In the historical development of individual nations revolutions come and go as tremendous earthquakes, upsetting the standing order and creating new constellations and configurations. After an earthquake on former plains new mountain ranges arise and, vice versa, enormous peaks suddenly disappear; quite so in the case of a revolution, which overturns century old institutions and organizations. At the time when the upheaval occurs, it often seems that the whole social structure is destroyed forever and that something entirely new is being created. And yet, everyone who has studied history knows very well that even in revolutions we have a constant evolution, that much of the old order remains and that the new institutions have many attachments in the past, no matter how completely new they may seem at the moment of their political birth.

Take the French Revolution of 1789 as a most vivid example. It might have seemed to contemporaries that the whole former French state and government, the social as well as the economic structure, had disappeared and were utterly destroyed.