The Hedgehog and the Fox

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CONTENTS

Forewordby Michael Ignatieff

ix

Editor’s Preface

xiii

Author’s Note

xvii

The Hedgehog and the Fox

1

Appendix to the Second Edition

91

Index

117

FOREWORD

Michael Ignatieff

IT IS WORTH TRYING to understand why this extraordinary essay, first delivered as a lecture in Oxford, then reprinted in an obscure Slavic studies journal in 1951, then re-titled and re-published in 1953, has been enjoying such a robust and enduring afterlife. Along with ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’,¹ the distinction between the hedgehog and the fox has proved to be enduringly fertile, and has been put to uses Berlin could never have imagined or intended. What began life as a common-room parlour game in the late 1930s – an Oxford undergraduate introduced him to the shimmering and mysterious sentence in the Greek original and Isaiah took it up to divide his friends into hedgehogs and foxes² – Berlin then turned into the structuring insight for a great essay on Tolstoy. It has now passed into the culture as a way to classify those around us and to think about two basic orientations towards reality itself.

It is not merely that the fox knows many things. The fox accepts that he can only know many things and that the unity of reality must escape his grasp. The critical feature of foxes is that they are reconciled to the limits of what they know. As Berlin puts it, ‘We are part of a larger scheme of things than we can understand. […] we ourselves live in this whole and by it, and are wise only in the measure to which we make our peace with it.’¹

A hedgehog will not make peace with the world. He is not reconciled. He cannot accept that he knows only many things. He seeks to know one big thing, and strives without ceasing to give reality a unifying shape. Foxes settle for what they know and may live happy lives. Hedgehogs will not settle and their lives may not be happy.

All of us, Berlin suggests, have elements of both fox and hedgehog within us. The essay is an unparalleled portrait of human dividedness. We are riven creatures and we have to choose whether to accept the incompleteness of our knowledge or to hold out for certainty and truth. Only the most determined among us will refuse to settle for what the fox knows and hold out for the certainties of the hedgehog.

The essay endures, in other words, because it is not simply about Tolstoy – it is about all of us. We can be reconciled to our ‘sense of reality’² – accept it for what it is, live life as we find it – or we can hunger for a more fundamental, unitary truth beneath appearance, a truth that will explain or console.³

Berlin contrasted this longing for unitary truth with a fox’s sense of reality. He was adamant that even a fox’s knowledge could be solid and clear as far as it went. We are not in a fog. We can know, we can learn, we can make moral judgements. Scientific knowledge is clear. What he disputed is that science or reason can give us a final certainty that cuts to the core of reality. Most of us settle for this. Wisdom, he writes, is not surrender to illusion, but rather an acceptance of the ‘unalterable medium in which we act’, ‘the permanent relationships of things’, ‘the universal texture of human life’.¹ This we can know, not by science or by reasoning, so much as by a deep coming to terms with what is. Berlin himself, in his final years, achieved this kind of serenity. It seemed to be rooted in the acceptance and reconciliation that imbued his sense of reality.²

A select few refuse to come to terms with reality. They refuse to submit, and seek – whether through art or science, mathematics or philosophy – to pierce through the many disparate things that foxes know, to a core certainty that explains everything. Karl Marx was such a figure, the most implacable hedgehog of them all.

The grandeur of hedgehogs is that they refuse our limitations. Their tragedy is that they cannot be reconciled to them at the end. Tolstoy was ruthlessly dismissive of every available doctrine of truth, whether religious or secular, yet he could not abandon the conviction that some such ultimate truth could be grasped if only he could overcome his own limitations. ‘Tolstoy’s sense of reality was until the end too devastating to be compatible with any moral ideal which he was able to construct out of the fragments into which his intellect shivered the world.’¹ At the end he was a figure of tragic grandeur – ‘a desperate old man, beyond human aid, wandering self-blinded at Colonus’² – unable to be at peace with the irremediable limitations of his own humanity.