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Eric Hoffer: An American Odyssey
Book by Tomkins, Calvin
115 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1968
31 people want to read
About the author
Calvin Tomkins
56 books36 followersCalvin Tomkins has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1960. He wrote his first fiction piece for the magazine in 1958, and his first fact piece in 1962. His many Profile subjects have included Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller, Philip Johnson, Julia Child, Georgia O’Keeffe, Leo Castelli, Frank Stella, Carmel Snow, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Frank Gehry, Damien Hirst, Richard Serra, Matthew Barney, and Jasper Johns. He wrote the Art World column from 1980 to 1988. Before joining The New Yorker, he was a general editor of Newsweek, a post he held from 1957 through 1959. In 1955, he joined Newsweek as an associate editor. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including “The Bride and the Bachelors,” “Merchants and Masterpieces,” “Living Well Is the Best Revenge,” “Off the Wall,” “Duchamp: A Biography,” and “Lives of the Artists.” A revised edition of his Duchamp biography came out in 2014.
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April 19, 2011
Review also found at:http://www.jamesrament.com/review—eri...
The biography, Eric Hoffer: An American Odyssey (1967) by Calvin Tomkins is, first of all, brief. The biography part is only sixty-eight pages long, including the introduction by CBS commentator, Eric Severeid. The balance of the book includes many of Hoffer’s aphorisms and photographs of him. A burly man, Hoffer, born July 25, 1902 died on May 21, 1983, writing eleven books during his lifetime. Two other books about Hoffer exist: One called Hoffer’s America by James D Koerner and the other Eric Hoffer by James Thomas Baker, both of which are difficult to find, but then the Tomkins book was difficult to locate. Given the content of his writing—his deep understanding of fanaticism, mass movements, and “change,” it’s a wonder that there hasn’t been a resurgence in interest in his work—it’s as applicable today as it was when he was popular in the '60s.
Although the book is short, the good news is that Tomkins was able to glean some enlightening information from his interviews with Eric Hoffer. He shows the reader a very different kind of philosopher. Hoffer never went to school! He was completely self-taught.
Eric Hoffer began life in New York City (the Bronx), the only child of German parents. His father was a carpenter and cabinet-maker earning a meager living and his mother died when he was seven years old. He taught himself to read English and German “easily” at age five, although he recalled that his mother helped him. His father was the town intellectual atheist and had all the necessary books that gave him that distinction. Hoffer remembered his father saying, “There is money in the cupboard,” where the books were. Hoffer had access to those books, which he claimed gave him the “capacity for generalization.” He said, “I have a tremendously high opinion of the age of five, by the way. I actually think that to become really mature is to return to the age of five, to become able to recapture the capacity for absorption, for learning, the tremendous hunger to master skills that you have at five years...I always feel that I was a brilliant child at the age of five, and that I’ve been declining ever since.”
When his mother died, he was taken care of by Martha Bauer, a Bavarian peasant who came over on the boat with his parents. That same year Hoffer inexplicably went blind and as mysteriously as he lost his sight, he recovered it at age fifteen. There is no explanation for this medical condition—they had no money for doctors—but it accounts for his lack of schooling. Hoffer doesn’t remember much from that time, but he knows that Martha Bauer took good care of him and that she was always cheerful. He also remembered that he had “a terrible hunger for the printed word.” When his sight came back, he read “ten, twelve hours a day....” He read everything he could get his hands on and a secondhand book store near his home provided a large library for that purpose.
In 1920, at age eighteen, Hoffer’s father died leaving him about $300. He took a bus to Los Angeles “because California was the place for the poor.” He spent the next ten years on Skid Row, his cheap room within walking distance of the Los Angeles Central Library. Early on, he didn't earn any money living there; he read books, but when the money ran out he started to go hungry and ended up going to the state employment agency. Tomkins quotes Hoffer with stories of these early work experiences, and then offers: “The fear of being trapped by life, by situations beyond his control, has always haunted Hoffer. Toward the end of the nineteen twenties, he found himself trapped by a man’s kindness toward him. Hoffer had taken a job in a pipe yard, planning to work there for a few days if it suited him. When he arrived for work that first morning, the owner...thought Hoffer looked pale, and he asked whether he was feeling all right. Did he get enough milk? Get enough sleep? From that moment, Hoffer says, ‘I thought he owned me. I could no more leave than fly.’ He stayed on...for nearly two years, wondering how he was ever going to break away.” The man died in 1929, which “set him free.”
