THE ANGLOSPHERIC DIFFERENCE:

Hoffer's life was a mix of confusing contradictions and clear ideas. The anti-Communist supporter of the Vietnam War loyally served a union led by Communist Harry Bridges, who, Bethell points out, disloyally returned the favor by blocking any mention of the union's most famous and most unusual member in organizational periodicals. The unschooled autodidact found a sinecure at the University of California-Berkeley, epicenter of all that he railed against in the 1960s. The lifelong Democrat's first taste of fame came from the unabashed boosterism of The True Believer by Dwight Eisenhower; his last stemmed from Ronald Reagan awarding him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Affiliated with neither a political movement nor a "little magazine," Hoffer remains difficult to pigeonhole. As Bethell explains of the gregarious loner: "He had the courage to stand alone."

Whereas Hoffer's life perplexes, his writing doesn't leave much room for interpretation. The big man conveyed big ideas. His small books exuded a weariness of intellectuals seeking to sow disorder by ordering the lives of others, movements whose mass absorbed its individuals, and revolutionary transformations that unleashed havoc on societies the way hormonal changes wreak chaos in juveniles. His efficient, epiphany-inducing prose communicated directly without tedious qualifiers hedging his thoughts. He may have spoken with a German accent. He did not write with one. His books betrayed neither an opaque Germanic tone nor the journeyman English characteristic of newcomers. His style owed much to the accessible epigrammatic flair of Pascal, Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, and other French thinkers. If this style seemed alien to his American readership, it is largely because his influences had become alien to those under his influence. Hoffer's interest in broad enduring questions--change, fanaticism, intellectuals--without reference to fleeting issues ensured that his audience would long outlive him.

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