the guilds, etc., only to set themselves outside and above the social institutions altogether, in order to dominate the other members of society and to enrich themselves at society's expense.
All really serious political, religious, economic reformers have belonged to the first of the two categories; and among them there have always been individuals who, without waiting for all their fellow citizens, or even a minority of them, to be imbued with similar ideas, strove to incite more or less numerous groups against oppression, or advanced alone if they had no following. There were Revolutionists in all times known to history.
However, these Revolutionists appeared under two different aspects. Some of them, while rebelling against the authority that oppressed society, in nowise tried to destroy this authority; they simply strove to secure it for themselves. Instead of a power that had grown oppressive, they sought to constitute a new power, of which they would be the holders; and they promised, often in good faith, that the new authority, handed over to them, would have the welfare of the people at heart and would be their true representative—a promise that later on was inevitably forgotten or betrayed. Thus were constituted Imperial authority in the Rome of the Caesars, ecclesiastical authority in the first centuries of our era, dictatorial power in the decaying cities of the Middle Ages, and so forth. The same line of thought brought about royal authority in Europe at the end of feudal times. Faith in an emperor "for the people," a Cæsar, is not yet dead, even in the present day.
But side by side with this authoritarian current, another current asserted itself, every time the necessity was felt of revising the established institutions. At all times, from ancient Greece till nowadays, there were individuals and currents of thought and action that sought, not to replace any particular authority by another, but to destroy the authority that had grafted itself on popular institutions, without creating a new one to take its place. They proclaimed the sovereignty of both the individual and the people, and they tried to free the popular institutions from authoritarian overgrowths; they worked to give back full liberty to the collective spirit of the masses, so that popular genius might freely reconstruct institutions of mutual aid and protection, in harmony with new needs and new conditions of existence. In the cities of ancient Greece, and especially in those of the Middle Ages—Florence, Pskov, etc.—we find many examples of this kind of conflict.
