The four chapters of Part Four of Eric Hoffer, The True Believer (1951) — a Czech historian saying that if the ceiling had fallen on the room where he and a few friends were dining there would have been no Czech nation; Milton spending twenty sterile years on pamphlets with a draft of Paradise Lost in his pocket; a monk who covenanted with his eyes never to look out of the window at the view; and a list of the Nazi leaders' failed artistic careers. Read from
RAW/books/The True Believer.md. One full archaeology pass per chapter, sweeping all seven dimensions in every run.This is the part about phases, and it is where the book stops being a study of a type and becomes a theory of how a movement dies. Three kinds of man take it in turn — the man of words, the fanatic, the practical man of action — and Hoffer's judgment is that a movement is good or bad depending on how long the middle stage runs. The last chapter is also the one place he says outright which movements he thinks were worth having.
Siblings: Part 1 — Le Bon, Preface to Book I · Part 2 — Le Bon, Book II · Part 3 — Le Bon, Book III · Part 4 — Hoffer, Preface and Part One · Part 5 — Hoffer, Part Two · Part 6 — Hoffer, Part Three · What Runs Through All of It.
Thread map: Le Bon vs Hoffer on What a Crowd Is Made Of.
Pairs with the Kershaw build and the Meerloo build.
Source ingest: Eric Hoffer, The True Believer
What makes things happen. Discrediting, and it does not happen by itself.1 Mass movements do not usually rise until the prevailing order has been discredited. That is not the automatic result of blunders and abuses by those in power. It is the deliberate work of men of words with a grievance. Where the articulate are absent, or have no grievance, an incompetent and corrupt order may hold power until it crumbles on its own. And an order of real merit may be swept away if it fails to win the allegiance of the articulate minority.
The reason the talker rather than the fanatic does this job is a matter of timing. A full-blown movement is a ruthless affair run by fanatics. They can only move in after the order has already lost the allegiance of the masses. Until then, the masses stay basically conservative. They can think of reform and not of total innovation. The fanatical extremist strikes them as dangerous, traitorous, impractical or insane, and they will not listen to him. Lenin himself admitted that where the ground is not ready the Communists find it hard to get the masses even to listen.
The man of words is heard for the opposite reason. The masses listen because they know his words cannot have immediate results. The authorities ignore him or use mild methods to muzzle him. So imperceptibly he undermines institutions, discredits those in power, and weakens prevailing loyalties. He sets the stage.
What a person is. Someone who wants to be recognised, and Hoffer thinks that is the whole of it. The men of words are of diverse types — priests, scribes, prophets, writers, artists, professors, students. Where reading and writing is a difficult art, as in China, mere literacy confers the status. Whatever the type, one craving is common to almost all of them. It is a craving for a clearly marked status above the common run of humanity. Napoleon's version is quoted: vanity made the Revolution, and liberty was only a pretext.
There is an irremediable insecurity at the core of every intellectual, creative or not. Even the most gifted seem to live in eternal self-doubt and have to prove their worth again each day. De Rémusat's line about Thiers is offered as typical. He has much more vanity than ambition, prefers consideration to obedience, and prefers the appearance of power to power itself. Consult him constantly, then do as you please. He will notice your deference more than your actions.
From which follows the most uncomfortable claim in the run. There is a moment in almost every faultfinding man of words's career when a deferential gesture from those in power would win him over. At a certain stage most of them are ready to become timeservers and courtiers. Jesus might not have preached a new Gospel had the dominant Pharisees taken him into the fold and called him Rabbi. A bishopric conferred on Luther at the right moment might have cooled his ardour. The young Marx could perhaps have been bought with a title and a government job.
The grievance behind the protest is nearly always private. However much the man of words sees himself as champion of the downtrodden, his pity is usually hatched out of his hatred for the powers that be. Thoreau states it with fierce extravagance. What saddens the reformer is not sympathy with his fellows in distress but his own private ail — let this be righted, and he will forsake his generous companions without apology.
The evidence is what happens when the status arrives. Luther, first defying the church, spoke feelingly of the poor, simple, common folk. Allied later with the German princelings, he proclaimed that God would prefer the government to exist however evil rather than allow the rabble to riot, however justified. Burke, patronised by lords, spoke of the swinish multitude and recommended patience, labour, sobriety and religion to the poor.
How people should relate. Rulers to intellectuals, and Hoffer treats it as the decisive relationship in politics. Wherever a dispensation endures beyond its span of competence, there is either no educated class at all or an intimate alliance between those in power and the men of words. Where all learned men are clergymen, the church is unassailable.
The comparison he uses is two centuries of the same institution. The Catholic Church was at its lowest in the tenth century, under Pope John XII, far more corrupt than at the Reformation. But then all learned men were priests. By the fifteenth century, printing and paper had ended the church's monopoly on learning, and it was the nonclerical humanists who formed the vanguard.
The stability of Imperial China and of ancient Egypt rested on the same alliance between bureaucracy and literati. He notes that the Taiping rebellion, the only effective Chinese movement while the Empire still worked, was started by a scholar who failed the state examination again and again. Rome's long endurance owed something to its partnership with the Greek men of words. The conquered Greeks felt they gave laws and civilisation to their conquerors. They welcomed the deformed and depraved Nero hysterically in 67 A.D. and took him to their hearts as a fellow intellectual and artist.
