Eric Hoffer: Champion of the Working Man

Hoffer thought the immigrants who came to America brought with them the impulse for self-reliance and a drive to find success. (bauhaus1000/Getty Images)

What makes a fanatic? To many today, this is less a question than an assumption. “They’re just crazy,” practical people are apt to say—particularly when observing the behaviors of their political enemies.

However, 70 years ago, a German immigrant sought to explain fanaticism by analyzing the common characteristics of people prone to joining radical political causes. While this is what Eric Hoffer is best remembered for today, his later, less well-known work further developed his social concerns and elaborated on antidotes to conformity. This wisdom hasn’t been assimilated like his early thoughts on mass movements have, although it’s arguably just as important.

The True Believer

Hoffer’s early life has never been independently verified. He said he was born in 1902 in New York City but had no birth certificate to prove it. He spoke with a thick Bavarian accent all his life, though his parents supposedly came from Alsace-Lorraine, where accents are a mix of French and light German. There are no records of Hoffer’s parents. At age 7, he mysteriously went blind, then eight years later recovered his sight. He never attended school but often haunted libraries. In 1920 he set out for California, spending 20 years doing odd jobs—orange salesman, dishwasher, migrant worker, gold prospector—before settling in San Francisco after the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.

Hoffer’s documented life begins here. He rented a one-room apartment in the railroad yards and worked as a longshoreman on the docks. His few possessions did not include a television, radio, or phone. He always kept a notebook in his pocket, however, and would write down thoughts during spare moments.

Hoffer gradually shaped his thoughts into a book, “The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements.” In it, he explained the rise of fascism and communism by describing their processes of “religiofication,” or “the art of turning practical purposes into holy causes.” Followers of mass movements, he said, are often misfits and failures who have lost faith in themselves. As a substitute for confidence and self-esteem, they fuse their identity into a group that finds an enemy to scapegoat. Hoffer draws on a range of historical examples to describe the life cycles of mass movements and the way that leaders exploit crowds by inspiring fervent hope and hatred.

Published in 1951, the book became a bestseller after President Dwight D. Eisenhower quoted it on television. Since then, politicians have studied “The True Believer” almost as much as Machiavelli’s “The Prince”—and often for the wrong reasons. While it was written to warn against the dangers of mass movements, it also lends itself to being read as a handbook for starting one.

The Ordeal of Change

Hoffer’s third book, “The Ordeal of Change,” represents his more optimistic side by reflecting on how the working man has shaped history. Although it has less immediate political usefulness than “The True Believer”—and hence is seldom read—Hoffer considered it his best.

The opening essay, “Drastic Change,” begins with an anecdote from Hoffer’s experience as a migrant worker, spending most of the year picking peas then wandering to a different county to pick string beans.

“Would I be able to pick string beans? Even the change from peas to string beans had in it elements of fear,” he wrote.

Every life adjustment provokes a potential crisis in self-esteem. Misfits who can’t find opportunities to release their energy during a period of change lose their balance as individuals, becoming susceptible to radicalization and groupthink. The remedy for this misplaced enthusiasm is “the self-confidence born of experience and the possession of skill.”

Throughout the book, Hoffer discusses two important processes that promote dynamic change by preventing social inertia: immigration and trade. Early wandering merchants were vital to the growth of individualism, promoting culture-mixing and weakening dogma. In modern times, the millions of immigrants who came to America from “stagnant small towns and villages,” tapped into the tradition of self-reliance to find success. In essays such as “The Readiness to Work,” “The Practical Sense,” and “The Playful Mood,” Hoffer traces the historical development of these sensibilities and makes the case for their essential role in achieving life’s purpose.

The enemy of the trader is the scribe. In the essay “The Intellectual and the Masses,” Hoffer notes that intellectuals always seem to have “a grudge” against America. Why? Whereas in most other civilizations intellectuals have been either the allies of the powerful or members of the elite, in the United States they have a more uncertain status.

“America is the only instance of a civilization shaped and colored by the tastes and values of common folk,” Hoffer wrote.

Although intellectuals play an essential creative role in collective flourishing, society benefits from their tension with practical businesspeople. When intellectuals become too influential in shaping public opinion, society stagnates. He describes the tyranny resulting from bureaucracies that plan for every possible outcome: “The traditional master uses force to exact obedience and lets it go at that. Not so the intellectual.” The man of words demands conformity not just through action, but through ideology.

Working-Class Hero

“The abbreviated story of Hoffer’s life has almost a make-believe quality,” biographer Tom Bethell wrote in “Eric Hoffer: The Longshoreman Philosopher.” How did a poor man with no past and no formal education come to write some of the most profound books of the 20th century? However unlikely his rise to prominence, Hoffer’s self-taught background made him an original thinker. His mind roamed freely, unmolded by the fashionable paradigms of the university system.

San Francisco’s literary elite disliked Hoffer.

“It is because I have praised America extravagantly,” he said.

To this day, the reigning intellectual establishment isn’t much interested in Hoffer’s ideas. Cultivating practical sense? The importance of work—even of manual labor—in a well-adjusted life? Business as a dynamic force to counterbalance overbearing ideologies?

It’s ironic that one of America’s most eloquent champions was probably never a naturalized citizen. Bethell has made a convincing case that Hoffer was likely an undocumented immigrant who fled Germany after Hitler came to power and invented a vague past to avoid being deported. Other immigrants of the time who escaped totalitarian regimes, such as Ayn Rand and Vladimir Nabokov, were similarly rapturous about America and never understood native intellectuals who were so ungrateful to their own land of opportunity.

Hoffer continued to work as a longshoreman for nearly two decades after becoming a public figure. In 1983, the year of his death, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He remains an inspiration for independent minds eager to break up the stultifying monopoly on ideas that academia has exerted for the past half-century.

“Who built this country?” he said to Bethell. “Nobodies. Tramps.”

As he wrote in the closing paragraph of “The Ordeal of Change,” it’s a country that believes in “faith founded on experience. ... We shall go on believing that man, unlike other forms of life, is not a captive of his past—of his heredity and habits—but is possessed of infinite plasticity, and his potentialities for good and for evil are never wholly exhausted.”