By any absolute measure, Jimmy Hoffa in 1971 is a fortunate man. He has been released from federal prison. He has a pension, a house, a national reputation and the loyalty of a large part of a union with millions of members. And on July 30, 1975, less than four years later, he vanishes without a trace (presumed murdered, declared legally dead in 1982, his body never found), because none of that is what he is measuring against. He is measuring against the office he held, and every offer made to him is read as a demotion. Ted Gurr published a book in 1970 that explains why a man in that position becomes dangerous, and it is not about deprivation in any sense a household budget would recognize.
// The theoryThe gap, not the floor
The idea entered social science by accident. Samuel Stouffer and colleagues, studying American soldiers during the Second World War, found that satisfaction with promotion prospects was lower in the branches where promotion was fastest. The explanation was that men compared themselves not to an absolute standard but to the people around them, and rapid promotion produced more men who had been passed over. Walter Runciman (1966) formalized it: relative deprivation requires a person to want something, to see someone else having it, to feel entitled to it and to believe obtaining it is feasible. Ted Gurr then scaled it to political violence in Why Men Rebel, defining the driver as the discrepancy between value expectations and value capabilities. His famous corollary is the one that unsettles people: revolt tends to follow improvement, because improvement raises expectations faster than reality can meet them.
The reference group can be yourself
Most applications of this theory compare a person to others: the neighbor, the class above, the group across town. The version that explains Hoffa is the one criminology mentions less often — temporal relative deprivation, where the comparison is with one's own earlier position. It is the same arithmetic and it is considerably more volatile, because the reference cannot be dismissed as unfair or irrelevant. A man can tell himself that the rich were born lucky. He cannot tell himself that about the person he used to be. That is why the offer of a dignified retirement functions, for Hoffa, as an insult rather than a kindness: measured against a stranger it is generous, and measured against himself it is a demotion announced in public.
// The subjectA man negotiating with his own record
Everything he does after release follows from the comparison. He refuses arrangements that any outside observer would call advantageous. He campaigns to reclaim a post he is legally barred from holding, which is the clearest possible sign that the goal is the position and not the income. He treats the men now occupying his place not as rivals with competing claims but as usurpers, which converts a negotiation into a question of legitimacy — and legitimacy questions do not settle with money. And he does all of it while the structure around him has quietly changed: the arrangement he built depended on relationships that have been renegotiated in his absence, and he keeps invoking an authority that the people in the room no longer recognize. Gurr's model predicts exactly this trajectory for an actor whose expectations remain anchored to a capability he has lost.
Jimmy Hoffa
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// The crackA theory that explains too much
Relative deprivation has been criticized, fairly, for being hard to falsify. Expectations are rarely measured before the event; they are usually inferred from the grievance itself, which makes the explanation circular in precisely the way this archive keeps flagging. It also over-predicts: gaps between expectation and capability are everywhere and violence is rare, so the theory needs the resource-mobilization correction that followed it — grievance may be necessary, but organization, opportunity and means decide whether anything happens. In Hoffa's case that correction matters a great deal, because he had all three: a base, a treasury and people who owed him. The gap explains the motive. It does not explain the capacity, and without the capacity there is no case.
Measuring himself against the wrong thing
Hoffa ran an organization that stole from its own members' pension fund and did business with people who killed for it, and none of that is softened by the fact that his final grievance was psychologically real. The point of the lens is narrower and more useful: it explains why a man with every material reason to stop kept pushing until, by all indications, it cost him his life, and it does so without reaching for a defect of character. He was not irrational. He was measuring against the wrong thing, which is a mistake available to anyone who has ever been more important than they are now.
Three key ideas
- Stouffer found satisfaction was lowest where promotion was fastest: people compare to those around them, not to an absolute standard. Runciman (1966) formalized the conditions and Gurr (1970) scaled it to political violence as the gap between expectations and capabilities.
- The comparison can be temporal: measuring against your own earlier position is more volatile, because unlike a rival that reference cannot be dismissed as unfair. Hoffa reads a generous retirement as a public demotion.
- The theory is hard to falsify — expectations are usually inferred from the grievance — and it over-predicts, since gaps are everywhere and violence is rare. Grievance explains motive; organization and means explain whether anything happens.
Sources · to keep reading
- Gurr, T. R. (1970). Why Men Rebel. Princeton University Press.
- Runciman, W. G. (1966). Relative Deprivation and Social Justice. Routledge.
- Stouffer, S. A. et al. (1949). The American Soldier. Princeton University Press.
- Merton, R. K. y Kitt, A. (1950). “Contributions to the Theory of Reference Group Behavior”.
- Smith, H. J. et al. (2012). “Relative deprivation: a theoretical and meta-analytic review”, Personality and Social Psychology Review, 16(3).
- Hoffa v. United States, 385 U.S. 293 (1966). Supreme Court of the United States. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/385/293
- Hoffa v. Saxbe, 378 F. Supp. 1221 (1974). United States District Court for the District of Columbia. https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/2124607/hoffa-v-saxbe/
- Goldsmith, J. (2019, November 26). “Are the Claims in the New Film ‘The Irishman’ True?”. Lawfare. https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/are-claims-new-film-irishman-true
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who is Jimmy Hoffa?
Jimmy Hoffa is a villain from The Irishman, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. He is offered a comfortable retirement and an honorary title.
Why does Jimmy Hoffa become a villain?
Jimmy Hoffa and relative deprivation: the man who ran the country's most powerful union, came out of prison and found his chair taken. What sinks him is not poverty — it is the comparison with his own past.
Which criminological theory explains Jimmy Hoffa?
Jimmy Hoffa's case is analysed through Relative deprivation. Relative deprivation explains one of the most baffling things about violence and revolt: that they break out more often when things improve than when they are at their worst. Samuel Stouffer found it measuring soldiers' morale, Walter Runciman gave it a frame and Ted Gurr carried it into rebellion: what produces grievance is not absolute lack but the distance between what a person expects and what they get — and the reference they compare against may be a neighbor, a group, or themselves at another moment. Jimmy Hoffa is the case where the reference is his own biography. He leaves prison with money, freedom and offers, and finds all of them insulting because he measures them against the man he was.
