Eric Hoffer

Eric Hoffer (July 25, 1902 - May 21,1983) was an American social writer. He produced ten books and won the Presidential Medal of Freedom in February 1983 from Ronald Reagan. His first book, The True Believer, published in 1951, was widely recognized as a classic. This book, which he considered his best, established his reputation, and he remained a successful writer for most of his remaining years.

Hoffer and "Intellectuals"

Hoffer was also one of the most pro-American writers of his day. He did not consider himself an "intellectual", and he scorned the term as descriptive of the mostly anti-American academics of the West. Academics, he believed, most of all craved power; but they were denied it in the democratic countries of the West (though they were not in totalitarian countries, which Hoffer saw as an intellectual's dream). So instead, he believed, they chose to bite the hand that fed them in their quest to feel important.

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Hoffer himself drew confidence from his working-class environment, seeing in it vast human potential. He took solace in being an outcast, believing that the outcasts have always been the pioneers of society. Though he felt opposed to "liberal" intellectuals, it would be wrong to call Hoffer's thinking "conservative". Rather, it was completely apart from the mainstream. As he said, "my writing grows out of my life just as a branch from a tree." When called an intellectual, he insisted that he was a longshoreman.

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