No one had heard of Eric Hoffer until he published The True Believer (1951), a set of reflections about mass movements and those attracted to them. He was also known as the Longshoreman Philosopher.

Remember Eric Hoffer? His time has come — again. The late and still great Eric Hoffer's classic study of mass man, mass movements, and the mass mind ("The True Believer") appeared in 1951, and it ...

Eric Hoffer was a former migrant farm worker who achieved praise and fame in the 1950s and 1960s as a writer and philosopher. Hoffer’s first of many books, “The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature ...

The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements; By Eric Hoffer; Harper Perennial Modern Classics; 192 pp., $16.99 It’s not entirely academics’ fault that so many are so prone to ...

Hardly anyone had heard of Eric Hoffer when his first book, The True Believer, was published in 1951. In fact, when Harper & Brothers was considering accepting it, they asked Norman Thomas, the former ...

On the sides of city buses and on TV we have seen the admonition “Believe!” But what is it to “believe,” and what or who is the object of that belief? Or does “belief,” like “trust,” involve many ...

More than 60 years ago, a New York editor named Margaret Anderson received a manuscript entitled “Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements.” The second paragraph of the preface announced its theme: ...

Someone slapped that Eric Hoffer line on the side of a Brooklyn trash can, just under “Don’t litter” and above “Put litter in its place.” Hoffer was the longshoreman with a sideline in philosophy who ...

Eric Hoffer was a former migrant farm worker who achieved praise and fame in the 1950s and 1960s as a writer and philosopher. Hoffer’s first of many books,“The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of ...