Book: The Temper of Our Time

Overview

Eric Hoffer’s The Temper of Our Time (1967) is a compact series of essays that takes the quickened pulse of mid-century America and the West as prosperity, technology, and mobility reorder everyday life. Writing as a self-taught longshoreman-philosopher, Hoffer tracks the psychological and social effects of an age defined less by deprivation than by abundance, less by permanence than by change. He argues that the decisive feature of the era is a new human posture: a readiness to move, improvise, and discard habits, joined to a restless hunger for meaning that flares in politics, work, and identity.

The New Dispositions

Hoffer claims the modern temper prizes the unattached person, mobile, unencumbered, able to shift jobs, locales, and allegiances. In an economy of rapid innovation, the crucial intellectual skill is not mastery but unlearning, the ability to shed obsolete knowledge and start again. The old ideal of settled expertise gives way to an amateur spirit of trial, error, and collaboration. This improvisational ethos rewards initiative and freshness, yet it breeds fragility: when roots and routines loosen, anxiety and a craving for belonging intensify.

Affluence and Discontent

Contrary to the expectation that misery fuels revolt, Hoffer contends that modern mass movements draw energy from the disappointed hopeful, from the ambitious blocked, the newly emancipated who find equality more elusive than promised, the young tasting freedom without firm roles. Abundance raises expectations faster than institutions can satisfy them. Discontent in this setting is less about hunger than about status, dignity, and identity. Hence the volatility of student rebellions and generational clashes in the 1960s; the crowd’s zeal is a bid to trade a precarious self for solidarity and significance.

Work, Technology, and the Amateur

The book sketches a world where work becomes less a fixed craft than a sequence of problems to be solved by teams. Hoffer praises the generative power of the amateur, curious, adaptive, and unawed by authority, while warning that a purely technical society risks eroding purpose. The dignity of work remains central: effort offers ballast in a mobile age, channeling energies that might otherwise splinter into frustrated activism or nihilistic play. Leadership, in his view, should be pragmatic and wary of grand designs that promise salvation at scale.

Pride, Identity, and Assimilation

Hoffer analyzes the politics of pride and resentment in ethnic and racial conflicts, using the period’s language and assumptions. Gains in status can sharpen sensitivities to slights; newly won freedoms expose humiliations once dulled by resignation. Movements that sanctify grievance supply belonging but may harden divisions. He favors participation and competence as paths to dignity, though some of his formulations now read as dated or reductive. The underlying psychological insight remains: identities become most combustible when they are in transition.

Freedom, Anxiety, and Morality

Freedom enlarges choice and with it the burden of self-command. Hoffer insists that character, habits of restraint, patience, and perseverance, matters more in modernity, not less. Moral seriousness anchors people amid novelty, and institutions endure when they respect limits. The appetite for sweeping solutions, he cautions, often masks a flight from the everyday work of improvement.

Style and Significance

Aphoristic, contrarian, and compressed, the essays trade breadth for punch. Hoffer’s generalizations can be sweeping, yet he captures enduring tensions of an innovation-driven society: rootlessness and creativity, prosperity and grievance, specialization and amateur vigor. The book reads as both diagnosis and warning, urging flexibility without surrendering to fad, and belonging without dissolving into the crowd.