Section LXXIX Socialism and Communism. (Continued.)
What has just been said will serve to explain why, in the following four periods of the world’s history, socialistic and communistic ideas have been most widespread: among the ancients at the time of the decline of Greece,476 and in that of the degeneration of the Roman Republic;477 among the moderns in the age of the Reformation,478 and again, in our own day.479