Hoffer had a bit of money and decided to live as he pleased until it ran out. At age twenty-eight, he harbored thoughts of suicide, telling of an incident of taking poison, but aborting the attempt after the first taste. “The incident marked the end of Hoffer’s life on Skid Row. Feeling that he had reached a turning point, he packed his few belongings in a knapsack and walked out of Los Angeles....”
For ten years, Hoffer was a migrant worker, traveling all over California, working with the Okies and Arkies during the Great Depression. He also prospected for gold in the mountain streams near Lake Tahoe, working with a hand sluice and he took jobs with the forest service. Tomkins said, “It was a grueling life but a varied one, and he was never tempted to leave it for the greater security and servitude of factory work. Years later, when Hoffer felt that he was going soft on the waterfront, he used to take five dollars and a change of underwear, board a bus to Fresno, and get off at any small town that caught his eye along the way. ‘The idea was, you have five dollars, you get a room there, and then you have to cut the mustard. I used to come back with a hundred and fifty bucks. I did it time and time again....I always said that you could drop me anywhere in California, and within fifteen minutes I was going to have a job.’”
“Skid Row had taught Hoffer that a man could live without hope. During his years of wandering, certain other ideas about man—man as an individual and man in the mass—took root in his mind and slowly matured.” Here is where Hoffer developed his theories about outcasts and misfits as pioneers and makers of history. But he also realized that a more sinister path was possible. Later, in his most famous work, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, he says, “ When we lose our individual independence in the corporateness of a mass movement, we find a new freedom—freedom to hate, bully, lie, torture, murder, and betray without shame and remorse.” Tomkins adds, “The misfit, then, formed a volatile element in society, capable of either heroic individualism or mass tyranny.” Hoffer was a great observer of the world’s tyrants emerging during the thirties.
It was during this time that Hoffer discovered Montaigne’s Essays. Hoffer is quoted as saying, “You see, what really impressed me about Montaigne—here was this sixteenth-century aristocrat...and I found out that he was talking about nothing but Eric Hoffer! That’s how I learned about human brotherhood.” He also had said, “Montaigne gave me a taste for the good sentence...I never had the urge to write until after I read Montagne.”
Hoffer devoured Montaigne and Tomkins said his writing unmistakably reflects Montaigne’s clarity and measured cadence.
Hoffer spent most of his free time in libraries and no doubt seemed a “rare bird” to the other migrant workers. Occasionally, he would pour out those ideas he was developing and would quote Montaigne or Pascal. “His exuberance led him to personify ideas, act them out, give himself over to them body and spirit,” says Tomkins.
“Hoffer studied the men and and women he met, and one of the simple things that impressed him deeply was the prevalence of simple kindness—which seemed to go hand in hand with a sort of mindless cruelty.” Hoffer said, “Kindness is not instinctive with me. I have a savage heart, ungentled by schoolmarms. I never learned how to meet people or behave with people, and I’ve always been such a solitary person. with me, kindness is always such an effort, something I have to make myself remember.” The book quotes Hoffer’s stories of man’s kindness coupled with cruelty and closes the chapter with, “Man, Hoffer decided, was nature’s only unfinished animal. Eternally unsatisfied and incomplete, his soul continually stretched between opposites of good and evil, he achieved nobility in the attempt to become fully human, or, as Hoffer put it, to finish God’s work.”
All during the thirties, Hoffer taught himself to write, filling notebooks with his work. he established a relationship, by letters, with a magazine editor in New York. In 1941, he volunteered for the armed services but was rejected for an old hernia condition and he decided to look for “the hardest work there was,” and as Tomkins said, “preferably connected to the war effort.” He thus became a stevedore on the San Francisco docks and for “the first time in his life, he settled down to a steady job and a fixed way of life.”
During the lulls in work, Hoffer read and took notes. He took only the ordinary jobs and it was during those times that some of his best ideas came to him. He would do the manual work while he also worked on his thoughts, excited about when he could get back to his rented room and write it down. He said his teachers were Montaigne, Pascal, Renan, Bergson and de Tocqueville—all French; then, Bacon, Dostoevsky, and Burckhardt. He didn’t get much out of the Greeks or the Germans except Nietzsche and Heine. He said it was German superstition that if anything was to be profound, it had to be dark, abstruse, and difficult. He said, “They don’t know what lucidity is.” He also thought that Sartre and other modern French intellectuals were “writing like Germans.”