The British in India are the counter-case, and it is the most concrete argument in the chapter. Toynbee found a Latin poet praising Rome five hundred years after Caesar reached Egypt, and observed ruefully that no Claudian could be found in any Alexandria of Hindustan. Hoffer thinks it is not far-fetched to suppose the British could have kept India indefinitely. They cultivated the Nizams, Maharajas and Nawabs, and did not try to win the Indian intellectual. They were men of action with a faith in innate British superiority, and they scorned him twice over.
They also kept the realm of action for themselves. They did not much encourage Indians to become engineers, agronomists or technicians. The institutions they built produced impractical men of words. It is an irony of fate, he writes, that this system hastened the end of British rule instead of safeguarding it.
How you know. By watching the fate of the articulate under each regime. Both the Bolsheviks and the Nazis showed an acute awareness of the relationship. In Russia, men of letters, artists and scholars share the privileges of the ruling group as superior civil servants, made to toe the line under the same discipline as the rest of the elite. And Hitler's plan had a diabolical realism to it — make all learning the monopoly of the elite ruling his world empire, and keep the anonymous masses barely literate.
The historical pattern runs the same way in every case he checks. The men of letters of eighteenth-century France are the familiar example. The ground for the Reformation was prepared by pamphleteers who satirised the clergy. Christianity spread fast in a Roman world where the pagan cults had already been discredited by Greek philosophers who found them puerile and ridiculed them in the streets. Christianity made little headway against Judaism because the Jewish religion had the ardent allegiance of the Jewish men of words. The rabbis had an exalted status in a life where the school and the book had supplanted the temple and the fatherland.
Modern movements follow the same rule. Socialist and nationalist movements alike were pioneered by poets, writers, historians and philosophers. The generals, industrialists and businessmen who are counted as pillars of patriotism are latecomers who join once it is a going concern. Palacky said that if the ceiling of the room where he and a handful of friends were dining had collapsed, there would have been no Czech nationalist movement.
And it is humiliation that sets them off, because of the craving for status. Napoleon's humiliation of the Prussians drove Fichte and the German intellectuals to call for a Germany that would dominate Europe. Herzl and the Jewish intellectuals were driven to Zionism by the treatment of millions of Jews in Russia. The nationalist movement that forced the British out of India began, to a degree, in the humiliation of a scrawny and bespectacled Indian man of words in South Africa.
What is worth having. Not what the man of words thought he was buying, and this is the chapter's real finding. It is easy to see how ridicule shakes prevailing loyalties. What is not obvious is how discrediting the old beliefs makes a new fanatical faith possible. The militant man of words who sounds the established order to its source often prepares the ground for a corporate society that cherishes blind faith. A wide diffusion of doubt leads to unexpected results. The irreverence of the Renaissance was a prelude to the fanaticism of Reformation and Counter-Reformation. The Frenchmen of the enlightenment who preached reason and tolerance released a burst of revolutionary fanaticism that has not abated.
The mechanism he offers is a plumbing metaphor and it is worth keeping. When we debunk a fanatical faith we do not strike at the root of fanaticism. We merely prevent its leaking out at a certain point, with the likely result that it leaks out somewhere else. By denigrating prevailing loyalties, the man of words creates in the disillusioned a hunger for faith, because most people cannot endure the barrenness of their lives without some ardent dedication. So the scoffer becomes the precursor of a new faith in spite of himself.
He can get along without absolutes himself, which is the point of difference. He values the search for truth as much as truth. He delights in the clash of thought and the give-and-take of controversy. When he formulates a doctrine it is an exhibition of brilliance rather than a programme of action. The fanatics and the faith-hungry masses then invest his speculations with the certitude of holy writ. Jesus was not a Christian, nor was Marx a Marxist.
The summary he gives has four items. The militant man of words discredits prevailing creeds and detaches people's allegiance from them. He indirectly creates a hunger for faith in those who cannot live without one. He furnishes the doctrine and the slogans. And he undermines the convictions of the better people — those who can get along without faith — so that when the new fanaticism appears they cannot resist it. They see no sense in dying for principles, and yield without a fight. Then Yeats, quoted to close it: the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
What a person is — the precursor's mistake. Wrong about what the masses want, and the error is fatal to him personally. The tragic figures in a movement's history are the intellectual precursors who live to see the old order fall. They rise against it, deride its incompetence, and call for freedom of self-expression. They take it for granted that the masses who follow them crave the same things.
They do not. The freedom the masses crave is not freedom of self-expression but freedom from the intolerable burden of an autonomous existence. They want freedom from the fearful burden of free choice, and from the responsibility of realising an ineffectual self and taking the blame for the result. They do not want freedom of conscience. They want faith — blind, authoritarian faith. They sweep away the old order to establish uniformity and anonymity and a new structure of perfect unity.
Which reverses the usual story about betrayal. It is not the wickedness of the old regime they rise against but its weakness. Not its oppression, but its failure to hammer them together into one mighty whole. So the demagogue's persuasiveness lies less in convicting people of the old order's vileness than in demonstrating its helplessness. The immediate result of a movement usually corresponds to what the people wanted. The only people cheated are the intellectual precursors.
