Each community was sufficient in itself in all essential points and was only attached to the exterior world through loose bands. The great states were only conglomerates of communities which were held together only through either a dynasty or through another ruling and exploiting community. Each community had its own special economic development corresponding to its own peculiar characteristics and corresponding to these also its special class struggles. The political revolutions also at that time were chiefly only communal revolutions. It was as a matter of course impossible to transform the whole social life of a great territory by a political revolution.
The smaller the number of individuals in a social movement the less there is of a real social movement; the less there is of the universal and law creating, and the more the personal and the accidental dominate. This increased the diversity of the class struggles in the different communities. Because in the class struggle no movement of the masses could appear, because the general was concealed in the accidental and the personal, there could be no deep recognition of social causes and the goals of class movements. However great the philosophy created by the Greeks, the idea of a scientific national economy was foreign to them. Aristotle supplies only outlines of such a system. The Greeks and Romans on the economic field produced only practical instruc-
