someone who generally opposes such changes. A reactionary is someone who wants things to go back to the way they were before the change has happened (and when this return to the past would represent a major change in and of itself, reactionaries can simultaneously be revolutionaries). A revolution is also not the same as a coup d'état: while a coup usually involves a small group of conspirators violently seizing control of government, a revolution implies mass participation and popular legitimacy. Again, the distinction is often clearer conceptually than empirically. Revolution and ideology According to sociologist James Chowning Davies, political revolutionaries may be classified in two ways: According to the goals of the revolution they propose. Usually, these goals are part of a certain ideology. In theory, each ideology could generate its own brand of revolutionaries. In practice, most political revolutionaries have been anar chists, communists, socialists, Islamists, syndicalists, or nationalists. According to the methods they propose to use. This divides revolutionaries in two broad groups: Those who advocate a violent revolution, and those who are pacifists. Anarchism See also: Anarchism The revolutionary anarchist Sergey Nechayev argued in Catechism of a Revolutionary: "The revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no private interests, no affairs, sentiments, ties, property nor even a name of his own. His entire being is devoured by one purpose, one thought, one passion - the revolution. Heart and soul, not merely by word but by deed, he has severed every link with the social order and with the entire civilized world; with the laws, good manners, conventions, and morality of that world. He is its merciless enemy and continues to inhabit it with only one purpose - to destroy it." Marxism–Leninism See also: Marxism–Leninism According to Che Guevara, "the true revolutionary is gu ided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a true revolutionary lacking in this quality." According to the Marxist Internet Archive, a r