Tomkins wrote, “Slowly and without a conscious plan, The True Believer was taking shape. Hoffer did not acknowledge even to himself that he was writing a book, but increasingly, in the library and elsewhere, he looked for and found material that was relevant to his thinking about mass movements throughout history.” In 1951, The True Believer was published, dedicated to Margaret Anderson who helped get it published. He had fought the editors, wanting to preserve his carefully worded sentences and won. “On the other hand, the spirit in which he offered his work to the public was characteristically modest. As he wrote in the preface, quoting his beloved Montaigne, ‘All I say is by way of discourse, and nothing by way of advice. I should not speak so boldly if it were my due to be believed.’”
The book was critically acclaimed but it did not make him rich. He continued to live in his rented room on McAllister Street in San Francisco. “His requirements were simple...a bed, a worktable, a hard wooden chair. He had no expensive tastes in food, clothing, or pleasure, and no taste at all for property...The waterfront, in any case, gave him the opportunity to live as he liked.”
Being a loner, Hoffer had few real friends, but during this time, an intellectual with a Master’s degree in political science named Selden Osborne, invited him for dinner and a life-long friendship with the family ensued, including the wife Lili and the children. They “adopted” Eric and his friendship with the family was the joy of his life.
He also wrestled with a new idea—the problem of change, which was really underpinning all his previous ideas, and wrote another great book, The Ordeal of Change, published in 1963. He pursued these ideas further and published The Temper of Our Time in 1967.
Also in the early sixties, Hoffer was very concerned about the effects of automation. He “thought that automation was coming terrifically fast then...” He was “possessed by the idea” and began making speeches at Rotary clubs, lodges and churches. To the best of my knowledge, he never went so far as to suggest—as a Luddite might—that lawnmowers should be banned and the grass should be cut with scissors thus using more labor, but rapid technological advances obviously concerned him. Tomkins wrote that this lasted about a year. “Then, little by little, Hoffer’s faith in the adaptability of the American working masses reasserted itself.”
In 1964, Hoffer was given at appointment at UC Berkeley in the political science department at a modest salary. He spent one day a week in an office provided him where students came to him to discuss his ideas. He also lectured a few times a year. He knew and talked with many of the “anti-administration rebels” who participated in the 1964 “free speech riots,” but “to him they sounded like spoiled children.” The book gives a detailed account of his sentiments.
Hoffer became famous when Eric Sevareid interviewed him for an hour on CBS television, September 19, 1967. And it was repeated on November 14, 1967. The man was charismatic and had an appeal. He “touched the nerve of faith about ourselves and our nation” in that interview. He had to give up trying to answer all the letters he received. He occasionally would take a speaking engagement and said that the Jesuits, the Jews, and the psychiatrists were the most persistent in trying to get him. The invitation that meant the most was from President Lyndon Johnson. He was supposed to spend five minutes, shake hands, and move on. They spent fifty minutes together and Hoffer was thrilled.
He continued to spend a good deal of his time in libraries, at Berkeley, and with the Osborne family. He didn't’ see himself as an intellectual and said the reason was “that I’m not impressed by my ability to hold people with words.” (C.S. Lewis had a few things to say about “men of words” as did Hoffer.) Hoffer had this to say about himself: “I’m a common man, and proud of my commonness. But talent is common too—its all around us, only most of the time it gets wasted. You just can’t judge the intelligence, the talent of the American working masses by talking with them; you have to work with them to know that. I’ve worked with these people for forty-five years, and I never had a steady partner; always felt I ought to be able to work with anybody, and the technique I found for getting along with everybody was that you let them teach you....” (Emphasis mine)
Eric Hoffer epitomizes the kind of individual that lived out one of my favorite quotes from the preface of "The Great Conversation," book one of "The Great Books of the Western World," edited by Robert M. Hutchins and Mortimer Adler, December 1, 1951:
"We believe that the reduction of the citizen to an object of propaganda, private and public, is one of the greatest dangers to democracy. A prevalent notion is that the great mass of the people cannot understand and cannot form an independent judgment upon any matter; they cannot be educated, in the sense of developing their intellectual powers, but they can be bamboozled. The reiteration of slogans, the distortion of the news, the great storm of propaganda that beats upon the citizen twenty-four hours a day all his life long mean either that democracy must fall prey to the loudest and most persistent propagandists or that the people must save themselves by strengthening their minds so that they can appraise the issues for themselves."
