The Hedgehog and the Fox

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"The Hedgehog and the Fox" is the title of an essay by Isaiah Berlin, regarding the Russian author Leo Tolstoy's theory of history.

The title is a reference to a fragment attributed to the ancient Greek poet Archilochus: πόλλ οἶδ ἀλώπηξ, ἀλλ ἐχῖνος ἓν μέγα ("The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." In Erasmus Rotterdamus's Adagia from 1500, the expression is recorded as Multa novit vulpes, verum echinus unum magnum.)

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 Dante, Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, and Proust) 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 Shakespeare, Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, and Joyce).

Turning to Tolstoy, Berlin contends that at first glance, Tolstoy escapes definition into one of these two groups. He postulates, rather, that while Tolstoy's talents are those of a fox, his beliefs are that one ought to be a hedgehog, and thus 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.

The essay has been published separately and as part of the collection Russian Thinkers, edited by Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly.

Some authors, for instance Michael Walzer, have used the same pattern of description on Berlin, as a person who knows many things, compared to the purported narrowness of many other contemporary political philosophers.

[edit] External link

• The Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library