Isaiah Berlin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaiah_Berlin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaiah_Berlin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hedgehog_and_the_Fox
The Hedgehog and the Fox is an essay by philosopher Isaiah Berlin that was published as a book in 1953. It was one of his most popular essays with the general public. However, Berlin said, "I meant it as a kind of enjoyable intellectual game, but it was taken seriously. Every classification throws light on something".[1] It has been compared to "an intellectual's cocktail-party game".[2]
Summary
The title is a reference to a fragment attributed to the Ancient Greek poet Archilochus: πόλλ' οἶδ' ἀλώπηξ, ἀλλ' ἐχῖνος ἓν μέγα ("a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing"). In Erasmus's Adagia from 1500, the expression is recorded as Multa novit vulpes, verum echinus unum magnum. (The fable of The Fox and the Cat embodies the same idea.)[citation needed]
Berlin expands upon this idea to divide writers and thinkers into two categories: hedgehogs, who view the world through the lens of a single defining idea (examples given include Plato, Lucretius, Blaise Pascal, Marcel Proust and Fernand Braudel), and foxes, who draw on a wide variety of experiences and for whom the world cannot be boiled down to a single idea (examples given include Aristotle, Desiderius Erasmus, Johann Wolfgang Goethe).[3]
Turning to Leo Tolstoy, Berlin contends that at first glance, Tolstoy escapes definition into one of the two groups. He postulates that while Tolstoy's talents are those of a fox, his beliefs are that one ought to be a hedgehog and so Tolstoy's own voluminous assessments of his own work are misleading. Berlin goes on to use this idea of Tolstoy as a basis for an analysis of the theory of history that Tolstoy presents in his novel War and Peace.
In the latter half of the essay, Berlin compares Tolstoy with the early 19th-century thinker Joseph de Maistre. As Berlin explains, while Tolstoy and de Maistre held violently contrasting views on more superficial matters, they also held profoundly similar views about the fundamental nature of existence and the limits of a rational scientific approach to it.
The essay ends with Berlin reiterating his view of Tolstoy—by nature a fox but a hedgehog by conviction— by concluding that this duality caused Tolstoy great pain at the end of his life.
InfluenceIn business and forecasting
James C. Collins refers to the story in his 2001 book Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't , where he clearly shows his preference towards hedgehog mentality.
Philip E. Tetlock, a political psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, drew heavily on this distinction in his exploration of the accuracy of experts and forecasters in various fields (especially politics) in his 2005 book Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?[4][5] Tetlock summarized substantial research claiming that most experts and well-paid pundits think like hedgehogs with one big idea; on average they make poor forecasts. Meanwhile, people who draw information from a large variety of often-conflicted sources, like foxes, make better forecasts. However, both are often beaten by formal models like autoregressive distributed lag models.[6]
In his 2012 The New York Times bestselling book The Signal and the Noise, forecaster Nate Silver urges readers to be "more foxy" after summarising Berlin's distinction. He cites the work of Philip E. Tetlock on the accuracy of political forecasts in the United States during the Cold War while he was a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. Silver's news website, fivethirtyeight.com, when it was launched in March 2014, also adopted the fox as its logo "as an allusion to" Archilochus' original work.[7]
In 2018, the author John Lewis Gaddis refers to Berlin's essay as well as Tetlock's work in his 2018 book On Grand Strategy.[8]
In other disciplines
Some authors such as Michael Walzer have used the same pattern of description for Berlin himself, as a person who knows many things, compared to the purported narrowness of many other contemporary political philosophers. Berlin's former student, Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, was dubbed a hedgehog by Berlin and admitted to it after receiving the 2007 Templeton Prize.[9]
Legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin's 2011 book, Justice for Hedgehogs, argues the case for a single, overarching, and coherent framework of moral truth.