The shape of time. A relay in three legs, announced here and run in the next two chapters. The readying of the ground is done best by men whose chief excellence is skill with words. The hatching of the actual movement requires the temperament of the fanatic. The final consolidation is the work of practical men of action. He notes the division is not categorical — Gandhi and Trotsky started as apparently ineffectual men of words and later showed exceptional talents as administrators or generals.
Read: lines 1219–1329.
What makes things happen. The fanatic, at the moment the order cracks.2 When the moment is ripe, only he can hatch a genuine movement. Without him the disaffection the talkers engendered stays undirected. It vents itself in pointless and easily suppressed disorders. Reforms, even drastic ones, leave the old way of life unchanged. A change of government amounts to a transfer of power between sets of men of action. Without him there can perhaps be no new beginning.
The contrast with the men of words is drawn at the exact moment of collapse, and it is the sharpest scene in Part Four. When the old order begins to fall apart, many of the vociferous men of words who prayed for the day are in a funk. The first glimpse of the face of anarchy frightens them out of their wits. They forget everything they said about the poor simple folk. They run for help to strong men of action — princes, generals, administrators, bankers, landowners — who know how to deal with the rabble.
Not the fanatic. Chaos is his element. When the old order cracks he wades in with all his recklessness to blow the hated present to high heaven, and he glories in the sight of a world coming to a sudden end. To hell with reforms. All that exists is rubbish, and there is no sense in reforming rubbish. He justifies the will to anarchy plausibly enough: there can be no new beginning while the old clutters the landscape. He shoves the frightened men of words aside, and goes on quoting their doctrines and mouthing their slogans. He alone knows the innermost craving of the masses in action — the craving for communion, for the mustering of the host, for the dissolution of cursed individuality in a mighty whole.
What a person is. A man of words who cannot create, and Hoffer says the division inside that class is the significant one. The creative man of words, however bitterly he criticises the existing order, is attached to the present. His passion is to reform and not destroy. A movement left wholly in his keeping turns into a mild affair with reforms of the surface and no sudden break. That is only possible when the old order abdicates without a struggle, or when he allies himself with strong men of action the moment chaos threatens. When the struggle is bitter, the creative man is shoved aside and management falls to the noncreative — the eternal misfits and the contemners of the present.
The portrait he then gives is the same man from Part Two, at the top of a movement. Here is somebody who wants to write a great book, paint a great picture, become a great scientist, and knows he never will. He can find no peace in a stable social order, old or new. He sees his life as irrevocably spoiled and the world perpetually out of joint. He feels at home only in a state of chaos. Even when he imposes an iron discipline he is only shaping an instrument for attaining eternal flux. Only while engaged in change does he feel free and growing.
The evidence is a list, and it is the most quoted paragraph in the chapter. Marat, Robespierre, Lenin, Mussolini and Hitler are the outstanding examples. Peter Viereck points out that most of the Nazi bigwigs had artistic and literary ambitions they could not realise. Hitler tried painting and architecture. Goebbels tried drama, the novel and poetry. Rosenberg tried architecture and philosophy, von Schirach poetry, Funk music, Streicher painting. Almost all were failures, not only by the vulgar criterion of success but by their own artistic criteria.
How people should relate. Badly, once the creative man is inside a movement. He feels its whirl and passion sapping his creative energies. While he is conscious of the flow within him he will not find fulfilment in leading millions. So once it starts rolling he either retires or is pushed aside. And since he can never for long suppress his critical faculty, he is inevitably cast as the heretic. Unless he stifles the movement early or dies at the right moment, he is likely to end a shunned recluse, or in exile, or facing a firing squad.
What is worth having — and when the fanatic stops being useful. The danger is that he cannot settle down. Once victory is won and the new order begins to crystallise, he becomes an element of strain. The taste for strong feeling drives him to search for mysteries yet to be revealed and doors yet to be opened. He keeps groping for extremes. So on the morrow of victory most movements find themselves in the grip of dissension. The ardour that yesterday went into a life-and-death struggle now vents itself in violent factional disputes. Hatred has become a habit, and with no outside enemies left the fanatics make enemies of one another.
How you know. From a fanatic diagnosing other fanatics, which Hoffer treats as a self-portrait. In his order to the new chief of the SA after the Röhm purge in 1934, Hitler described those who will not settle down. Without realising it, they have found in nihilism their ultimate confession of faith. Their unrest can find satisfaction only in some conspiratorial activity of the mind, in perpetually plotting the disintegration of whatever set-up happens to exist. As so often, Hoffer notes, Hitler's accusations against his antagonists were a self-revelation — he too, particularly at the end, found in nihilism his ultimate philosophy and valediction.
The shape of time and What is real are not developed separately in this run. The chapter's whole content is one figure and one window of time in which he is indispensable. Left to themselves the fanatics split a movement into schisms, or wreck it by driving it to attempt the impossible. Only the entrance of a practical man of action can save what it achieved.
Read: lines 1330–1367.
