(6) ERIC HOFFER –

THE TRUE BELIEVER: THOUGHTS ON THE NATURE OF MASS MOVEMENTS (1951)

First you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the women.

That’s paraphrasing Scarface of course. While it’s close, it’s not quite what American social philosopher Eric Hoffer proposed for his tripartite classification for the development of mass movements – first you get the “men of words or fault-finding intellectuals”, then you get the fanatics, and then you get the “practical men of action”. (Still not sure when you get the women though).

Those categories are not mutually exclusive – they may overlap in the same person or persons – but when the “practical men of action” take over leadership from the fanatics, it marks the end of the movement’s “dynamic phase” (with the movement more establishing itself as a social institution) and “steering the mass movement away from the fanatic’s self-destructiveness”.

And “in the absence of a practical man of action, the mass movement often withers and dies with the fanatic (Nazism died as a viable mass movement with Hitler’s death).”

The book is exactly what it says on tin – thoughts on the nature of mass movements that “arise to challenge the status quo”, including their success or failure, and rise or fall.

One of the book’s interesting (and famous) propositions is that mass movements are interchangeable, whether radical or reactionary – and whether religious, political or something else – they are similar in terms of the psychology of their adherents. The movements attract the same sort of people, some of whom flip from one to another – such as St Paul as religious hitman turned evangelist, or fanatical opponent of Christianity turned fanatical proponent of Christianity.

Hoffer’s prose style was characteristically aphoristic – pithy aphorisms or turns of phrase that stick in the mind and resonate afterwards. Perhaps the most famous is “mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil”.

They’re not all bad either – Hoffer “gives examples of how the same forces that give rise to true believer mass movements can be channelled in more positive ways”.

RATING: 4 STARS****

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