Despite being a part of the generation that in World War II defeated fascism, Eric Hoffer was never a member of U.S. armed forces. Rejected as an enlistee when he was 40, the Bronx-born, working-class Hoffer turned to laboring as a longshoreman along the docks of San Francisco’s Embarcadero. Always considering himself more a reader than a writer, Hoffer nevertheless distinguished himself with his first book, garnering acclaim with the 1951 publication of what scholars and laymen alike continue to regard as a classic.
In The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, Hoffer focused on explicating the collective psychologies underpinning Nazism and Stalinism, the two dictatorial movements that had risen to prominence, and very nearly to world domination, during the prime of his life. Others, of course, had wrestled with how nearly half of humanity could ever have been led down totalitarianism’s senselessly destructive path. However, no one had yet explored the issue with the incisiveness, lucidity, and wit that Hoffer’s prose offered. Hoffer had an abiding respect for the common people and yet discovered that they continued to allow themselves, with alarming predictability, to be blindly misled.
While generally in favor of religion, Hoffer nonetheless professed lifelong atheism. He was wary of the descent into fanaticism that, now, has become a hallmark of extremist sectarian and terrorist movements. Fanaticism facilitates abandoning one’s fundamental humanity or, as Hoffer wrote: “Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves.”