The shape of time. Three roles played by three men in succession, and the succession is the point.3 A movement is pioneered by men of words, materialised by fanatics and consolidated by men of action. It is usually an advantage, and perhaps a requirement for endurance, that different men play those roles as conditions require. When the same person leads a movement from inception to maturity it usually ends in disaster.
The Fascist and Nazi movements had no successive change of leadership, and both ended in disaster. Hoffer's reading is that Hitler's fanaticism, and his inability to settle down and play the practical man, brought ruin to his own movement. Had Hitler died in the middle 1930s, a man of action of Goering's type would have succeeded him and the movement would have survived.
A change of character is possible and he thinks it rarely lasts. Trotsky was essentially a man of words — vain, brilliant, an individualist to the core. The collapse of an empire and Lenin's overpowering will brought him into the camp of the fanatics, and in the civil war he showed unequalled talents as an organiser and general. The moment the strain relaxed he was a man of words again, trusting in words rather than relentless force, and he let himself be pushed aside by the crafty fanatic Stalin.
Stalin he reads as a combination of fanatic and man of action with the fanatic predominating. The disastrous blunders were the fanatic's: the senseless liquidation of the kulaks and their offspring, the terror of the purges, the pact with Hitler, the clumsy meddling with the work of writers and artists. There was small chance for the Russians to taste the joys of the present while Stalin was in power.
What a person is. A rare kind of leader, in the one paragraph where Hoffer names people he admires. Lincoln, Gandhi, F.D.R., Churchill and Nehru all harness men's hungers and fears to weld a following and make it zealous unto death. Unlike Hitler or Stalin, or even Luther and Calvin, they are not tempted to use the slime of frustrated souls as mortar in building a new world. Their self-confidence is blended with faith in humanity. They know that no one can be honourable unless he honours mankind.
What makes things happen. The man of action arriving, which saves the movement and ends its dynamic phase in the same act. He saves it from suicidal dissension and from the recklessness of the fanatics. The war with the present is over. The genuine man of action is intent not on renovating the world but on possessing it. Where the dynamic phase lived on protest and a desire for drastic change, the final phase administers and perpetuates the power already won.
The explosive vigour then gets embalmed and sealed in sanctified institutions. A religious movement crystallises into a hierarchy and a ritual. A revolutionary movement crystallises into organs of vigilance and administration. A nationalist movement crystallises into governmental and patriotic institutions. Establishing a church marks the end of the revivalist spirit. The organs of a triumphant revolution liquidate the revolutionary mentality. Institutions freeze a pattern of united action, and members must act as one man while representing a loose aggregation rather than a spontaneous coalescence. Spontaneity becomes suspect, and duty is prized above devotion.
How people should relate. Under drill rather than enthusiasm. The man of action's chief task is to fix and perpetuate unity and readiness for sacrifice. His ideal is a compact whole that functions automatically. Enthusiasm is ephemeral and persuasion unpredictable, so he leans on drill and coercion. He finds the assertion that all men are cowards less debatable than the assertion that all men are fools. In Sir John Maynard's phrase, he inclines to found the new order on the necks of the people rather than in their hearts. The genuine man of action is not a man of faith but a man of law.
He is still awed by what faith and spontaneity achieved in the early days, when a mighty instrument of power was conjured out of the void. The memory is vivid. So he takes great care to preserve an impressive façade of faith and keeps up an incessant flow of fervent propaganda while relying mainly on force. His orders are worded in pious vocabulary. The old slogans stay on his lips. The symbols are carried high and given reverence. The men of words and the fanatics of the early period are canonised. The pious phrases give coercion a semblance of persuasion, and habit a semblance of spontaneity.
What is real. A patchwork, assembled from anywhere it can be got. The man of action is eclectic and borrows from near and far, from friend and foe. He even goes back to the order that preceded the movement and takes its techniques of stability, unintentionally re-establishing continuity with the past. The institution of an absolute dictator at this stage is as much a deliberate device as a hunger for power. A rigid ceremonial style appears both at the birth of an organisation and at its decline. It gives shape to what is still amorphous, or holds together what seems to be falling apart. The infallibility of the bishop of Rome was propounded in the earliest days of the papacy, and again in 1870 when the papacy seemed close to extinction.
The examples are inventories. Stalin's Russia was a patchwork of bolshevism, czarism, nationalism, pan-Slavism, dictatorship, borrowings from Hitler, and monopolistic capitalism. Hitler's Third Reich was a conglomerate of nationalism, racialism, Prussianism, dictatorship, and borrowings from fascism, bolshevism, Shintoism, Catholicism and the ancient Hebrews. Christianity too, once it crystallised into an authoritarian church, was a patchwork. It patterned its hierarchy after the bureaucracy of the Roman Empire and adopted portions of the antique ritual.
What is worth having. Different things, now, and the change in the intake is how you spot it. In the hands of a man of action, a movement stops being a refuge from the burdens of individual existence. It becomes a means of self-realisation for the ambitious. Its new attraction for people preoccupied with their own careers is a clear indication that it has been reconciled with the present. And the influx of career men accelerates the change. Hitler, who saw the whole course of a movement while still nursing his own, warned that a movement keeps its vigour only while it can offer nothing in the present except honour and fame in the eyes of posterity.
