The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (1951)

by Unbekoming

The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, first published in 1951, is one of the strangest and most enduring works of twentieth-century political thought. Strange because of who wrote it — a self-educated longshoreman with no university degree, no academic post, no institutional sponsor — and enduring because, more than seventy years after it appeared, no one has yet written a better short book on why ordinary people throw themselves into religious revivals, nationalist crusades and political revolutions with a willingness to die that defies every assumption of self-interest. Eisenhower kept it on his desk and recommended it publicly. It has never gone out of print. Each new generation rediscovers it during whatever upheaval happens to be theirs, and finds the old longshoreman waiting with most of the answers already worked out.

Eric Hoffer (1902–1983) lived a life almost calculated to disqualify him as a public intellectual. He worked in restaurants, picked crops as a migrant in California’s fields, prospected for gold in the mountains, and after Pearl Harbor settled into twenty-five years on the San Francisco docks loading and unloading ships. He read philosophy on his lunch breaks — Montaigne, Pascal, Dostoyevsky, Bagehot — and he wrote in spiral notebooks during the hours other men spent at home. The True Believer was his first book, written largely in the evenings after shifts on the waterfront, and dedicated to Margaret Anderson, an editor whose persistent prodding from across a continent finally pried it loose from him. He went on to write nine more books. In 1983 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He never gave up the docks.

The book itself is short, dense and aphoristic — closer in form to Pascal’s Pensées than to a modern monograph. Its central claim is that all mass movements, however different in doctrine, share the same underlying physiology, and that the fuel they all run on is frustration: the inarticulate sense, carried by enormous numbers of people in any restive society, that one’s own life is spoiled or wasted and that some larger cause might redeem it. From this single premise, Hoffer derives a startling architecture: the eleven types of people most susceptible to recruitment, the techniques (make-believe, doctrine, devil-creation, ritual self-stripping) by which movements convert ordinary citizens into people willing to die for slogans, and the three personality types — men of words, fanatics, and practical men of action — who successively pilot a movement from its first articulate grievance to its final institutional patchwork.

What makes the book lasting is not its diagnosis of the totalitarianisms then in living memory — Nazism, Fascism, Stalinism — but the unsettling generality of its analysis. Hoffer is just as ready to apply his framework to early Christianity, the Reformation, the French and American Revolutions, Zionism and the Meiji Restoration as he is to apply it to Hitler’s rallies, and he passes no judgment on whether mass movements as such are good or bad. They are, he argues, simply a permanent feature of human politics, available to be used well or badly depending on who grips the wheel and, crucially, on whether anyone knows when to let go. The pages that follow distill the book’s main ideas into a form a curious layperson can carry away — a list, a set of questions and answers, an analogy, a summary, and one golden nugget worth the price of admission on its own.

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