The book starts from the premise that any revolutionary moment contains within itself a conflict between an authoritarian and anti-authoritarian tendency. This claim allows the author to analyze the extent to which the grasp over power of post-revolutionary rulers is in conflict with the revolutionary principles themselves. In other words, this monography problematizes the relation or tension between the affirmation of freedom (as it was imagined from the Enlightenment to Marx) and the mechanism of governance of revolutionary regimes.