ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the times of physical, political, economic, and spiritual distress that men's eyes turn with anxious hope to the future, and when anticipations, utopias, and apocalyptic visions multiply. One thinks of the chiliastic expectations of the Augustan age at the beginning of the Christian era, or of the spiritual changes in the West which accompanied the end of the first millennium. Rational argument can be conducted with some prospect of success only so long as the emotionality of a given situation does not exceed a certain critical degree. Their chimerical ideas, sustained by fanatical resentment, appeal to the collective irrationality and find fruitful soil there; they express all those motives and resentments which lurk in more normal people under the cloak of reason and insight. The constitutional State drifts into the situation of a primitive form of society the communism of a primitive tribe where everybody is subject to the autocratic rule of a chief or an oligarchy.
