From The New York Times
Collective conflict is hardly a new idea - James Madison invoked it in the Federalist Papers, defining factions as citizens "united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community." He went on to describe the primary source of factions as the "various and unequal distribution of property...." But it was Jack Hirshleifer of the University of California, Los Angeles, an economist with no affinity for Karl Marx, who virtually created a field of conflict analysis with a collection of essays poetically titled "The Dark Side of the Force...." Economists who have built on Professor Hirshleifer's approach include Herschel Grossman, who taught at Brown University, and Michelle Garfinkel and Sergios Skaperdas of the University of California, Irvine, authors of "The Political Economy of Conflict and Appropriation."

For the full story, please visit http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/03/class-war-games/.