Isaiah Berlin - The Hedgehog and the Fox

IB Well, only because I’ve studied it, because Karl Marx was one and Tolstoy was one and so on; but no, I don’t think that’s right. I’ve got no either envy of or obsession by or terrible interest in people with a single vision; on the contrary, I think them very grand, important geniuses, but dangerous. […] I do think they can be geniuses of the first order. People who have a single vision of the universe, like Dante or Tolstoy […] – Tolstoy didn’t, in my opinion, but he wanted to – but there are people with this single view of the world, and they can be marvellous, but don’t tempt me, [n]or [do I] object to [them] terribly […]. I admire them and concede their importance or their genius. […] You must be thinking that I have somewhere a desire to put it all together. […] You might be right, because one doesn’t know oneself, but I’m telling you I never have felt a hedgehog in my life, or any temptation to be one. I’ve admired hedgehogs – Toscanini is a hero of exactly that kind. Akhmatova was a hedgehog. Oh, I’m impressed by them, I’m deeply moved by them, but not with them; and I don’t walk the same earth with them. [It’s a] leitmotif in my work – human desire for certainty is unshakeable, noble, incorrigible, highly dangerous; that’s all right. I don’t know about noble, I’m not sure it is; unshakeable, incorrigible and dangerous, yes; maybe it’s a case of noble noble, a case of ignoble ignoble. I don’t think Karl Marx was very noble: brave rather than dignified and worthy of respect. Noble?

29 April 1991

IB Then as a result of learning to dictate in Washington – I’ve always found it very painful to write – I began dictating here [in Oxford], and I found that infinitely easier; and so The Hedgehog and the Fox […] dictated in two days. That was because the Oxford Slavonic Studies [sc. Papers ] – no, I had to deliver a lecture on a Slavonic subject, given to me by the Professor of Russian, whom I knew, Konovalov, 1a fellow of New College; and I delivered the lecture. He said, ‘Well, if you can write that, I’d like to publish it.’ So I wrote it out, then he rejected it. It was not in time. And then somebody intervened and it was saved. It was then published as ‘Notes about the Historical Scepticism of Lev Tolstoy’ [sc. ‘Lev Tolstoy’s Historical Scepticism’]. It was never read by anybody in that form. […] Somebody must have told [George] Weidenfeld. He looked at it and thought it was publishable. […] And then Weidenfeld said, ‘It’s not quite long enough. It doesn’t quite – a pamphlet could be a little longer.’ So

I made it a little longer – added some more – and that was that.

5 June 1994

LATER COMMENTARY

The following extracts are culled from the editor’s archive of material about Berlin. No attempt has been made to locate especially interesting passages from the enormous secondary literature on Berlin’s essay (an exercise for another day, perhaps).

[Berlin] discovered that he was a hedgehog with one big central idea only because everyone else was telling him it was there.

Michael Ignatieff 1

‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog one big thing.’ Berlin made Archilochus’ line famous by using it as a metaphor to distinguish (I put it crudely) single-issue fanatics from those who welcome MacNeice’s ‘drunkenness of things being various’. 2Steven Lukes offers a typology of Berlinian hedgehogs and foxes and places Berlin within it as ‘an empiricist, realist, objectivist, anti-irrationalist, anti-relativist fox’. Fair enough, though the endless discussion of where precisely to place Berlin on the erinaceous/vulpine continuum is, to quote Berlin’s own description of the result of pressing the distinction too far, ‘artificial, scholastic, and ultimately absurd’.

Henry Hardy 1

Berlin’s famous essay on Tolstoy, most noted (and cited) for its distinction between The Hedgehog and the Fox, is an analysis of Tolstoy’s vision of history; the essay’s power, its motivation and momentum, comes less from the opening metaphor than from Berlin’s insight into the struggle within Tolstoy between his own natural ‘sense of reality’ 2– that of the ‘fox’ who ‘knows many things’ and is honestly aware of the multifarious facets of life in all their distinctness, and which resists all attempts at simplification and systematisation – and his desire for a simple, unified, harmonious vision of life as a whole. This irreconcilable conflict between instincts and aspirations, which Tolstoy strove and failed to resolve, ultimately made Tolstoy a tormented, tragic figure, as Berlin powerfully explains in the essay’s magnificent conclusion.

Joshua Cherniss and Henry Hardy 3

[Berlin] loved categorising individuals in the spirit of a party game. […] most often there were two categories and two alone: either you were, when it came right down to it, a conservative or a radical, shall we say; or you were either a hedgehog or a fox; or you were either a bishop or a bookmaker – he was inexhaustibly fertile in his ‘two sorts of’ distinctions. It gave rise to a joke against him: ‘The world is divided into two sorts of people: those who think the world is divided into two sorts of people and those who don’t.’

Bryan Magee 1

Perhaps the best-known phrase associated with Berlin’s view of the world and humanity is the one used as the title for his essay The Hedgehog and the Fox . It comes from a fragment of Greek poetry by Archilochus: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’ As he applied this saying to the major actors of history, Berlin was not praising one beast and condemning the other. Everyone combines both, although in different proportions and interactions. In that sense, the proverb doesn’t quite work as a bumper-sticker for life – which is appropriate, since Berlin was wary of slogans and nostrums. He did, however, have one big idea of his own – his own personal hedgehog – and it was (also appropriately) paradoxical: beware of big ideas, especially when they fall into the hands of political leaders.

Strobe Talbott 1

AN EXCHANGE IN THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS 2

Letter from John S. Bowman

The joint authors of the review of Isaiah Berlin’s writings refer to [an] oft-quoted phrase – in this instance, Berlin’s use of a fragment of Archilochus, the early Greek poet, for epigram [sc. epigraph], title and governing metaphor of his essay, ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’. 3As quoted by Berlin, Archilochus is saying: ‘The fox knows many little things. The hedgehog knows one big thing.’ Berlin then proceeds to compare Tolstoy, the ‘fox’, to Dostoevsky, the ‘hedgehog’, and before he is through, the Archilochus epigram seems to be saying that there are two different ways of approaching or knowing reality – put quite simplistically, the way of the far-ranging generalist and the way of the concentrated specialist.

As I admit, that is oversimplifying Berlin’s subtle arguments, but it is not my intention to accuse Berlin of anything. I do not even know who is responsible for the translation of the Archilochus that he uses. My point is that it is this reading of the Archilochus epigram that has held sway since Berlin used it many years ago: when people refer to ‘the hedgehog and the fox’ these days, they are usually referring to this contrasting approach to the world. Furthermore, there is a general disposition to favour the way of the fox – although this may be entirely my own bias. For instance, the reviewers of Berlin refer to his ‘pluralism’ and other aspects of our Western–liberal tradition that Berlin so epitomises, in a way that suggests we all are better for knowing a lot of things.