Grenier offers a better understanding of the causes of revolution in El Salvador through an analysis of the central role of ideas and ideologues. The insurgency was not merely the charismatic embodiment of structurally determined processes, as it is commonly suggested, it was the expression of a distinct and forceful political will. The focus is placed on the period of emergence of insurgency (roughly, the 1970s and early 1980s), a period too often confounded (and not only in the Salvadoran case) with subsequent periods of the revolutionary cycle.