The Hedgehog and the Fox

Tribute should be paid to Berlin’s friend Julian Asquith,³ from whom he learned of the fragment that gave the book its title. I am extremely grateful to Aileen Kelly for invaluable help with the text and references during the preparation of the first edition of Russian Thinkers. Thanks in connection with the present edition are also due to Al Bertrand, Ewen Bowie, Quentin Davies (John Bowle’s literary executor, for allowing me to reprint Bowle’s parody), Leofranc Holford-Strevens, Eva Papastratis, John Penney and above all Mary Merry.

Henry Hardy

Heswall, May 2012

¹ Letter to Morton White, 2 May 1955. This may be sincere, but the intellectual influence of the book has surely been significantly enhanced by its felicitous title.

²Oxford Slavonic Papers 2 (1951), 17–54.

³ George Weidenfeld (b. 1919), joint founder in 1948 of the publishing house Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

⁴The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History (London, 1953: Weidenfeld and Nicolson; New York, 1954: Simon and Schuster).

¹Russian Thinkers, ed. Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly (London, 1978: Hogarth Press; New York, 1978: Viking; 2nd ed., revised by Henry Hardy, London etc., 2008: Penguin Classics).

²The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays, ed. Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer (London, 1997: Chatto and Windus; New York, 1998: Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

³ ‘Le hérisson et le renard’, in the French edition of Russian Thinkers – Les Penseurs russes (Paris, 1984: Albin Michel). There was a thirty-year delay in the publication of this translation. On 3 December 1954 Berlin wrote to his friend Rowland Burdon-Muller: ‘Aline came in to continue with the translation of The Hedgehog and the Fox, on which she seems fanatically intent. This flatters me, but I wonder if any publisher is rash enough to publish it.’

⁴ London, 1996: Phoenix.

¹ ‘Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht’ (‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’, 1784), Kant’s gesammelte Schriften (Berlin, 1900– ), viii 23, line 22.

² First published in the New Yorker, 9 November 1998, 54. © The New Yorker Collection 1998 Charles Barsotti from cartoonbank.com. All right reserved.

³ Julian Edward George Asquith (1916–2011), 2nd Earl of Oxford and Asquith, who read classics at Balliol College, Oxford, 1934–8, was a British colonial administrator.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

MY THANKS ARE DUE TO Professor S. Konovalov and the Clarendon Press for permission to reproduce the portions of this essay which originally appeared in 1951 under a somewhat different title in the second volume of Oxford Slavonic Papers. I have considerably revised the original version, and added two further sections (VI and VII). I should like to thank Mr Richard Wollheim for reading the new sections and suggesting improvements, and Mr J. S. G. Simmons for supplying me with a valuable reference, and for his care in seeing the earlier version through the press.

Oxford, July 1953

I. B.

To the memory of Jasper Ridley

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 Vogüé¹

I