The movement still concerns itself with the frustrated at this stage, and for the opposite purpose. It no longer harnesses their discontent for a struggle with the present. It reconciles them to it and makes them patient and meek, and what it offers them now is the distant hope, the dream and the vision. At the end of its vigorous span the movement is an instrument of power for the successful and an opiate for the frustrated.
How you know is answered by that same test, and What a person is by the inventory of the leader's qualities above.
Read: lines 1368–1415.
What is worth having. A short active phase, which is the book's one real verdict.4 This book is chiefly about the active phase, the one moulded by the true believer, and it is in that phase that all types of movement show the common traits. However noble the original purpose and however good the end result, the active phase is bound to strike us as unpleasant if not evil. The fanatic who personifies it is an unattractive human type: ruthless, self-righteous, credulous, disputatious, petty and rude, and often ready to sacrifice relatives and friends.
The absolute unity that gives a movement its drive is bought at a sacrifice of much that is precious in the autonomous individual. So no movement can be good if its active phase is overlong, and particularly if it continues after the movement is in undisputed possession of power. The ones he counts as more or less beneficent — the Reformation, the Puritan, French and American revolutions, and many nationalist movements of the past century — had relatively short active phases. The leader who benefits his people knows not only how to start a movement but, like Gandhi, when to end its active phase.
Where the pattern of the active phase is preserved for generations, as in the militant church through the Middle Ages, the result is an era of stagnation. A dark age. Genuine creativeness associated with a movement almost always comes before the active phase, or more often after it. Provided the phase was not too long or too bloody, its termination often releases a burst of creativeness — whether it ended in triumph, as with the Dutch Rebellion, or in defeat, as with the Puritan Revolution. The cause is not the movement's idealism but the abrupt relaxation of collective discipline.
What is real. Sterility, during the fever, and the evidence is a poet's twenty years. Trotsky knew that periods of high tension in social passions leave little room for contemplation, and that all the muses have hard sledding in times of revolution. Napoleon and Hitler were both mortified by the anaemic art produced in their heroic age and clamoured for masterpieces worthy of the times. They had not an inkling that an active movement stifles the creative spirit. Milton in 1640 was a poet of great promise with a draft of Paradise Lost in his pocket. He spent twenty sterile years writing pamphlets, up to his neck in the sea of noises and hoarse disputes that was the Puritan Revolution. With the Revolution dead and himself in disgrace, he produced Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes.
The interference has four routes and he lists them. The fervour drains the energies that would have gone into creative work, having the same effect as dissipation. Creative work gets subordinated to the movement, so literature, art and science must be propagandistic and practical. Where a movement opens vast fields of action there is a further drain. And the fanatical state of mind by itself can stifle all forms of creative work, because the fanatic's disdain for the present blinds him to the complexity and uniqueness of life.
The illustrations of that blindness are three men and a window. Simonov: our writers must march in serried ranks, and he who steps off the road to pick flowers is like a deserter. Rabbi Jacob in the first century: he who walks in the way and interrupts his study to say how beautiful is this tree has made himself guilty against his own soul. St Bernard could walk all day by the lake of Geneva and never see the lake. And Hume tells of a monk whose cell window opened on a noble prospect, who made a covenant with his eyes never to turn that way. The blindness is a source of strength, since the fanatic sees no obstacles. It is also the cause of intellectual sterility.
The fanatic is mentally cocky as well, and therefore barren of new beginnings. At the root of the cockiness is a conviction that life and the universe conform to a simple formula, his formula. So he is without the fruitful intervals of groping, when the mind is as it were in solution and ready for new combinations.
How you know. By whether a movement's originality is anything more than scale. When an active movement displays originality it is usually an originality of application. The principles and techniques it exploits were produced by creativeness outside the movement. All active movements have the unabashed imitativeness we associate with the Japanese. Even in propaganda the Nazis and Communists imitate more than they originate, selling their brand of holy cause the way an advertiser sells soap. Much of what looks new in their methods comes from running vast territorial empires the way a Ford or a DuPont runs an industrial one.
The shape of time — what sets the length. A concrete objective, or the lack of one. A movement with a limited objective is likely to have a shorter active phase than one with a nebulous aim. The vague objective is perhaps indispensable for chronic extremism. Cromwell's line is the epigraph: a man never goes so far as when he does not know whether he is going. Set a movement in motion to free a nation from tyranny, to resist an aggressor, or to renovate a backward society, and there is a natural point of termination. Make the objective an ideal society of perfect unity — the City of God, a Communist heaven, Hitler's warrior state — and the active phase has no automatic end.
Two nineteenth-century men saw it coming, and he quotes them at length because almost nobody else did. Burckhardt had a premonition that sounded to him like folly and would not leave him: the military state must become one great factory, and what must logically come is a definite and supervised stint of misery, with promotions and in uniform, begun and ended daily to the sound of drums. Renan felt socialism was the coming religion of the West, and that as a secular religion it would turn politics and economics into holy causes. Let us tremble, he wrote. At this very moment, perchance, the religion of the future is in the making, and we have no part in it.