Music historian Berthold Hoeckner applies and extends Berlin's distinction in his 2007 essay "Wagner and the Origin of Evil". One of Hoeckner's key insights is that the historiography of Wagner's antisemitism, much like that of the Holocaust, has two main branches: a hedgehog-like functionalist branch that sees the composer's polemic jabs at Jewish culture as mere assimilationist rhetoric, and a fox-like intentionalist branch that sees them instead as violent expressions of genuinely eliminationist Judenhass.[10]
In his book Wittgenstein's Place in Twentieth-Century Analytic Philosophy, Oxford philosopher Peter Hacker uses this metaphor to contrast Berlin's Tolstoy (a fox who wants to be a hedgehog) with philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was "by nature a hedgehog, but after 1929 transformed himself, by great intellectual and imaginative endeavour, into a paradigmatic fox".[11]
Claudio Véliz uses Berlin's construction to contrast Anglo-American and Spanish patterns of settlement and governance in his 1994 book The New World of the Gothic Fox: Culture and Economy in English and Spanish America.[citation needed]
Peter Kivy refers to the essay when describing philosophy of art in the current day as the age of the fox (best represented by Noël Carroll), contrasting it with the previous era of the hedgehog (best represented by Arthur Danto).[12]
Harvard political economist Dani Rodrik applies the distinction to "hedgehog" mainstream orthodox economists who apply the "Liberal Paradigm" to everything everywhere always and "fox" heterodox (political) economists who have different answers to different times, places, and situations in his 2015 book Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science.[13]
Leading Judge, Lord Hoffmann, observed that "Copyright law protects foxes better than hedgehogs" in his Judgment in the case Designers Guild Ltd v Russell Williams (Textiles) Ltd in the UK House of Lords.[14]
Linguist Mark Aronoff divides linguists into these two groups, essentially those that emphasize linguistic theory versus those focused on empirical accuracy and generalizations. He identifies as a fox and states, "I find it hard to understand why hedgehogs make the moves that they make. It has always been especially puzzling to me why they react with such vehemence to what strikes me, a fox, as entirely reasonable or even unremarkable."[15]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hedgehog_and_the_Fox
https://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/s9981.pdf
The Hedgehog and the Fox
A queer combination of the brain of an English chemist
with the soul of an Indian Buddhist.
E. M. de Vogüé 1
I
There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet
Archilochus which says: ‘The fox knows many things, but the
hedgehog knows one big thing.’2 Scholars have differed about the
correct interpretation of these dark words, which may mean no
more than that the fox, for all his cunning, is defeated by the
1 ‘On dirait l’esprit d’un chimiste anglais dans l’âme d’un bouddhiste hindou; se
charge qui pourra d’expliquer cet étrange accouplment’: Le Roman russe (Paris, 1886),
282.2 ‘po*ll’ oi#d’ a$lw* phx, a$ll’ e$ci&nov e= n me*ga.’ Archilochus fragment 201 in M. L. West
(ed.), Iambi et elegi graeci ante Alexandrum cantati, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (Oxford, 1989). [The
fragment was preserved in a collection of proverbs by the Greek Sophist Zenobius (5. 68),
who says that it is found in both Archilochus and Homer – West, op. cit., vol. 2 (Oxford,
1992), ‘Homerus’ fragment 5. Since it is iambic rather than dactylic in metre, the attribu-
tion to Homer is likely to mean that it appeared in the (now thought pseudo-Homeric)
comic epic poem Margites, probably written later than Archilochus’ poem. See e.g.
C. M. Bowra, ‘The Fox and the Hedgehog’, Classical Quarterly 34 (1940), 26–9 (see 26),
an article reprinted with revisions in Bowra’s On Greek Margins (Oxford, 1970), 59–66
(see 59), and evidently unknown to Berlin. In any event, the sentiment might well be
a proverb deployed by both authors, though given Archilochus’ frequent use of animal
encounters (on which see also 114–15 below), it is attractive to think it was used first, and
given this metrical form, by him.]
2 • Isaiah Berlin
hedgehog’s one defence. But, taken figuratively, the words can
be made to yield a sense in which they mark one of the deepest
differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be,
human beings in general. For there exists a great chasm between
those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vi-
sion, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms
of which they understand, think and feel – a single, universal,
organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and
say has significance – and, on the other side, those who pursue
many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected,
if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or
physiological cause, related to no moral or aesthetic principle.
These last lead lives, perform acts and entertain ideas that are
centrifugal rather than centripetal; their thought is scattered or
diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a
vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in them-
selves, without, consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them
into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing,
sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical,
unitary inner vision. The first kind of intellectual and artistic
personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes; and
without insisting on a rigid classification, we may, without too
much fear of contradiction, say that, in this sense, Dante belongs
to the first category, Shakespeare to the second; Plato, Lucretius,
Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust are, in varying
degrees, hedgehogs; Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus,
Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce are foxes.
