The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

The True Believer was published in 1951. It is important to remember, therefore, that Eric Hoffer wrote the book with several of history’s most notorious mass movements still fresh in his mind. With a perspective shaped by recent events, Hoffer nonetheless takes a long historical view of mass movements.

Hoffer describes mass movements as a general phenomenon. He is interested in common denominators, so he does not dwell at length on any particular mass movement. At times, however, he derives the general from the particular, and no single mass movement contributes more particulars to his general portrait than Nazism.

Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich (1933-45) passed into history only six years before The True Believer appeared in print. Hoffer quotes Hitler on several occasions, and in many other places the relevance of the short-lived Nazi regime appears obvious. For instance, Hoffer cites genuine creativity as a factor that mitigates frustration in an individual who otherwise might feel unfulfilled and come to loathe individual existence as meaningless. Hitler’s unrealized artistic aspirations constitute a familiar biographical element in his frustrated early life. Likewise, Hoffer’s description of a mass movement’s theatrical aspect calls to mind the Nazi Party’s Nuremberg rallies. In downplaying the importance of propaganda as a mass movement’s agent of unification or control, Hoffer surely knows that his readers will associate propaganda with Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda for the Third Reich. Hoffer also cites demobilized armies as breeding grounds for fanaticism—a fact of crucial importance in understanding the rise of the Nazi Party after World War One. In short, every chapter features observations about mass movements in general that pertain to something specific in the Nazi experience.

Communism also occupies Hoffer’s attention. Although Hoffer makes no effort to differentiate between mass movements, one aspect of Communism requires special treatment. By the time of the book’s publication, Nazi Germany’s reign of terror had ended, but Communism’s fate had yet to be determined. Like most people in the mid-20th century, Hoffer uses “Communism” and “the Soviet Union” as synonymous terms. The Soviets themselves encouraged this conflation by insisting that Moscow would lead a worldwide revolution of Marxist true believers. This deceived many Westerners into believing that Soviet agents both inspired and manipulated all communist movements across the world.

Hoffer had no way of knowing that, by 1951, the Soviet Union’s life was not yet half over. Forged from the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the Soviet Union did not collapse until 1991. Likewise, Joseph Stalin’s totalitarian regime concealed many details of life inside the Soviet Union. In China, the most grotesque atrocities of Mao Zedong’s Communist regime—still only two years old by the time of the book’s publication—lay in the future. Hoffer, therefore, could not yet know the full scope of 20th-century Communism’s unprecedented destruction of human life.

Finally, Hoffer describes ancient and modern mass movements in the same context. He regards 20th-century true believers as modern cousins of the fanatics who drove Christianity and Islam to attempt world domination. While he cannot know the early histories of those religions with the same familiarity that he brings to his analysis of modern mass movements, Hoffer nonetheless emphasizes the “religiofication” of all mass movements whether they prove productive of good or ill (163). Hoffer establishes this context in the Preface: “For though ours is a godless age, it is the very opposite of irreligious” (xiii).

In short, while The True Believer amounts to a philosophical treatise, its concerns, both immediate and distant, are shaped by its historical context.