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What is significant for a 'revolutionary' change of social institutions as compared with an 'evolutionary' one? Not the suddenness with which the change is performed; not the amount of violence involved, but, according to Jones, the radicalism. The revolutionary character of a change depends on whether or not 'the former and now displaced conditions are permitted to survive and coëxist with the new ones, or at least are transformed in such a fashion that the essential elements persist even in the new guise'.
Jones looks for the conditions of such radicalism only in the subjective psychology of revolutionary individuals, without asking questions about the nature, history or objectively undesirable effects of the institutions to be changed. He estimates the practical importance of such psychological knowledge very highly, perhaps too highly. He says, 'The prevailing muddle, to use a mild expression, into which the social relations of mankind have obviously landed, both intra-nationally and inter-nationally, is more than anything else due to ignorance of just those unconscious forces on the nature of which psychoanalysis is throwing so much light'.
The question as to which persons tend to express their Oedipus complex more radically so that nothing of the old father is to remain—this question which seems to Jones to deal with the essence of revolution—is answered as follows: 'In my experience what has happened is that the sense of guilt in such people has been disposed of, or successfully kept at bay, by their developing in an especially high degree the paranoid mechanism of projection. They have persuaded themselves that their opponents are so unspeakably evil that they deserve no better fate than torture and death, and that to inflict this, so far from being a guilty act, is a laudable one.' Now, paranoid projection in men is always a defense against unconscious passive homosexuality, and therefore Jones is of the opinion that most revolutionaries are persons wi