The Hedgehog and the Fox

I am naturally delighted that you should think so highly of The Hedgehog and the Fox and hope that it will not prove financially disastrous to you. In the meanwhile I have added two further sections to the original which appeared in the Oxford volume of Slavonic Studies.¹ I hope they will not spoil the rest too much. They deal with what Tolstoy and de Maistre meant by such concepts as ‘inexorable’ and ‘inevitable’ and move de Maistre a little more into the picture which earns him that place in the subtitle,² which otherwise seemed a little odd. Is there anyone else in the world besides yourself and me who does not think that Tolstoy’s long epilogues and philosophical excursuses are tedious interruptions of the story? Typical Russian amateur home-made bits of eccentric philosophy?

To his ex-pupil and friend Shiela Sokolov Grant, 29 January 1954

People seem to find obscurities in the Hedgehog. It seems to me terribly clear to the point of sheer platitude.

To H. Paul Simon, University of Toronto, 27 May 1971

I think that you truly believe that I prefer foxes to hedgehogs, but this is not so. No greater poet than Dante, no greater philosopher than Plato, no profounder novelist than Dostoevsky exists; yet, of course, they seem to me to have been hedgehogs, and although I do think that they were fanatical unitarians – and that this can lead to disastrous consequences in social, personal and political life – this is the price that may be paid for forms of genius which may well be profounder than any other. I may have more personal sympathy with foxes; I may think that they are politically more enlightened, tolerant and humane; but this does not imply they are otherwise more valuable – if such comparisons of incommensurables make sense at all.

To R. Errera of the publishers Calmann-Levy, 23 January 1973

The Hedgehog and the Fox – Le Hérisson et le renard: essai sur le philosophie d’histoire de Léon Tolstoi, which, whatever its merits, is, I suspect, the most widely read of all my books, both in England and in America […].

To Leon Edel, 17 September 1985

[T]he idea [in Edmund Wilson’s diary] that the last bit of my essay on Tolstoy is really autobiographical and that, ‘like all serious Jews’, I long to be a hedgehog is simply not true […].

Edmund Wilson had written:

I told [A. J. P.] Taylor, when it was over, that I had misunderstood Isaiah. ‘He’s very easy to misunderstand,’ said Taylor shortly and tellingly. I had not then seen, in the New Statesman, Taylor’s review of The Hedgehog and the Fox, which had rather cast a shadow on Isaiah. I talked to Taylor about the book as we were coming out of the lecture, and he said that he felt that Isaiah, when he couldn’t get into his subject, tried to carry things off ‘with a burst of words’, and that this was what he had said. There is something in this, I think – I had felt the evening before, when the conversation became philosophical, as I had sometimes felt with Isaiah before, that one feels him at moments scraping bottom when he has sailed into the shallows of his mind; but it is evident that Taylor, in the plain English tradition, cannot appreciate what they call at Oxford ‘the Delphic side’ of Isaiah, which is also the prophetic Jewish side. I thought that the end of the Tolstoy essay, which for Taylor is a mere torrent of words, was actually quite successful: he is talking about his own problems: he lives much the life of the fox but, like all serious Jews, aspires to the unity of the hedgehog.¹

A. J. P. TAYLOR’S REVIEW

Isaiah Berlin dwells in that strange borderland, the history of ideas, especially of ideas displayed in literature; and one sometimes feels that he has more ideas than all the historical authors whom he sets out to illuminate. Voltaire no doubt had him in mind when he wittily remarked, ‘it is neither literature nor ideas nor history’.² Something rather in the nature of an intellectual firework display, appropriately published in November, Mr Berlin is lavish with his gifts. In this little book of eighty pages, he starts enough themes to last another man a lifetime, though by now he is doubtless off on quite a different scent.