Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements explained the rise of Communism and Fascism, and predicted the renewed strength of Islam. This book, which offered a cautionary view of the modern alternatives to the faith preached by Peter and Paul, may have fallen out of favor with the intelligentsia, but it remains among the twentieth century’s most notable works of social reflection. That it has the further virtue of being short, clever, and readable should make it even more of a canonical work.

Central to Hoffer’s thought was the concept of self-esteem. Hoffer’s understanding of the term was almost the reverse of most contemporary intellectuals’, however. For Hoffer, a meaningful sense of self-worth is only attained by actual accomplishment and through adult rites of passage. Anything else, he believed, leaves people in states of delayed adolescence in which they are the potential targets of charismatic leaders offering vague but visionary schemes of national, political, or religious transformation. All proselytizers and converts, Hoffer said, are motivated principally by their frustration about their own sense of inadequacy, alienation, and incompleteness and their need for a cause rather than by any real set of beliefs. He repeatedly points to examples of men and women who start out as devout followers of one cause and then became fanatics for another. Typically, he notes, the acolytes are young, and sometimes just teenagers.

For Hoffer, therefore, the concept of the Children’s Crusade is both literal and metaphorical. Adherents