Of course, like all over-simple classifications of this type, the
dichotomy becomes, if pressed, artificial, scholastic and ultimately
The Hedgehog and the Fox • 3
absurd. But if it is not an aid to serious criticism, neither should it
be rejected as being merely superficial or frivolous: like all distinc-
tions which embody any degree of truth, it offers a point of view
from which to look and compare, a starting-point for genuine
investigation. Thus we have no doubt about the violence of the
contrast between Pushkin and Dostoevsky; and Dostoevsky’s
celebrated speech about Pushkin has, for all its eloquence and
depth of feeling, seldom been considered by any perceptive
reader to cast light on the genius of Pushkin, but rather on that
of Dostoevsky himself, precisely because it perversely represents
Pushkin – an arch-fox, the greatest in the nineteenth century –
as being similar to Dostoevsky, who is nothing if not a hedgehog;
and thereby transforms, indeed distorts, Pushkin into a dedicated
prophet, a bearer of a single, universal message which was indeed
the centre of Dostoevsky’s own universe, but exceedingly remote
from the many varied provinces of Pushkin’s protean genius.
Indeed, it would not be absurd to say that Russian literature is
spanned by these gigantic figures – at one pole Pushkin, at the
other Dostoevsky; and that the characteristics of other Russian
writers can, by those who find it useful or enjoyable to ask that
kind of question, to some degree be determined in relation to
these great opposites. To ask of Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov, Blok
how they stand in relation to Pushkin and to Dostoevsky leads –
or, at any rate, has led – to fruitful and illuminating criticism. But
when we come to Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, and ask this of
him – ask whether he belongs to the first category or the second,
whether he is a monist or a pluralist, whether his vision is of one
or of many, whether he is of a single substance or compounded of
heterogeneous elements – there is no clear or immediate answer.
4 • Isaiah Berlin
The question does not, somehow, seem wholly appropriate; it
seems to breed more darkness than it dispels. Yet it is not lack of
information that makes us pause: Tolstoy has told us more about
himself and his views and attitudes than any other Russian, more,
almost, than any other European, writer. Nor can his art be called
obscure in any normal sense: his universe has no dark corners,
his stories are luminous with the light of day; he has explained
them and himself, and argued about them and the methods by
which they are constructed, more articulately and with greater
force and sanity and lucidity than any other writer. Is he a fox or
a hedgehog? What are we to say? Why is the answer so curiously
difficult to find? Does he resemble Shakespeare or Pushkin more
than Dante or Dostoevsky? Or is he wholly unlike either, and is
the question therefore unanswerable because it is absurd? What
is the mysterious obstacle with which our enquiry seems faced?
I do not propose in this essay to formulate a reply to this
question, since this would involve nothing less than a critical
examination of the art and thought of Tolstoy as a whole. I shall
confine myself to suggesting that the difficulty may be, at least in
part, due to the fact that Tolstoy was himself not unaware of the
problem, and did his best to falsify the answer. The hypothesis I
wish to offer is that Tolstoy was by nature a fox, but believed in
being a hedgehog; that his gifts and achievement are one thing,
and his beliefs, and consequently his interpretation of his own
achievement, another; and that consequently his ideals have led
him, and those whom his genius for persuasion has taken in, into
a systematic misinterpretation of what he and others were doing
or should be doing. No one can complain that he has left his
readers in any doubt as to what he thought about this topic: his
The Hedgehog and the Fox • 5
views on this subject permeate all his discursive writings – diaries,
recorded obiter dicta, autobiographical essays and stories, social
and religious tracts, literary criticism, letters to private and public
correspondents. But the conflict between what he was and what
he believed emerges nowhere so clearly as in his view of history,
to which some of his most brilliant and most paradoxical pages
are devoted. This essay is an attempt to deal with his historical
doctrines, and to consider both his motives for holding the views
he holds and some of their probable sources. In short, it is an
attempt to take Tolstoy’s attitude to history as seriously as he
himself meant his readers to take it, although for a somewhat
different reason – for the light it casts on a single man of genius
rather than on the fate of all mankind.
II
Tolstoy’s philosophy of history has, on the whole, not obtained
the attention which it deserves, whether as an intrinsically inter-
esting view or as an occurrence in the history of ideas, or even as
an element in the development of Tolstoy himself.1 Those who
have treated Tolstoy primarily as a novelist have at times looked
upon the historical and philosophical passages scattered through
War and Peace as so much perverse interruption of the narrative,
as a regrettable liability to irrelevant digression characteristic
1 For the purposes of this essay I propose to confine myself almost entirely to
the explicit philosophy of history contained in War and Peace, and to ignore, for ex-
ample, Sevastopol Stories, The Cossacks, the fragments of the unpublished novel on the
Decembrists, and Tolstoy’s own scattered reflections on this subject except in so far as
they bear on views expressed in War and Peace.
