Last year I devoted a handful of columns to “classics of conservatism” that I had finally gotten around to reading: Whittaker Chambers’s Witness, Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, and a couple of Eric Voegelin’s shorter works. Scanning my shelves for other such works of “classical conservatism” broadly defined, and preoccupied with the present shape of American politics, I decided before the holidays to pick up two brief books, very different from each other yet both speaking to our predicament in interesting ways.
The first such book is Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer, published in 1951. It was Hoffer’s first book, published when he was just over fifty years of age. The son of German immigrants to New York, Hoffer had very little formal education. He lost both his parents while still quite young, traveled to California, and spent his adult life first as a migrant farm worker and then as a San Francisco longshoreman. He was a true autodidact; in the years he spent hitching or riding the rails from job to job in California, he acquired library cards in town after town and read widely in many subjects, as the endnotes of his book testify. The True Believer was a huge success: Dwight Eisenhower admired it and recommended it to friends, and Hoffer became a minor celebrity who went on to publish nine more books (none nearly so successful as his first) and to teach for a few years in the 1960s at Berkeley. My edition of his first book was printed in 1963 by the publishing arm of the Time magazine empire, as a “Time Reading Program Special Edition” for a mass audience, with a preface by the magazine’s editors and a new introduction by the philosopher Sidney Hook. In 1983, just a few months before his death, Hoffer was awarded the Medal of Freedom by Ronald Reagan, in such august company the same day as James Burnham, Billy Graham, George Balanchine, Clare Boothe Luce, and R. Buckminster Fuller.
What was this work by the “longshoreman philosopher”? Subtitled Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, Hoffer’s book is chiefly descriptive. He wants to understand what prompts people to join “mass movements, be they religious movements, social revolutions, or nationalist movements.” What sorts of people do such movements attract? What personal or social circumstances make people potential recruits for them? What are the attractions of membership? How do such movements and their leaders forge a unity out of the diverse human elements they gather to themselves?
Hoffer wrote with a blunt candor about human nature and the characteristics of movement recruits. The urge to join a rebellion against one’s present situation must proceed from some disaffection with the world as one finds it. And, Hoffer writes:
Though the disaffected are found in all walks of life, they are most frequent in the following categories: (a) the poor, (b) misfits, (c) outcasts, (d) minorities, (e) adolescent youth, (f) the ambitious (whether facing insurmountable obstacles or unlimited opportunities), (g) those in the grip of some vice or obsession, (h) the impotent (in body or mind), (i) the inordinately selfish, (j), the bored, (k) the sinners.
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Given his personal experience, it is no surprise that Hoffer did not romanticize the proletariat, the poor, the working man, for he knew them too well. And he understood that, short of that abject poverty that threatens survival itself, people will often accept being poor—unless they see a prospect for a better life and are frustrated in its pursuit: “It is not actual suffering but the taste of better things which excites people to revolt.” That observation may apply as well to the other categories in Hoffer’s list above. Frustration is the common thread among them—the dashing of hopes, the breaking of ambitions, the failures of vice, the ennui of boredom. “A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrines and promises,” Hoffer writes, “but by freeing them from their ineffectual selves—and it does this by enfolding them and absorbing them into a closely knit and exultant corporate whole.”
In passages like these, I see common features of mass movements in our own time, from Antifa and “Free Palestine” to the MAGA mob of January 6:
Such diverse phenomena as a deprecation of the present, a facility for make-believe, a proneness to hate, a readiness to imitate, credulity, a readiness to attempt the impossible, and many others which crowd the minds of the intensely frustrated are, as we shall see, unifying agents and prompters of recklessness.
And this is certainly on the nose: “nationalist movements revive or invent memories of past greatness.” Whether radical or reactionary, “fanatics of all kinds are actually crowded together at one end. It is the fanatic and the moderate who are poles apart and never meet.” As for the leadership of mass movements, it is not the “quality of ideas” that matters. “What counts is the arrogant gesture. … Charlatanism of some degree is indispensable to effective leadership. There can be no mass movement without some deliberate misrepresentation of facts.”
Hoffer, as these examples illustrate, was a gifted aphorist. Here’s one more: “Self-righteousness is a loud din raised to drown the voice of guilt within us.” The True Believer is more than a mere string of such bon mots, but it must be said that Hoffer’s keen observations are not matched with deep historical understanding or with the critical tools of analytical distinction. There is some justice, for instance, in his observation that religious movements can be like other mass phenomena in their fanaticism. But in Hoffer’s eyes the essential characters of Christianity, Islam, the French Revolution, Zionism, Communism, the nationalisms of the Japanese and Irish, and Nazism are all fundamentally alike—at least in their early stages. He proceeds as though their ends and moving principles were matters of indifference and their means and methods were the same. For the most part, he has a blind spot when it comes to the distinctive character of religious faith.
