume atomistic individuals who engage in no social planning. Lichbach notes, however, that potential dissidents are often members of a community characterized by communal knowledge and values, or are living in societies with an implicit social contract or with some preexisting dissident organization.
Dissidents who share common knowledge can overcome the mutual ignorance characteristic of market solutions, and...