https://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/s9981.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaiah_Berlin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaiah_Berlin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hedgehog_and_the_Fox
The Hedgehog and the Fox is an essay by philosopher Isaiah Berlin that was published as a book in 1953. It was one of his most popular essays with the general public. However, Berlin said, "I meant it as a kind of enjoyable intellectual game, but it was taken seriously. Every classification throws light on something".[1] It has been compared to "an intellectual's cocktail-party game".[2]
Summary
The title is a reference to a fragment attributed to the Ancient Greek poet Archilochus: πόλλ' οἶδ' ἀλώπηξ, ἀλλ' ἐχῖνος ἓν μέγα ("a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing"). In Erasmus's Adagia from 1500, the expression is recorded as Multa novit vulpes, verum echinus unum magnum. (The fable of The Fox and the Cat embodies the same idea.)[citation needed]
Berlin expands upon this idea to divide writers and thinkers into two categories: hedgehogs, who view the world through the lens of a single defining idea (examples given include Plato, Lucretius, Blaise Pascal, Marcel Proust and Fernand Braudel), and foxes, who draw on a wide variety of experiences and for whom the world cannot be boiled down to a single idea (examples given include Aristotle, Desiderius Erasmus, Johann Wolfgang Goethe).[3]
Turning to Leo Tolstoy, Berlin contends that at first glance, Tolstoy escapes definition into one of the two groups. He postulates that while Tolstoy's talents are those of a fox, his beliefs are that one ought to be a hedgehog and so Tolstoy's own voluminous assessments of his own work are misleading. Berlin goes on to use this idea of Tolstoy as a basis for an analysis of the theory of history that Tolstoy presents in his novel War and Peace.
In the latter half of the essay, Berlin compares Tolstoy with the early 19th-century thinker Joseph de Maistre. As Berlin explains, while Tolstoy and de Maistre held violently contrasting views on more superficial matters, they also held profoundly similar views about the fundamental nature of existence and the limits of a rational scientific approach to it.
The essay ends with Berlin reiterating his view of Tolstoy—by nature a fox but a hedgehog by conviction— by concluding that this duality caused Tolstoy great pain at the end of his life.
InfluenceIn business and forecasting
James C. Collins refers to the story in his 2001 book Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't , where he clearly shows his preference towards hedgehog mentality.
Philip E. Tetlock, a political psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, drew heavily on this distinction in his exploration of the accuracy of experts and forecasters in various fields (especially politics) in his 2005 book Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?[4][5] Tetlock summarized substantial research claiming that most experts and well-paid pundits think like hedgehogs with one big idea; on average they make poor forecasts. Meanwhile, people who draw information from a large variety of often-conflicted sources, like foxes, make better forecasts. However, both are often beaten by formal models like autoregressive distributed lag models.[6]
In his 2012 The New York Times bestselling book The Signal and the Noise, forecaster Nate Silver urges readers to be "more foxy" after summarising Berlin's distinction. He cites the work of Philip E. Tetlock on the accuracy of political forecasts in the United States during the Cold War while he was a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. Silver's news website, fivethirtyeight.com, when it was launched in March 2014, also adopted the fox as its logo "as an allusion to" Archilochus' original work.[7]
In 2018, the author John Lewis Gaddis refers to Berlin's essay as well as Tetlock's work in his 2018 book On Grand Strategy.[8]
In other disciplines
Some authors such as Michael Walzer have used the same pattern of description for Berlin himself, as a person who knows many things, compared to the purported narrowness of many other contemporary political philosophers. Berlin's former student, Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, was dubbed a hedgehog by Berlin and admitted to it after receiving the 2007 Templeton Prize.[9]
Legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin's 2011 book, Justice for Hedgehogs, argues the case for a single, overarching, and coherent framework of moral truth.
