The Hedgehog and the Fox

This essay asks basic questions of anyone who reads it: What can we know? What does our ‘sense of reality’ tell us? Are we reconciled to the limits of human vision? Or do we long for something more? If so, what certainty can we hope to achieve one day? Because these are enduring questions of human existence, this great essay will last as long as people come seeking answers.

¹ Available in two of Berlin’s collections: The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays, ed. Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer (London, 1997), and Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy (Oxford, 2002).

² Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (London, 1998), 297–8.

¹ 79 below.

² 43, 70, 71, 76, 85, 89, 105 below.

³ See also Berlin’s ‘The Sense of Reality’ (the Elizabeth Cutter Morrow Lecture, Smith College, 1953), in his collection of the same title, ed. Henry Hardy (London, 1996).

¹ 75–6, 74 below.

² See my ‘Berlin in Autumn’, repr. in Henry Hardy (ed.), The Book of Isaiah: Personal Impressions of Isaiah Berlin (Woodbridge, 2009).

¹ 90 below.

² ibid.

EDITOR’S PREFACE

I am very sorry to have called my own book The Hedgehog

and the Fox. I wish I hadn’t now.

Isaiah Berlin¹

THIS SHORT BOOK IS ONE of the best-known and most widely celebrated works by Isaiah Berlin. Its somewhat complicated history is perhaps worth summarising briefly.

The original, shorter, version, based on a lecture delivered in Oxford, was dictated (the author claimed) in two days, and published in a specialist journal in 1951 under the somewhat less memorable title ‘Lev Tolstoy’s Historical Scepticism’.² Two years later, at George Weidenfeld’s³ inspired suggestion, it was reprinted in a revised and expanded form under its present, famous, title,⁴ afforced principally by two additional sections on Tolstoy and Maistre, and dedicated to the memory of the author’s late friend Jasper Ridley (1913–43), killed in the Second World War ten years earlier.

Twenty-five years after that, it was included in a collection of Berlin’s essays on nineteenth-century Russian thinkers, of which a second, much revised, edition appeared a further thirty years thereafter.¹ It also appeared in the year of Berlin’s death in a one-volume retrospective collection drawn from the whole of his work.² Numerous translations have been made over the years: work on a French version in the mid-1950s by Aline Halban,³ soon to be Berlin’s wife, was the occasion for regular meetings in the period preceding their marriage. Finally, an excerpted text has been published as Tolstoy and History.⁴ The free-standing complete text has remained in print ever since it was first published, and now enters the latest phase in its history.

For each of the collections of essays by Berlin that I have edited or co-edited – that is, in 1978, 1997 and 2008 – corrections were made in the text and corrections and additions to the notes. Translations of passages in languages other than English (some of them rather long) were also added. The present edition of the essay includes all these revisions and more besides.

New to this edition are the foreword by Berlin’s biographer Michael Ignatieff, and the appendix, which includes (extracts from) letters Berlin wrote about the essay at the time it was written and published, and later, and also (extracts from) contemporary reviews and later commentary.

The book was enthusiastically reviewed when it first appeared, and has become a staple of literary criticism. Berlin’s distinction between the monist hedgehog and the pluralist fox, like his celebration of Kant’s ‘crooked timber of humanity’,¹ has entered the vocabulary of modern culture. It is invoked so frequently in speech, in print and online that it has developed an untrackable life of its own, inspiring (among much else) a parody by John Bowle in Punch (reproduced in the appendix) and cartoons such as the one by Charles Barsotti reproduced overleaf.²

Since the new edition has been reset, the pagination differs from that of the various earlier editions. This will cause some inconvenience to readers trying to follow up references to those editions. I have therefore posted a concordance of the editions, compiled by Nick Hall, at ‹http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/published_works/hf/concordance.html›, so that references to one edition can readily be converted into references to another.

Page references are mostly given as plain numerals. Cross-references to notes (in this volume, unless otherwise stated) are given in the form ‘123/4’, i.e. ‘page 123, note 4’.