The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

by Eric Hoffer

The personality of the leader is probably a crucial factor in determining the nature and duration of a mass movement. Such rare leaders as Lincoln and Gandhi not only try to curb the evil inherent in a mass movement but are willing to put an end to the movement when its objective is more or less realized. They are of the very few in whom “power [has] developed a grandeur and generosity of the soul.”13 Stalin’s medieval mind and his tribal ruthlessness were chief factors in the prolonged dynamism of the Communist movement. It is futile to speculate on what the Russian Revolution might have been like had Lenin lived a decade or two longer. One has the impression that he was without that barbarism of the soul so evident in Hitler and Stalin, which, as Heraclitus said, makes our eyes and ears “evil witnesses to the doings of men.” Stalin molded his possible successors in his own image, and the Russian people can probably expect more of the same for the next several decades. Cromwell’s death brought the end of the Puritan Revolution, while the death of Robespierre marked the end of the active phase of the French Revolution. Had Hitler died in the middle of the 1930's, Nazism would probably have shown, under the leadership of a Goering, a fundamental change in its course, and the Second World War might have been averted.