Лучшие книги Эрика Хоффера

Книга «Человек убежденный. Личность, власть и массовые движения» (The True Believer. Thoughts on The Nature of Mass Movements) принесла Эрику Хофферу всемирную славу: написанное в 1951 г., исследование признанного классика общественной мысли посвящено природе и содержанию массовых движений человечества — будь то партии, религиозные течения, национальные или социальные революции. Чем объяснить притягательность для масс таких неоднозначных в мировой истории и духовной культуре фигур, как Христос, Будда, Магомет, Гитлер, Сталин? Выявляя закономерности, автор дает оригинальные, порой парадоксальные ответы. Хоффер снискал репутацию современного…

Eric Hoffer--one of America's most important thinkers and the author of The True Believer--lived for years as a Depression Era migratory worker. Self-taught, his appetite for knowledge--history, science, mankind--formed the basis of his insight to human nature. Nowhere is this more evident than in Hoffer's seminal work, The Ordeal of Change, essays on the duality and essentiality of change in man throughout history.

ERIC HOFFER has been a longshoreman
on the Pacific Coast since 1943. Before that,
he was a migratory field laborer, and a
gold min er in the country around Ne vada
City. H e writes of his early life:
"I had no schooling. I was practically
blind up to the age of fifteen. Wh en my
eyesight came back I was seized with an
enormous hunger for the printed word. I
read indiscriminately everything with in
reach-Engli sh and German.
"When my father (a cahinet-maker)
died I realized that I would have to fend
for myself. I knew several things: One,
that I didn't want to work in a factory;
two, tha t I couldn't stand being dependent
on the good graces of a boss; thr ee, that I
was going to stay poor; four, that I had to
get out of New York . Logic told me that
California was the poor man's country."
Through ten years as a migratory
worker he continued to read and scribble.
These were the depression years, the Okies
and Arkies were the new pioneers and
Hoffer was one of them. He had library
cards in a dozen towns along the railroad,
and when he was in pocket he took a room
near a libra ry for concentrated thinking
and writing. Out of these experiences came
his interest in mass movements .