Here was a man who, on his own, certainly strengthened his mind...and made the world a better place for what he gave us.
Eric Hoffer’s eleven books:
1951 The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements
1955 The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms
1963 The Ordeal Of Change
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
1976 In Our Time
1979 Before the Sabbath
1982 Between the devil and the dragon : the best essays and aphorisms of Eric Hoffer
1983 Truth Imagined
The biography, Eric Hoffer: An American Odyssey (1967) by Calvin Tomkins is, first of all, brief. The biography part is only sixty-eight pages long, including the introduction by CBS commentator, Eric Severeid. The balance of the book includes many of Hoffer’s aphorisms and photographs of him. A burly man, Hoffer, born July 25, 1902 died on May 21, 1983, writing eleven books during his lifetime. Two other books about Hoffer exist: One called Hoffer’s America by James D Koerner and the other Eric Hoffer by James Thomas Baker, both of which are difficult to find, but then the Tomkins book was difficult to locate. Given the content of his writing—his deep understanding of fanaticism, mass movements, and “change,” it’s a wonder that there hasn’t been a resurgence in interest in his work—it’s as applicable today as it was when he was popular in the '60s.
Although the book is short, the good news is that Tomkins was able to glean some enlightening information from his interviews with Eric Hoffer. He shows the reader a very different kind of philosopher. Hoffer never went to school! He was completely self-taught.
Eric Hoffer began life in New York City (the Bronx), the only child of German parents. His father was a carpenter and cabinet-maker earning a meager living and his mother died when he was seven years old. He taught himself to read English and German “easily” at age five, although he recalled that his mother helped him. His father was the town intellectual atheist and had all the necessary books that gave him that distinction. Hoffer remembered his father saying, “There is money in the cupboard,” where the books were. Hoffer had access to those books, which he claimed gave him the “capacity for generalization.” He said, “I have a tremendously high opinion of the age of five, by the way. I actually think that to become really mature is to return to the age of five, to become able to recapture the capacity for absorption, for learning, the tremendous hunger to master skills that you have at five years...I always feel that I was a brilliant child at the age of five, and that I’ve been declining ever since.”
When his mother died, he was taken care of by Martha Bauer, a Bavarian peasant who came over on the boat with his parents. That same year Hoffer inexplicably went blind and as mysteriously as he lost his sight, he recovered it at age fifteen. There is no explanation for this medical condition—they had no money for doctors—but it accounts for his lack of schooling. Hoffer doesn’t remember much from that time, but he knows that Martha Bauer took good care of him and that she was always cheerful. He also remembered that he had “a terrible hunger for the printed word.” When his sight came back, he read “ten, twelve hours a day....” He read everything he could get his hands on and a secondhand book store near his home provided a large library for that purpose.
In 1920, at age eighteen, Hoffer’s father died leaving him about $300. He took a bus to Los Angeles “because California was the place for the poor.” He spent the next ten years on Skid Row, his cheap room within walking distance of the Los Angeles Central Library. Early on, he didn't earn any money living there; he read books, but when the money ran out he started to go hungry and ended up going to the state employment agency. Tomkins quotes Hoffer with stories of these early work experiences, and then offers: “The fear of being trapped by life, by situations beyond his control, has always haunted Hoffer. Toward the end of the nineteen twenties, he found himself trapped by a man’s kindness toward him. Hoffer had taken a job in a pipe yard, planning to work there for a few days if it suited him. When he arrived for work that first morning, the owner...thought Hoffer looked pale, and he asked whether he was feeling all right. Did he get enough milk? Get enough sleep? From that moment, Hoffer says, ‘I thought he owned me. I could no more leave than fly.’ He stayed on...for nearly two years, wondering how he was ever going to break away.” The man died in 1929, which “set him free.”
Hoffer had a bit of money and decided to live as he pleased until it ran out. At age twenty-eight, he harbored thoughts of suicide, telling of an incident of taking poison, but aborting the attempt after the first taste. “The incident marked the end of Hoffer’s life on Skid Row. Feeling that he had reached a turning point, he packed his few belongings in a knapsack and walked out of Los Angeles....”