Size and homogeneity matter too, and here Hoffer makes his one constructive proposal. In most cases where an attempt at an ideal society produced a prolonged and ugly active phase, the experiment was made on a vast scale with a heterogeneous population — Christianity, Islam, and the French, Russian and Nazi revolutions. The communal settlements in the small state of Israel and the socialisation programmes of the small Scandinavian states suggest something else. A small nation with a fairly homogeneous population can attempt the same thing in an atmosphere that is neither hectic nor coercive.
His reasons are practical. A small nation has a horror of wasting its human material. It needs internal harmony as a safeguard against aggression. And its people feel they are all of one family, which allows utmost co-operation without either religiofication or militarisation. He proposes the principle of a pilot plant, borrowed from mass-production industry and applied to social progress: leave the extreme social experiments wholly to small states with homogeneous, civilised populations.
There is one further variable, and it is habit. The Japanese, Russians and Germans who allowed an active phase to run on without opposition had been inured to submissiveness for generations beforehand. Lenin knew the advantage he had — how can you compare the masses of Western Europe with our people, so patient, so accustomed to privation? Madame de Staël on the Germans a century earlier is quoted as the same finding: they are vigorously submissive, and they employ philosophical reasonings to explain respect for force and the fear that turns respect into admiration.
He will not say a Hitler or a Stalin could not rise in a country with a tradition of freedom. What he asserts is narrower and more useful. In such a country a Hitler might find it easy to gain power and extremely hard to hold it indefinitely, because any marked improvement in conditions would activate the tradition of freedom, which is a tradition of revolt. In Russia the individual pitted against Stalin had nothing to identify himself with. In a traditionally free country he does not feel an isolated human atom but one of a mighty race — his rebellious ancestors.
The leader's personality is the last factor. Rare leaders like Lincoln and Gandhi curb the evil in a movement and are willing to end it when its objective is more or less realised. Stalin's medieval mind and tribal ruthlessness were a chief cause of the Communist movement's prolonged dynamism, and he moulded his successors in his own image. Cromwell's death brought the end of the Puritan Revolution, and Robespierre's death ended the active phase of the French one.
Then a counterfactual he refuses to resolve, and it is the most honest sentence in the chapter. Had Hitler died in the mid-1930s, Nazism under Goering would probably have changed course and the Second World War might have been averted. Yet the sepulchre of Hitler, founder of a Nazi religion, might have been a greater evil than all the atrocities and destruction of Hitler's war.
How people should relate — the founding gesture. With an act of defiance, if individual liberty is ever to come out the other end. The Reformation, the Puritan, American and French revolutions and many nationalist risings ended after a short active phase in orders marked by increased individual liberty. All of them started by defying and overthrowing a long-established authority. The more clear-cut that initial defiance, and the more vivid its memory, the likelier individual liberty is to emerge.
The counter-cases are the ones with no such moment. There was no clear-cut act of defiance in the rise of Christianity. It did not begin by overthrowing a king, a hierarchy or a church. There were martyrs, and not individuals shaking their fists under the nose of proud authority in view of the whole world. Hence perhaps the fact that the authoritarian order it ushered in endured almost unchallenged for fifteen hundred years. The emancipation of the Christian mind at the Renaissance drew its inspiration from the Graeco-Roman past rather than from early Christianity. Islam and the Japanese collective body lack the same founding gesture, and neither shows signs of individual emancipation. German nationalism, unlike most Western nationalisms, did not start with a spectacular act of defiance — it was taken under the wing of the Prussian army from the beginning.
What a person is — the case for useful movements. Somebody who might have to be welded together in a hurry, and this is where Hoffer defends the thing he has spent the book anatomising. The true believers of every colour declaim on the decadence of the Western democracies. The burden is always that people there are too soft and too selfish to die for a nation or a cause, and that this indicates moral and biological decay.
He calls it a grain of sense and more than a grain of nonsense. In normal times a democratic nation is an institutionalised association of more or less free individuals. Threatened, it must unify and generate a spirit of self-sacrifice, and to do that it has to transform itself into something like a militant church. That transformation is difficult and slow, and it does not involve deep-reaching changes. The true believers give the game away themselves. By their account Germany was decadent in the 1920s and wholly virile in the 1930s — and a decade is far too short to work biological or even cultural changes in a population of millions.
So the ability to produce a movement in short order matters in times like the Hitler decade. The mastery of the art of religiofication is an essential requirement in the leader of a democratic nation, even if the need to practise it never arises. And extreme intellectual fastidiousness, or a businessman's practical-mindedness, may disqualify a man for national leadership.
The measure he proposes for a nation's readiness is a good one. The measure of a nation's potential virility is the reservoir of its longing. Heraclitus said it would not be better for mankind if they were given their desires, and Hoffer applies it to nations. When a nation stops wanting things fervently, or aims its desires at something concrete and limited, its potential is impaired. Only a goal open to continued perfection keeps it ready. The goal need not be sublime: the gross ideal of an ever-rising standard of living has kept America fairly ready. England's ideal of the country gentleman and France's of the retired rentier are concrete and limited, and he thinks that has something to do with both nations' lessened drive.
