Book: In Our Time

Overview
Eric Hoffer’s In Our Time (1976) is a compact collection of reflections, aphorisms, and brief essays that takes stock of the moral and political temper of the post-1960s West. Written in his late career, the book distills recurring Hoffer concerns, mass movements, work and dignity, resentment and pride, the allure of utopia, into concentrated observations keyed to the mid-1970s moment of Vietnam’s aftermath, campus revolts, energy shocks, and strained faith in institutions. Rather than a linear argument or a polemic, it is a notebook of judgments about human nature under modern pressures, delivered from the perspective of a self-taught longshoreman attuned to both the fragility and stubborn resilience of ordinary people.

Structure and Voice
The book is arranged in short, self-contained entries that move from the immediate to the perennial. Hoffer’s voice is plainspoken and paradox-loving, with terse formulations that read like field notes on the psychology of crowds and leaders. He compresses biography, history, and common observation into statements that invite rereading, returning often to how frustrated hopes become political fuel and how restless elites turn private discontent into public crusades.

Mass Movements and the new class
A central thread is Hoffer’s anatomy of mass movements and the people who animate them. He argues that movements draw power from the dissatisfied, those who cannot bear their present selves, and from men of words who convert diffuse discontent into a doctrine. Utopian promises, he suggests, are less about the future than about permission to renounce the present. In the 1970s he sees a new class of credentialed but thwarted intellectuals and semi-elites, whose craving for importance makes them adept at inflaming causes and discrediting the imperfect institutions that give ordinary people stability. Movements thrive on hatred, not love; they need enemies more than goals. When a movement succeeds, it ossifies into routine; when it fails, it seeks purer targets.

Work, freedom, and self-respect
Hoffer repeatedly links freedom to the dignity of useful work. The disciplined habits learned in manual labor, endurance, self-command, the acceptance of limits, anchor a self that can resist grandiose promises. Affluence without purpose breeds boredom and fragility, while hardship with meaning can produce pride. He warns that a society that devalues craftsmanship and everyday competence hollows out the very character needed for self-government. Charity that humiliates corrodes both giver and receiver; opportunity that invites effort elevates.

America, minorities, and the world
Hoffer treats America as a nation of the unfavored that succeeded by making room for the outsider. He admires its capacity to absorb newcomers and channel ambition toward constructive ends, yet he is wary of moral fatigue and performative guilt that undermine confidence. He defends embattled democracies and small nations against revolutionary chic and double standards, skeptical of intellectual fashions that romanticize violence or excuse tyranny if it marches under a redemptive banner. Equality, in his view, is most secure where institutions protect the weak without empowering avenging elites to rule in their name.

Youth, universities, and culture
Reflecting on the campus upheavals of the previous decade, Hoffer sees an aristocracy of students and professors who mistake negation for courage. Education severed from work becomes a training in grievance; theory untethered from reality becomes a license to despise ordinary virtues. He is not anti-intellectual but anti-pretension, urging learning that enlarges sympathy, not contempt.

Style and significance
The significance of In Our Time lies in its method as much as its conclusions. By reducing complex phenomena to crisp, testable propositions, Hoffer offers a portable diagnostic of fanaticism and social decay. The book captures a moment when faith in progress faltered, yet it retains a stubborn hope rooted in the capacity of common people to build decent lives. Its warnings about elite resentment, politicized idealism, and the erosion of work’s dignity remain pointed, and its counsel, cultivate self-respect, honor limits, beware grand redeemers, feels designed for recurring seasons of discontent.