For ten years, Hoffer was a migrant worker, traveling all over California, working with the Okies and Arkies during the Great Depression. He also prospected for gold in the mountain streams near Lake Tahoe, working with a hand sluice and he took jobs with the forest service. Tomkins said, “It was a grueling life but a varied one, and he was never tempted to leave it for the greater security and servitude of factory work. Years later, when Hoffer felt that he was going soft on the waterfront, he used to take five dollars and a change of underwear, board a bus to Fresno, and get off at any small town that caught his eye along the way. ‘The idea was, you have five dollars, you get a room there, and then you have to cut the mustard. I used to come back with a hundred and fifty bucks. I did it time and time again....I always said that you could drop me anywhere in California, and within fifteen minutes I was going to have a job.’”
“Skid Row had taught Hoffer that a man could live without hope. During his years of wandering, certain other ideas about man—man as an individual and man in the mass—took root in his mind and slowly matured.” Here is where Hoffer developed his theories about outcasts and misfits as pioneers and makers of history. But he also realized that a more sinister path was possible. Later, in his most famous work, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, he says, “ When we lose our individual independence in the corporateness of a mass movement, we find a new freedom—freedom to hate, bully, lie, torture, murder, and betray without shame and remorse.” Tomkins adds, “The misfit, then, formed a volatile element in society, capable of either heroic individualism or mass tyranny.” Hoffer was a great observer of the world’s tyrants emerging during the thirties.
It was during this time that Hoffer discovered Montaigne’s Essays. Hoffer is quoted as saying, “You see, what really impressed me about Montaigne—here was this sixteenth-century aristocrat...and I found out that he was talking about nothing but Eric Hoffer! That’s how I learned about human brotherhood.” He also had said, “Montaigne gave me a taste for the good sentence...I never had the urge to write until after I read Montagne.”
Hoffer devoured Montaigne and Tomkins said his writing unmistakably reflects Montaigne’s clarity and measured cadence.
Hoffer spent most of his free time in libraries and no doubt seemed a “rare bird” to the other migrant workers. Occasionally, he would pour out those ideas he was developing and would quote Montaigne or Pascal. “His exuberance led him to personify ideas, act them out, give himself over to them body and spirit,” says Tomkins.
“Hoffer studied the men and and women he met, and one of the simple things that impressed him deeply was the prevalence of simple kindness—which seemed to go hand in hand with a sort of mindless cruelty.” Hoffer said, “Kindness is not instinctive with me. I have a savage heart, ungentled by schoolmarms. I never learned how to meet people or behave with people, and I’ve always been such a solitary person. with me, kindness is always such an effort, something I have to make myself remember.” The book quotes Hoffer’s stories of man’s kindness coupled with cruelty and closes the chapter with, “Man, Hoffer decided, was nature’s only unfinished animal. Eternally unsatisfied and incomplete, his soul continually stretched between opposites of good and evil, he achieved nobility in the attempt to become fully human, or, as Hoffer put it, to finish God’s work.”
All during the thirties, Hoffer taught himself to write, filling notebooks with his work. he established a relationship, by letters, with a magazine editor in New York. In 1941, he volunteered for the armed services but was rejected for an old hernia condition and he decided to look for “the hardest work there was,” and as Tomkins said, “preferably connected to the war effort.” He thus became a stevedore on the San Francisco docks and for “the first time in his life, he settled down to a steady job and a fixed way of life.”
During the lulls in work, Hoffer read and took notes. He took only the ordinary jobs and it was during those times that some of his best ideas came to him. He would do the manual work while he also worked on his thoughts, excited about when he could get back to his rented room and write it down. He said his teachers were Montaigne, Pascal, Renan, Bergson and de Tocqueville—all French; then, Bacon, Dostoevsky, and Burckhardt. He didn’t get much out of the Greeks or the Germans except Nietzsche and Heine. He said it was German superstition that if anything was to be profound, it had to be dark, abstruse, and difficult. He said, “They don’t know what lucidity is.” He also thought that Sartre and other modern French intellectuals were “writing like Germans.”
Tomkins wrote, “Slowly and without a conscious plan, The True Believer was taking shape. Hoffer did not acknowledge even to himself that he was writing a book, but increasingly, in the library and elsewhere, he looked for and found material that was relevant to his thinking about mass movements throughout history.” In 1951, The True Believer was published, dedicated to Margaret Anderson who helped get it published. He had fought the editors, wanting to preserve his carefully worded sentences and won. “On the other hand, the spirit in which he offered his work to the public was characteristically modest. As he wrote in the preface, quoting his beloved Montaigne, ‘All I say is by way of discourse, and nothing by way of advice. I should not speak so boldly if it were my due to be believed.’”
