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Eric Hoffer (July 25 1898 – May
21 1983) was an American social writer. He produced ten
books and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in February 1983
by President of the United States Ronald
Reagan. His first book, The True Believer, published in 1951, was widely
recognized as a classic, receiving critical acclaim from both scholars and laymen.[1] This book, which he considered his best, established his reputation. He remained
a successful writer for most of his remaining years.
Life
Hoffer was born in New York City, the son of German
immigrants. By the age of five, he could read in both German and English. When he was age seven, his mother fell down a flight of stairs with Eric in her arms. Hoffer
went blind for unknown medical reasons but later in life he said he thought it might have been due to trauma. ("I lost my sight
at the age of seven. Two years before, my mother and I fell down a flight of stairs. She did not recover and died in that second
year after the fall. I lost my sight and for a time my memory") [Truth Imagined pg 1]. His eyesight inexplicably returned when he
was fifteen. Fearing he would again go blind, he seized upon the opportunity to read as much as he could for as long as he could.
His eyesight remained, but Hoffer never abandoned his habit of voracious reading.
His mother had already died shortly after the fall down the flight of stairs (Eric carried a scar on his forehead from the
fall), however, his father also died while he was still a young man - within a year after he regained his sight. The
cabinetmaker's union buried his dad and gave him a little over three hundred dollars. He was homeless, uneducated and unskilled.
Sensing that Los Angeles was the best place for a poor man, Hoffer took a bus
there in 1920. He spent the next 10 years on Los Angeles' skid row, working odd jobs, reading, and occasionally writing.
In 1931 he attempted suicide by drinking a solution of oxalic acid, but the attempt
failed as he could not bring himself to swallow the poison. The experience gave him a new determination to live adventurously. It
was then he left skid row and became a migrant worker. Following the harvests up and down the coast of California, he had library
cards for each town near the fields where he worked. A seminal event for Hoffer occurred in the mountains where he had gone in
search of gold. Snowed in for the winter, he read Essais by Michel de Montaigne. Montaigne's book impressed Hoffer deeply, and he often made reference to its
importance for him.
Hoffer was in San Francisco by 1941. He attempted to enlist in the Armed
forces there in 1942 but was rejected due to a hernia. Wanting to contribute to the war effort, he found ample opportunity as a
longshoreman on the docks of The Embarcadero. It was there he felt at home and finally
settled down. He continued reading voraciously and soon began to write while earning a living loading and unloading ships. He
continued this work until he retired at age 65.
Hoffer considered his best work to be "The True Believer." It was a landmark explanation of fanaticism and mass movements.
"The Ordeal of Change" is also a literary favorite. In 1970 he endowed the Lili Fabilli and Eric Hoffer Laconic Essay Prize for
students, faculty, and staff at the University of California, Berkeley.
Despite authoring ten books and a newspaper column, in retirement Hoffer continued to live a simple life, thinking and writing
near San Francisco’s waterfront.
Hoffer's working class roots and "intellectuals"
Hoffer drew confidence and inspiration from his modest roots and working-class
surroundings, seeing in it vast human potential. In a letter to Margaret Anderson in 1941, he wrote:
-
-
- My writing is done in railroad yards while waiting for a freight,
- in the fields while waiting for a truck, and at noon after lunch.
- Towns are too distracting.
Hoffer also took solace in being an outcast, believing that the outcasts have always been the pioneers of society. He did not
consider himself an "intellectual", and scorned the term as descriptive of the allegedly anti-American academics of the West. He believed academics craved
power but were denied it in the democratic countries of the West (though not in
totalitarian countries, which Hoffer understood to be an intellectual's dream). Instead,
Hoffer believed academics chose to bite the hand that fed them in their quest for power and influence.
Though Hoffer did not identify with "liberal intellectuals" and often criticized the radical ideology of many activists of the New Left, it would be wrong to characterize Hoffer's thinking as "conservative". Rather, his structural
approach to analyzing and understanding mass movements and their ideologies often led Hoffer to consistently nonideological
positions. As he said, "my writing grows out of my life just as a branch from a tree." When called an intellectual, he insisted
that he was a longshoreman. He has since become known as the "longshoreman philosopher."
On the nature and origins of mass movements
Hoffer was among the first to recognize the central importance of self-esteem to
psychological well-being. While most recent writers focus on the benefits of a positive self-esteem, Hoffer focused on the
consequences of a lack of self-esteem. Concerned about the rise of totalitarian governments, especially those of Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, he tried to find the roots of these
"madhouses" in human psychology. He discovered that fanaticism and self-righteousness are
rooted in self-hatred, self-doubt, and insecurity. As he describes in The True Believer, a passionate obsession with the
outside world or with the private lives of other people is merely a craven attempt to compensate for a lack of meaning in one's
own life.
The mass movements discussed in The True Believer include religious mass movements as well as political, including
extensive discussions of Islam and Christianity. They
also include seemingly benign mass movements which are neither political nor religious. A core principle in the book is Hoffer's
insight that mass movements are interchangeable; he notes fanatical Nazis later becoming fanatical Communists, fanatical
Communists later becoming fanatical anti-Communists, and Saul, persecutor of Christians, becoming Paul, a fanatical Christian himself. For the true believer the substance of the mass movement isn't so
important as that he or she is part of that movement. Hoffer furthermore suggests that it is possible to head off the rise of an
undesirable mass movement by substituting a benign mass movement, which will give those prone to joining movements an outlet for
their insecurities.
