Philosopher of the Misfits

THE ORDEAL OF CHANGE (150 pp.)--Eric Hoffer--Harper & Row ($3.50).

President Eisenhower's taste in literature is supposed to run to westerns, but the book he kept pressing on friends and Cabinet members is a work of philosophy called The True Believer. A shrewd study of fanaticism, the book was written by Eric Hoffer, a San Francisco longshoreman and, before that, a migrant farm worker.

Hoffer, 61, is still a longshoreman, but since Ike discovered him he has had no difficulty in getting his thoughts published. In his third book, a collection of gracefully written essays, Hoffer launches into a philosophy of history. As he sees it, history is a constant and fruitful tussle between the intellectuals and the masses. When the intellectual has no clear role in society, Hoffer writes, his frustration leads him to champion the masses. But when intellectuals take over a society, they are the sternest taskmasters of all, imposing an ideology because of their addiction to words. This accounts for the harshness of Communist societies, where the "intellectuals" (in Hoffer's view) have more power than in any democratic society.

The U.S., on the other hand, is a land of the masses. "Freedom releases the energies of the masses not by exhilarating but by unbalancing, irritating and goading." In this floundering freedom, they develop their own skills to stay afloat, and they have no need of ideology.

The undesirables and the misfits do not inhabit the fringe of society, Hoffer argues; they are the mainspring of change. The fact that they are failures in everyday life makes them jump at the chance to do the heroic. The U.S. itself, writes Hoffer, is the "handiwork of Europe's undesirables dumped on a virgin continent." California's present-day "fruit tramps and Okies" are the counterparts of the noble pioneers who settled the West.

Nearly blind until he was 15, Hoffer had no schooling. But when his eyesight returned, he was seized with an "enormous hunger for the printed word" and read voraciously. Though he has many academic friends, Hoffer is wary of being "kept" by the intellectuals. He prefers his longshoreman's life by the sea with its freedom and heartiness. The romantics used to dream of philosophers of the common man springing up in America. Hoffer shows it can happen.

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