The book was critically acclaimed but it did not make him rich. He continued to live in his rented room on McAllister Street in San Francisco. “His requirements were simple...a bed, a worktable, a hard wooden chair. He had no expensive tastes in food, clothing, or pleasure, and no taste at all for property...The waterfront, in any case, gave him the opportunity to live as he liked.”
Being a loner, Hoffer had few real friends, but during this time, an intellectual with a Master’s degree in political science named Selden Osborne, invited him for dinner and a life-long friendship with the family ensued, including the wife Lili and the children. They “adopted” Eric and his friendship with the family was the joy of his life.
He also wrestled with a new idea—the problem of change, which was really underpinning all his previous ideas, and wrote another great book, The Ordeal of Change, published in 1963. He pursued these ideas further and published The Temper of Our Time in 1967.
Also in the early sixties, Hoffer was very concerned about the effects of automation. He “thought that automation was coming terrifically fast then...” He was “possessed by the idea” and began making speeches at Rotary clubs, lodges and churches. To the best of my knowledge, he never went so far as to suggest—as a Luddite might—that lawnmowers should be banned and the grass should be cut with scissors thus using more labor, but rapid technological advances obviously concerned him. Tomkins wrote that this lasted about a year. “Then, little by little, Hoffer’s faith in the adaptability of the American working masses reasserted itself.”
In 1964, Hoffer was given at appointment at UC Berkeley in the political science department at a modest salary. He spent one day a week in an office provided him where students came to him to discuss his ideas. He also lectured a few times a year. He knew and talked with many of the “anti-administration rebels” who participated in the 1964 “free speech riots,” but “to him they sounded like spoiled children.” The book gives a detailed account of his sentiments.
Hoffer became famous when Eric Sevareid interviewed him for an hour on CBS television, September 19, 1967. And it was repeated on November 14, 1967. The man was charismatic and had an appeal. He “touched the nerve of faith about ourselves and our nation” in that interview. He had to give up trying to answer all the letters he received. He occasionally would take a speaking engagement and said that the Jesuits, the Jews, and the psychiatrists were the most persistent in trying to get him. The invitation that meant the most was from President Lyndon Johnson. He was supposed to spend five minutes, shake hands, and move on. They spent fifty minutes together and Hoffer was thrilled.
He continued to spend a good deal of his time in libraries, at Berkeley, and with the Osborne family. He didn't’ see himself as an intellectual and said the reason was “that I’m not impressed by my ability to hold people with words.” (C.S. Lewis had a few things to say about “men of words” as did Hoffer.) Hoffer had this to say about himself: “I’m a common man, and proud of my commonness. But talent is common too—its all around us, only most of the time it gets wasted. You just can’t judge the intelligence, the talent of the American working masses by talking with them; you have to work with them to know that. I’ve worked with these people for forty-five years, and I never had a steady partner; always felt I ought to be able to work with anybody, and the technique I found for getting along with everybody was that you let them teach you....” (Emphasis mine)
Eric Hoffer epitomizes the kind of individual that lived out one of my favorite quotes from the preface of "The Great Conversation," book one of "The Great Books of the Western World," edited by Robert M. Hutchins and Mortimer Adler, December 1, 1951:
"We believe that the reduction of the citizen to an object of propaganda, private and public, is one of the greatest dangers to democracy. A prevalent notion is that the great mass of the people cannot understand and cannot form an independent judgment upon any matter; they cannot be educated, in the sense of developing their intellectual powers, but they can be bamboozled. The reiteration of slogans, the distortion of the news, the great storm of propaganda that beats upon the citizen twenty-four hours a day all his life long mean either that democracy must fall prey to the loudest and most persistent propagandists or that the people must save themselves by strengthening their minds so that they can appraise the issues for themselves."
Here was a man who, on his own, certainly strengthened his mind...and made the world a better place for what he gave us.
Eric Hoffer’s eleven books:
1951 The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements
1955 The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms
1963 The Ordeal Of Change
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
1976 In Our Time
1979 Before the Sabbath
1982 Between the devil and the dragon : the best essays and aphorisms of Eric Hoffer
1983 Truth Imagined
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