Hoffer's work was original, staking out new ground largely ignored by dominant academic trends of his time. In particular,
Hoffer's work was completely non-Freudian, at a time when almost all American psychology
was confined to the Freudian paradigm. In avoiding the academic mainstream, he managed to
avoid the straitjacket of established thought. Many argue Hoffer's lack of a formal University education contributed to his
independent thought, with his book remaining an insightful classic today. Hoffer appeared on Public Television in 1964 and then
in two one-hour conversations on CBS with Eric Sevareid in
the late 1960s. Both times he drew wide response for his patiently considered but unorthodox views.
Other writings
Hoffer's insights into the consequences of a lack of self-esteem also informed his later writings. His 1963 book The Ordeal
of Change discusses change and modernization in society. His 1971 book First Things, Last Things was a collection of
essays published at a time in which young middle-class American youth were undergoing an increasing attraction to mass movements,
whether political, religious, or subcultural, as well as a rapid increase in youth crime. In these and other books, Hoffer
continued to build upon his earlier insights. In Hoffer's view, rapid change is not a positive thing for a society, and too rapid
change can cause a regression in maturity for those who were brought up in a very different society than what that society has
become. He noted that in the 1960s America had many young adults still living in extended adolescence. Seeking to explain the
attraction of the New Left protest movements, he characterized them as the result of widespread affluence which, in his words,
"is robbing a modern society of whatever it has left of puberty rites to routinize the attainment of manhood." He sees these
puberty rites as essential for self-esteem, and notes that mass movements and juvenile mindsets tend to go together to the point
that anyone, no matter what age, who joins a mass movement immediately begins to exhibit juvenile behavior. He further notes that
the reason working class Americans did not by and large join in the 1960s protest movements and subcultures was they had entry
into meaningful labor as an effective rite of passage out of adolescence, while both the very poor on welfare and the affluent
are, in his words "prevented from having a share in the world's work and of proving their manhood by doing a man's work and
getting a man's pay" and thus remained in a state of extended adolescence, lacking in necessary self-esteem, and prone to joining
mass movements as a form of compensation. Hoffer suggested that this need for meaningful work as a rite of passage into adulthood
could be fulfilled with a 2-year civilian national service program (not unlike the earlier programs during the Depression such as
the Civilian Conservation Corps), in which all young adults would do two
years of work in fields such as construction or natural
resources work. He writes: "The routinization of the passage from boyhood to manhood would contribute to the solution of
many of our pressing problems. I cannot think of any other undertaking that would dovetail so many of our present difficulties
into opportunities for growth."
Unpublished writings
Hoffer's papers, including 131 of the notebooks he carried in his pockets, were acquired in 2000 by the Hoover Institution Archives. Because Hoffer cultivated an aphoristic style, the unpublished notebooks (dated from 1949 to 1977) contain very significant work. Available for scholarly study since at least 2003, little of their contents has yet been published. A selection of fifty aphorisms, focusing on the development
of unrealized human talents through the creative process, appeared in the July 2005 issue of
Harper's Magazine.[2]
Bibliography
- 1951 The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements ISBN
0-06-050591-5
- 1955 The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms ISBN 1-933435-09-7
- 1963 The Ordeal Of Change ISBN 1-933435-10-0
- 1967 The Temper Of Our Time
- 1969 Working And Thinking on The Waterfront; a journal, June 1958-May 1959
- 1971 First Things, Last Things
- 1973 Reflections on the Human Condition ISBN 1-933435-14-3
- 1976 In Our Time
- 1979 Before the Sabbath
- 1982 Between the devil and the dragon : the best essays and aphorisms of Eric Hoffer ISBN 0-06-014984-1
- 1983 Truth Imagined ISBN 1-933435-01-1
Books on Hoffer
- Eric Hoffer; an American Odyssey Tomkins, Calvin, New York, E.P. Dutton & Co., 1968 ISBN 0-8057-7359-2 Part of
Twayne's United States authors series
- Hoffer's America, Koerner, James D., La Salle, Ill., Library Press, 1973 ISBN 0-912050-45-4
- Eric Hoffer, Baker, James Thomas. Boston : Twayne, 1982 ISBN 0-8057-7359-2 Twayne's United States authors
series
Broadcasts
Documentary on Eric Hoffer with Eric Sevareid, CBS, November 14, 1967
Footnotes
- ^ "Hoffer, Eric." Encyclopædia Britannica, from Encyclopaedia Britannica
2003 Ultimate Reference Suite CD-ROM. Copyright © 1994-2002 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. May 30
2002.
- ^ Tom Bethell, "Sparks: Eric Hoffer and
the art of the notebook," Harper's Magazine, July 2005, pp. 73-77. See also idem, "The Longshoreman Philosopher",
Hoover Digest, 2003.
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