Eric Hoffer: an American odyssey (1968)

 此書賀佛爾傳及True Believer (1951) 群眾運動---香港的今日世界有合訂本.1972第2刷












http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Hoffer
Eric Hoffer (July 25, 1902 – May 21, 1983) was an American social writer. He was the author of ten books and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in February 1983. His first book, The True Believer, published in 1951, was widely recognized as a classic, receiving critical acclaim from both scholars and laymen,^[1] although Hoffer believed that his book The Ordeal of Change was his finest work.^[2] In 2001, the Eric Hoffer Award was established in his honor with permission granted by the Eric Hoffer Estate in 2005.

On the nature and origins of mass movements

Hoffer believed that self-esteem was of central importance to psychological well-being. He focused on what he viewed as the consequences of a lack of self-esteem. Concerned about the rise of totalitarian governments, especially those of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, he tried to find the roots of these "madhouses" in human psychology. He postulated that fanaticism and self-righteousness are rooted in self-hatred, self-doubt, and insecurity. In The True Believer (1951) he claimed that a passionate obsession with the outside world or the private lives of others was an attempt to compensate for a lack of meaning in one's own life. The book discusses religious and political mass movements, and extensive discussions of Islam and Christianity. A core principle in the book is Hoffer's assertion that mass movements are interchangeable: fanatical Nazis became fanatical Communists, fanatical Communists became fanatical anti-Communists, and Saul, persecutor of Christians, became Paul, a fanatical Christian. For the "true believer", substance is less important than being part of a movement.
Hoffer's work was non-Freudian, at a time when much of American psychology was informed by the Freudian paradigm. Hoffer appeared on public television in 1964 and then in two one-hour conversations on CBS with Eric Sevareid in the late 1960s.