In his closing pages, Hoffer takes up the different roles played by “men of words” and “men of action”—the former who “pioneer” the movement and the latter who “consolidate” it. In between are the “fanatics” who give the movement its revolutionary energy. These roles are usually played by separate individuals, though some overlap can occur. But it was Hoffer’s rather thin treatment of the men of words that led me to pick up the second book I want to discuss: Julien Benda’s The Treason of the Intellectuals.
Benda, a secular French Jew of independent means, made his name as an essayist and critic, and published numerous books. La Trahison des Clercs, published in 1927 when Benda was sixty years old, is the only one of his works to be widely read (perhaps the only one translated) in English; it was published in the U.S. and UK in 1928 and was often reprinted thereafter. “Clercs”—literally “clerks”—is Benda’s term for “all those whose activity essentially is not the pursuit of practical aims.” These are “the philosophers, men of religion, men of literature, artists, men of learning”— Hoffer’s “men of words.” The English translation’s use of “Intellectuals” in the title captures his meaning well enough (in the UK it originally appeared with the title The Betrayal of the Intellectuals), and Richard Aldington’s 1928 translation often employs “clerks” in quotation marks in the text.
Writing in the anxious time between the world wars, Benda is very worried about the rising passions of nationalism in Europe. Five years before Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, Benda casts a baleful glance at Germany in particular, but his own beloved France does not escape criticism. In both countries and elsewhere, he sees xenophobia; a “scorn for universal morality” and humanism; a “cult for the particular”; an “adoration for the contingent, and scorn for the eternal”; the “denunciation of liberalism”; and frequent “apology for Machiavellianism.”
But what is the treason of which the “clerks” are guilty? The learned class, the intellectual elite, has in Benda’s view abandoned its proper vocation of detachment from political passions. They have become partisans as hot as any of the practical men of politics, and have moreover provided intellectual rationalizations for crass and morally dubious political agendas. He emphasizes that this is a kind of desertion of the watchmen:
Must I repeat that I am not deploring the fact that cults of honor and courage should be preached to human beings; I am deploring the fact that they are preached by the “clerks.” Civilization, I repeat, seems to me possible only if humanity consents to a division of functions, if side by side with those who carry out the lay passions and extol the virtues serviceable to them there exists a class of men who depreciate these passions and glorify the advantages which are beyond the material. What I think serious is that this class of men should cease to perform their office, and that those whose duty was to quench human pride should extol the same impulses of soul as the leaders of armies.
Blaming recent philosophers such as Nietzsche, Benda also calls out contemporaries by name, including his own compatriots such as Charles Péguy and Maurice Barrès, for espousing doctrines of harshness and of cruelty, including those “Churchmen making Jesus an apostle of nationalism.”
Like many forceful critics, Benda thrives on generalization, even exaggeration. Can it really be true that the “clerks” as a class, virtually without exception, have so abandoned their calling as he claims? And are there no examples in previous ages of intellectuals who prostituted themselves to powerful political causes? Benda is probably right, however, that the “treason” of which he writes is more common in the modern age. The “clerks” are more numerous than ever, and are generally less classically educated, as he observes; at the same time the “lay” classes are more literate (though not literary), and consume a steady diet of mass media to which the “clerks” contribute (newspapers in Benda’s day, the internet today). Success and celebrity for the intellectual elite can be most reliably achieved by pandering to the viscera of the many, rather than appealing to their minds or spirits. And the greatest success seems to come to those “clerks” who really believe the pap they peddle.
Benda’s elitism is unabashed, as one can see above. He believes civilization is best served by intellectuals who keep their distance from political life, whose love of truth and concern for their fellow man prompt them to question, to criticize, to highlight the failings of their nations in the name of universal morality and common humanity. Such a posture, in Benda’s view, is not a failure of true patriotism but its highest expression. He often invokes Socrates against Callicles in Plato’s Gorgias, and the invocation is apt.
We do well to remind ourselves, as the late Christopher Lasch did in his final, posthumously published book, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, that what we now call the “laptop class” can make itself too independent, too insulated from the buffeting winds that others must struggle against. When this happens, the temptation to sin against solidarity with one’s fellow citizens is very strong—in part because one’s circumstances make it almost imperceptibly easy. I do not think Benda would have disagreed with Lasch about this. But if Benda is right that political life benefits from an elite that stands critically apart from the rough and tumble of the crowd, the men and women “of words” would do well to steer clear of Eric Hoffer’s fanatical movements. When the dust settles, they may be the first to call people back to themselves.
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