What makes things happen — the last argument. Movements as an instrument of renewal, defended in the closing pages. They are often a factor in awakening stagnant societies. In large and heterogeneous bodies — Russia, India, China, the Arab world, even Spain — awakening seems to depend on a widespread fervent enthusiasm that perhaps only a movement can generate. So the inability to produce a full-fledged movement can be a grave handicap. It has probably been one of China's great misfortunes that the Taiping rebellion and the Sun Yat-sen revolution were both stifled too soon.
He goes further, and the sentence is deliberately hard. It is probably better for a country whose government shows chronic incompetence to be overthrown by a mighty upheaval, even at considerable waste of life and wealth, than to be allowed to crumble of itself. Where governments die a lingering death the result is often stagnation and irremediable decay. And since men of words are crucial to the rise of movements, an educated and articulate minority is probably indispensable to the vigour of a social body — provided it is not in intimate alliance with the government.
The mechanism of renewal, in his account, runs through outsiders and never directly. Foreign influence works not by introducing foreign fashions or manners. It works by creating an educated minority where there was none, or by alienating an existing one from the prevailing order. That minority then sets a movement in motion, and the movement shakes the body out of its stagnation. Foreign influences alienated Mohammed from the dispensation in Mecca, and Islam shook and integrated Arabia. Graeco-Roman and Arabic influences produced men of words with no connection to the church, and the Reformation shook Europe out of its torpor. European influence detached the Russian intelligentsia from the Romanovs.
Japan is the exception that makes his case, because there the influence landed on men of action rather than men of words. Emperor Meiji's group had the vision Peter the Great lacked, and they succeeded where he failed. They knew that importing foreign customs would not stir Japan to life, and that the art of religiofication was indispensable to the task. They set in motion one of the most effective movements of modern times. Its evils are illustrated throughout this book, and Hoffer doubts any other agency could have accomplished that feat of renovation.
Then the last sentence of the book, which is a compliment and an indictment in one breath. Haldane counts fanaticism among the only four really important inventions made between 3000 B.C. and 1400 A.D., and calls it a Judaic-Christian invention. It is strange to think that in receiving this malady of the soul, the world also received a miraculous instrument for raising societies and nations from the dead — an instrument of resurrection.
Read: lines 1416–1561.
Everything from here down is speculative by design. Above the line, every claim carries a footnote and a line range. Below it, the writing is allowed to weigh alternatives, run counterfactuals and hand the decision to advisors from other traditions — because that is the job of these sections.
[SPECULATIVE]Paradigm-obvious in 1951.
Homogeneity as a technical advantage. The pilot-plant proposal turns on small nations with homogeneous, civilised populations, and the word civilised is doing quiet work that nothing in the chapter examines.
National character as a durable trait. The Japanese, Russians and Germans are said to have been inured to submissiveness for generations, and Madame de Staël's century-old sentence about the Germans is offered as still describing them.
Empire as a going concern with a management problem. Whether the British could have held India indefinitely is asked as a technical question. Whether they should have held it is not asked.
Modernisation as the standard against which a society is scored, carried over from Part One and never revisited.
Paradigm-breaking, and the cost is what marks it.
Saying the intellectual precursors were not cheated by anybody. The standard story is that a power-hungry clique kidnaps a revolution. Hoffer says the masses got what they wanted, and the only people cheated were the men who thought everyone wanted what they wanted. The cost is that it removes the villain from the most-told story of the century.
Saying most men of words could have been bought. Jesus with a Rabbi's title, Luther with a bishopric, Marx with a government job. That is aimed at the class that reviews books.
Locating the fanatic in the failed artist and naming the Nazi leaders' abandoned careers one by one. It is the same finding as Part Two's, and here it is attached to specific men.
Proposing that a chronically incompetent government is better overthrown violently than left to crumble. He counts the cost in life and wealth and takes the trade anyway.
Refusing to resolve the Hitler counterfactual. He grants that an earlier death might have averted the war, then says the tomb of a founder might have been worse than the war. He leaves it there, in a book whose readers wanted the other answer.
Ending on fanaticism as an instrument of resurrection. After eighteen chapters of anatomy he closes by calling the thing indispensable, which is the least comfortable place he could have finished.
[SPECULATIVE]Decision type: predicting what a population will do with a freedom it is about to be handed.
The finding is a mismatch, and it is the sharpest thing in Part Four. The people who discredit an old order want freedom of self-expression and self-realisation. They assume the crowds behind them want the same. What the masses want is freedom from the burden of an autonomous existence — from the fearful burden of free choice, from the responsibility of realising an ineffectual self and taking the blame for the result.
The mechanism follows from the whole book. A man whose self is the problem does not experience more room for that self as relief. He experiences it as more exposure. So the object of the revolt is not the old order's wickedness but its weakness — not that it oppressed, but that it failed to hammer people together into one whole.
Scope conditions. This bites where the population is frustrated in Hoffer's sense: individuated enough to feel responsible for their own station, and without the compact groups that would take the weight. It fails where people are still held inside tribe, church or family, since they never carried the burden alone. And it fails where a tradition of defiance is available to identify with, which is his own point in the last chapter and the one qualification he offers.
