In popular belief, Bhagat Singh and Gandhi occupy two antipodes in India's struggle for freedom – the former representing the young generation impatient to overthrow foreign rule by any means necessary, the latter navigating a plodding course alternating between negotiation and struggle....

This article argues that in the mid to late eighteenth century, political economy, through writers such as Francois Quesnay, David Hume and Adam Smith, saw a discussion of ‘despotism’, which stood for thinking through the political arrangement within which economic productivity was...