Music historian Berthold Hoeckner applies and extends Berlin's distinction in his 2007 essay "Wagner and the Origin of Evil". One of Hoeckner's key insights is that the historiography of Wagner's antisemitism, much like that of the Holocaust, has two main branches: a hedgehog-like functionalist branch that sees the composer's polemic jabs at Jewish culture as mere assimilationist rhetoric, and a fox-like intentionalist branch that sees them instead as violent expressions of genuinely eliminationist Judenhass.[10]
In his book Wittgenstein's Place in Twentieth-Century Analytic Philosophy, Oxford philosopher Peter Hacker uses this metaphor to contrast Berlin's Tolstoy (a fox who wants to be a hedgehog) with philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was "by nature a hedgehog, but after 1929 transformed himself, by great intellectual and imaginative endeavour, into a paradigmatic fox".[11]
Claudio Véliz uses Berlin's construction to contrast Anglo-American and Spanish patterns of settlement and governance in his 1994 book The New World of the Gothic Fox: Culture and Economy in English and Spanish America.[citation needed]
Peter Kivy refers to the essay when describing philosophy of art in the current day as the age of the fox (best represented by Noël Carroll), contrasting it with the previous era of the hedgehog (best represented by Arthur Danto).[12]
Harvard political economist Dani Rodrik applies the distinction to "hedgehog" mainstream orthodox economists who apply the "Liberal Paradigm" to everything everywhere always and "fox" heterodox (political) economists who have different answers to different times, places, and situations in his 2015 book Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science.[13]
Leading Judge, Lord Hoffmann, observed that "Copyright law protects foxes better than hedgehogs" in his Judgment in the case Designers Guild Ltd v Russell Williams (Textiles) Ltd in the UK House of Lords.[14]
Linguist Mark Aronoff divides linguists into these two groups, essentially those that emphasize linguistic theory versus those focused on empirical accuracy and generalizations. He identifies as a fox and states, "I find it hard to understand why hedgehogs make the moves that they make. It has always been especially puzzling to me why they react with such vehemence to what strikes me, a fox, as entirely reasonable or even unremarkable."[15]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hedgehog_and_the_Fox
https://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/s9981.pdf
The Hedgehog and the Fox
A queer combination of the brain of an English chemist
with the soul of an Indian Buddhist.
E. M. de Vogüé 1
I
There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet
Archilochus which says: ‘The fox knows many things, but the
hedgehog knows one big thing.’2 Scholars have differed about the
correct interpretation of these dark words, which may mean no
more than that the fox, for all his cunning, is defeated by the
1 ‘On dirait l’esprit d’un chimiste anglais dans l’âme d’un bouddhiste hindou; se
charge qui pourra d’expliquer cet étrange accouplment’: Le Roman russe (Paris, 1886),
282.2 ‘po*ll’ oi#d’ a$lw* phx, a$ll’ e$ci&nov e= n me*ga.’ Archilochus fragment 201 in M. L. West
(ed.), Iambi et elegi graeci ante Alexandrum cantati, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (Oxford, 1989). [The
fragment was preserved in a collection of proverbs by the Greek Sophist Zenobius (5. 68),
who says that it is found in both Archilochus and Homer – West, op. cit., vol. 2 (Oxford,
1992), ‘Homerus’ fragment 5. Since it is iambic rather than dactylic in metre, the attribu-
tion to Homer is likely to mean that it appeared in the (now thought pseudo-Homeric)
comic epic poem Margites, probably written later than Archilochus’ poem. See e.g.
C. M. Bowra, ‘The Fox and the Hedgehog’, Classical Quarterly 34 (1940), 26–9 (see 26),
an article reprinted with revisions in Bowra’s On Greek Margins (Oxford, 1970), 59–66
(see 59), and evidently unknown to Berlin. In any event, the sentiment might well be
a proverb deployed by both authors, though given Archilochus’ frequent use of animal
encounters (on which see also 114–15 below), it is attractive to think it was used first, and
given this metrical form, by him.]
2 • Isaiah Berlin
hedgehog’s one defence. But, taken figuratively, the words can
be made to yield a sense in which they mark one of the deepest
differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be,
human beings in general. For there exists a great chasm between
those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vi-
sion, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms
of which they understand, think and feel – a single, universal,
organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and
say has significance – and, on the other side, those who pursue
many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected,
if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or
physiological cause, related to no moral or aesthetic principle.
These last lead lives, perform acts and entertain ideas that are
centrifugal rather than centripetal; their thought is scattered or
diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a
vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in them-
selves, without, consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them
into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing,
sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical,
unitary inner vision. The first kind of intellectual and artistic
personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes; and
without insisting on a rigid classification, we may, without too
much fear of contradiction, say that, in this sense, Dante belongs
to the first category, Shakespeare to the second; Plato, Lucretius,
Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust are, in varying
degrees, hedgehogs; Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus,
Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce are foxes.
