Eric Hoffer

One of America’s greatest thinkers & philosophers

 

Former migratory worker and longshoreman, Eric Hoffer burst on the scene in 1951 with his irreplaceable tome, The True Believer, and assured his place among the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. His prolific output includes such classics as The Passionate State of Mind, The Ordeal of Change, Reflections on the Human Condition, The Temper of Our Time, and his memoir Truth Imagined. With more than nine books to his credit, Hoffer remains a vital figure with his cogent insights to the nature of mass movements and the essence of humankind. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1983.

Each year Hoffer is memorialized through The Eric Hoffer Award for prose and books.

 

 

"America meant freedom and what is freedom? To Hoffer it is the capacity to feel like oneself. He felt like Eric Hoffer; sometimes like Eric Hoffer, working man. It could be said, I believe, that he is the first important American writer, working class born, who remained working class-in his habits, associations, environment. I cannot think of another. Therefore, he was a national resource. The only one of its kind in the nation's possession."    - Eric Sevareid, from his dedication speech to Eric Hoffer

 

Books by Eric Hoffer:

 

The Ordeal of Change

by Eric Hoffer

(ISBN 1933435100, 136 pgs)

 

It is my impression that no one really likes the new. We are afraid of it. It is not only as Dostoyevsky put it that “taking a new step, uttering a new word is what people fear most.” Even in slight things the experience of the new is rarely without some stirring of foreboding.

In the case of drastic change the uneasiness is of course deeper and more lasting. We can never be really prepared for that which is wholly new. We have to adjust ourselves, and every radical adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem: We undergo a test; we have to prove ourselves. It needs inordinate self-confidence to face drastic change without inner trembling.

          –from The Ordeal of Change

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The Passionate State of Mind

And Other Aphorisms

by Eric Hoffer

(ISBN 1933435097, 120 pgs)

 

There is in most passions a shrinking away from ourselves. The passionate pursuer has all the earmarks of a fugitive.

Passions usually have their roots in that which is blemished, crippled, incomplete and insecure within us. The passionate attitude is less a response to stimuli from without than an emanation of an inner dissatisfaction.

A poignant dissatisfaction, whatever be its cause, is at bottom a dissatisfaction with ourselves. It is surprising how much hardship and humiliation a man will endure without bitterness when he has not the least doubt about his worth or when he is so integrated with others that he is not aware of a separate self.

          –from The Passionate State of Mind

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Truth Imagined

by Eric Hoffer

(ISBN 1933435011, 120 pgs)

 

It is curious how blurred my childhood memories are. I lost my sight at the age of seven. Two years before, my mother and I fell down a flight of stairs. She did not recover and died in that second year after the fall. I lost my sight and for a time my memory. I heard, my father speak of me as an “idiot child.”

I regained my sight at the age of fifteen. I never took the trouble to learn the causes of the sudden loss and return of sight. Martha said jokingly that it was a miracle the Hoffers managed to stay alive. None of them lived past fifty. “Never worry about the future, Eric—you’ll be dead by the time you are forty.” Her words sank into my mind and became a source of lightheartedness during my years as a migratory worker. I went through life like a tourist.

          –from Truth Imagined

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Reflections on the Human Condition

Reflections on the Human Condition

by Eric Hoffer

(ISBN 1933435143, 88 pgs)

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Nature attains perfection, but man never does. There is a perfect ant, a perfect bee, but man is perpetually unfinished. He is both an unfinished animal and an unfinished man. It is this incurable unfinishedness which sets man apart from other living things. For, in the attempt to finish himself, man becomes a creator. Moreover, the incurable unfinishedness keeps man perpetually immature, perpetually capable of learning and growing. …

Everywhere we look at present we see something new trying to be born. A pregnant, swollen world is writhing in labor, and everywhere untrained quacks are officiating as obstetricians. These quacks say that the only way the new can be born is by a Caesarean operation. They lust to rip the belly of the world open.

 

          –from Reflections on the Human Condition

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The Temper of Our Time

The Temper of Our Time

by Eric Hoffer

(ISBN 1933435224, 106 pgs)

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Our age is not the age of the masses but the age of the intellectuals. Everywhere you look you can see intellectuals easing the traditional men of action out of their seats of power. In many parts of the world there are now intellectuals acting as large-scale industrialists, as military leaders, as statesmen and empire builders. By intellectual I mean a literate person who feels himself a member of the educated minority. It is not actual intellectual superiority which makes the intellectual but the feeling of belonging to an intellectual elite. ...

 

          –from The Temper of Our Time

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Hoffer’s books have been painstakingly edited and restored by award-winning author Christopher Klim and Hopewell Publications.