The Start

 

The manner is which a mass movement starts out can also have some effect on the duration and mode of termination of the active phase of the movement. When we see the Reformation, the Puritan, American and French revolutions and many of the nationalist uprisings terminate, after a relatively short active phase, in a social order marked by increased individual liberty, we are witnessing the realization of moods and examples which characterized the earlies days of these movements. All of them started out by defying and overthrowing a long-established authority. The more clear-cut this initial act of defiance and the more vivid its memory in the minds of the people, the more likely is the eventual emergence of individual liberty. There was no such clear act of defiance in the rise of Christianity. It did not start by overthrowing a king, a hierarchy, a state or a church. Martyrs there were, but not individuals shaking their fists under the nose of proud authority, and defying it in the view of the whole world. Hence perhaps the fact that the authoritarian order ushered in by Christianity endured almost unchallenged for fifteen hundred years. The eventual emancipation of the Christian mind at the time of the Renaissance in Italy drew its inspiration not from the history of early Christianity but from the stirring examples of individual independence and defiance in the Graeco-Roman past. There is a similar lack of dramatic defiance at the birth of Islam and of the Japanese collective body, and in neither are there now signs of genuine individual emancipation. German nationalism, too, unlike the nationalism of most Western countries, did not start with a spectacular act of defiance against established authority. It was taken under the wing from its beginning by the Prussian army. The seed of individual liberty in Germany is in its Protestantism and not its nationalism. The Reformation, the American, French and Russian revolutions and most of the nationalist movements opened with a grandiose overture of individual defiance, and the memory of it is kept green.:

 

By this test, the eventual emergence of individual liberty in Russia is perhaps not entirely hopeless.”

 

My response: Hoffer seems to be suggesting that there is a connection between early, sharp, pronounced acts of defiance by the rebels against the existing order and the inclination for individual liberty to grow out of the rebellion. Where no overt act of defiance was theatrically gestured defiance, the new order is more likely to be authoritarian.