The True Believer Summary

The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer stands out in the social­-psychological literature because of it’s author’s notorious lack of formal education and for the conclusions he drew about social movements and their participants. Hoffer, seeking to better understand the prognosis of large social movements and how they gain and lose members, applies numerous theoretical examples to illustrate his arguments including Nazism, Christianity, Islam, and Communism. Hoffer’s book provides an historically-­backed assessment of, mostly western social movements but fails to include the largest possible scope and empirical evidence base. To fully understand the books shortcomings, though, we must first look to its conclusions.
Part 1 of the book looks entirely at the roots and recruitment of movements. Hoffer contends membership in a social movement is, at least partially, borne out of discontentment with current conditions. He …show more content…
These men act as the larger group’s voice of frustration and delegitimization of the prevailing social order. Men like Trotsky and Ghandi were effective because of their specific talents as men of words and later as men of action. So­-called “Fanatics” serve as at-­first outspoken, but never-­the-­less people with the ability to evoke the aforementioned sense of unity and separation of self­-identity for the cause of progress. From these roots in discontentment and through the pens of men of words, movements can get lift; but to stay off the ground the mass movement must change it’s focus from cultivating an urgency for change to reconciling participants with the movement as the prevailing institution. This phenomenon is evidenced through the Roman Catholic adoption of “fantic” proto-­Christians’ ideologies and