Introduction

In writing about social change-agents, the author make sociological generalizations about the status and nature of their initiatives and about their professed values. The change-agents of Judaism and Christianity no doubt acted in a political way often and conspicuously enough. The main substance of a spirituality which is engendered from this self-restraint is the very factor that is alone capable of deciding whether it is the personal or the political change-agent's turn to act. The political wind instruments and the personalist strings take it in turns but they do not play the same music. Many personalist change-agents insist that the political change-agent in effect derives his moral authority from the personal, and many political change-agents insist that the personalist change-agent in effect derives his moral authority from the political. Marxists and Marxist-type change-agents recognize no personalist concerns complementary to their political concerns. Indeed, the explicit disavowal of personalist concerns is regarded as a loyalty-test of Marxist political reliability.