The general form. A demand for freedom is not evidence of a wish for choice, and may be a demand to be relieved of choosing. Modern equivalent: any liberation that arrives and is immediately traded for a stricter order than the one displaced. The tell is in the complaints that preceded it — whether the old regime was being called cruel, or being called weak.
The second-order finding is what happens to the person who got it wrong. He is not merely disappointed. He is disposed of, and Hoffer explains why with no malice in it. The precursor remains an individualist who believes in individual opinion and initiative. Once the movement rolls, power falls to men who have no respect for the individual — and they prevail because their attitude matches the ruling passion of the masses, not because ruthlessness gives them an edge.
[SPECULATIVE]Take the fanatic at the head of an arrived movement. He has won. The old order is gone and the new one is crystallising. Hoffer's finding is that he now becomes an element of strain and disruption, because the taste for strong feeling drives him to keep groping for extremes, and with no outside enemies left the fanatics make enemies of each other. Somebody else has to take over, and if nobody does, the movement wrecks itself. The Fascist and Nazi movements had no successive change of leadership, and both ended in disaster.
Hoffer's counsel is that the man should be replaced, and he offers no mechanism for replacing him. Gandhi and Lincoln knew when to stop. Stalin and Hitler did not. The difference is left as a fact about persons.
An advisor working from the āśrama system read as alternatives rather than stages would go straight at that gap, and the historical detail is what makes the counsel bite. The four ways of life — student, householder, forest-dweller, renouncer — are now told as a sequence a man passes through with age. In the early material they were not a sequence at all. They were alternatives, chosen once, and a man picked the one he would live in. So the tradition contains both designs and knows the difference between them. A stage system has an exit built into it at a fixed point, known in advance by everyone, including the man who will have to leave. An alternatives system does not, because nobody was ever going to move on.
The counsel to a movement is that its phases are being run as alternatives while everyone pretends they are stages. Hoffer's three roles are described as a succession. Nothing in the movement makes the succession happen. The fanatic's tenure ends when he dies, and that is not a design. The question the advisor would put is the one nobody asks at the founding: what event, fixed now and public, ends this phase — and who is already named to take it.
An advisor working from succession crisis in empires would say the problem is older and larger than fanaticism, and would refuse to treat it as a defect of character. Every structure built around one indispensable person inherits the same fault. The founder's capabilities are the load-bearing wall, and there is no procedure for replacing a wall. So the crisis arrives on the founder's death whether he was a fanatic or a saint, and the movements that survive are the ones that answered the question before it was urgent.
That is a real correction to Hoffer, who explains the disaster by Hitler's inability to settle down. The advisor would point out that his own counter-example concedes the point: had Hitler died in the mid-1930s, a Goering would have taken over and the movement would have survived. The variable in that sentence is not anybody's temperament. It is a date.
They disagree about where to intervene. The first says build the exit into the founding, so the phase has an end everyone can see coming. The second says build the replacement, so the end of the phase does not have to be an accident.
Where they converge is on the thing Hoffer treats as luck. He gives us leaders who knew when to stop and leaders who did not, and files the difference under personality. Both advisors would say a movement that depends on its founder having the right character has already made its decision, and made it badly. Gandhi knowing when to end the active phase is not a plan. It is a lottery that came out well once.
[SPECULATIVE]The road not taken here is one Hoffer proposes himself, in the only constructive paragraph in the book: run the extreme social experiments in small states with homogeneous populations, on the principle of a pilot plant.
The live evidence he offers is two cases from his own decade. The communal settlements in Israel and the socialisation programmes of the Scandinavian states were both attempts at an ideal society, and neither produced the hectic and coercive atmosphere of a prolonged active phase. Against them he sets the vast heterogeneous cases — Christianity, Islam, the French, Russian and Nazi revolutions — every one of which did.
His reasons are worth separating, because two of the three are structural and one is not. A small nation has a horror of wasting its precious human material, which is arithmetic rather than virtue. It needs internal cohesion as a safeguard against aggression, which is also arithmetic. And its people feel they are all of one family — which is where homogeneous comes in, and where the proposal stops being neutral.
The counterfactual is uncomfortable in both directions. Read it charitably and it is a scale argument: fervour that has to bind fifty million strangers must be manufactured, and fervour among four million who already know each other need not be. That is consistent with everything in Part Three about compact groups. Read it less charitably and the pilot plant has a membership requirement, and the requirement is the thing the twentieth century's worst movements were built on. Hoffer does not notice the second reading, and the sentence about civilised populations is where it sits.
What makes the road genuinely untaken is that he never asks the obvious follow-up. If cohesion is what lets a small homogeneous state attempt the experiment calmly, then cohesion is the variable and size is a proxy for it. The question is then whether a large state can manufacture enough cohesion without manufacturing a movement, which is the question his entire book says is the important one. He raises the pilot plant, likes it, and moves on to national character within two paragraphs.
The second-order consequence is one he half-writes elsewhere. His own last chapter says the surest route to eventual individual liberty is a clear-cut founding act of defiance against an established authority. A pilot plant has no such moment. It is a programme, run calmly, by consent. So the two proposals in this chapter point in opposite directions, and he does not put them side by side.