Of course, like all over-simple classifications of this type, the
dichotomy becomes, if pressed, artificial, scholastic and ultimately
The Hedgehog and the Fox • 3
absurd. But if it is not an aid to serious criticism, neither should it
be rejected as being merely superficial or frivolous: like all distinc-
tions which embody any degree of truth, it offers a point of view
from which to look and compare, a starting-point for genuine
investigation. Thus we have no doubt about the violence of the
contrast between Pushkin and Dostoevsky; and Dostoevsky’s
celebrated speech about Pushkin has, for all its eloquence and
depth of feeling, seldom been considered by any perceptive
reader to cast light on the genius of Pushkin, but rather on that
of Dostoevsky himself, precisely because it perversely represents
Pushkin – an arch-fox, the greatest in the nineteenth century –
as being similar to Dostoevsky, who is nothing if not a hedgehog;
and thereby transforms, indeed distorts, Pushkin into a dedicated
prophet, a bearer of a single, universal message which was indeed
the centre of Dostoevsky’s own universe, but exceedingly remote
from the many varied provinces of Pushkin’s protean genius.
Indeed, it would not be absurd to say that Russian literature is
spanned by these gigantic figures – at one pole Pushkin, at the
other Dostoevsky; and that the characteristics of other Russian
writers can, by those who find it useful or enjoyable to ask that
kind of question, to some degree be determined in relation to
these great opposites. To ask of Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov, Blok
how they stand in relation to Pushkin and to Dostoevsky leads –
or, at any rate, has led – to fruitful and illuminating criticism. But
when we come to Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, and ask this of
him – ask whether he belongs to the first category or the second,
whether he is a monist or a pluralist, whether his vision is of one
or of many, whether he is of a single substance or compounded of
heterogeneous elements – there is no clear or immediate answer.
4 • Isaiah Berlin
The question does not, somehow, seem wholly appropriate; it
seems to breed more darkness than it dispels. Yet it is not lack of
information that makes us pause: Tolstoy has told us more about
himself and his views and attitudes than any other Russian, more,
almost, than any other European, writer. Nor can his art be called
obscure in any normal sense: his universe has no dark corners,
his stories are luminous with the light of day; he has explained
them and himself, and argued about them and the methods by
which they are constructed, more articulately and with greater
force and sanity and lucidity than any other writer. Is he a fox or
a hedgehog? What are we to say? Why is the answer so curiously
difficult to find? Does he resemble Shakespeare or Pushkin more
than Dante or Dostoevsky? Or is he wholly unlike either, and is
the question therefore unanswerable because it is absurd? What
is the mysterious obstacle with which our enquiry seems faced?
I do not propose in this essay to formulate a reply to this
question, since this would involve nothing less than a critical
examination of the art and thought of Tolstoy as a whole. I shall
confine myself to suggesting that the difficulty may be, at least in
part, due to the fact that Tolstoy was himself not unaware of the
problem, and did his best to falsify the answer. The hypothesis I
wish to offer is that Tolstoy was by nature a fox, but believed in
being a hedgehog; that his gifts and achievement are one thing,
and his beliefs, and consequently his interpretation of his own
achievement, another; and that consequently his ideals have led
him, and those whom his genius for persuasion has taken in, into
a systematic misinterpretation of what he and others were doing
or should be doing. No one can complain that he has left his
readers in any doubt as to what he thought about this topic: his
The Hedgehog and the Fox • 5
views on this subject permeate all his discursive writings – diaries,
recorded obiter dicta, autobiographical essays and stories, social
and religious tracts, literary criticism, letters to private and public
correspondents. But the conflict between what he was and what
he believed emerges nowhere so clearly as in his view of history,
to which some of his most brilliant and most paradoxical pages
are devoted. This essay is an attempt to deal with his historical
doctrines, and to consider both his motives for holding the views
he holds and some of their probable sources. In short, it is an
attempt to take Tolstoy’s attitude to history as seriously as he
himself meant his readers to take it, although for a somewhat
different reason – for the light it casts on a single man of genius
rather than on the fate of all mankind.
II
Tolstoy’s philosophy of history has, on the whole, not obtained
the attention which it deserves, whether as an intrinsically inter-
esting view or as an occurrence in the history of ideas, or even as
an element in the development of Tolstoy himself.1 Those who
have treated Tolstoy primarily as a novelist have at times looked
upon the historical and philosophical passages scattered through
War and Peace as so much perverse interruption of the narrative,
as a regrettable liability to irrelevant digression characteristic
1 For the purposes of this essay I propose to confine myself almost entirely to
the explicit philosophy of history contained in War and Peace, and to ignore, for ex-
ample, Sevastopol Stories, The Cossacks, the fragments of the unpublished novel on the
Decembrists, and Tolstoy’s own scattered reflections on this subject except in so far as
they bear on views expressed in War and Peace.
https://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/s9981.pdf
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