The Hedgehog and the Fox

IB You say ‘Berlin appears to be a fox who wishes he were a hedgehog.’ Never have I wished that. Never. Why would you think that? I’m a fox who’s quite content to be a fox. That’s what I say about Tolstoy, that he’s a fox who thought he was a hedgehog; that’s rather different, and that’s what I’m accused of by Perry Anderson, of being a fox who is really a hedgehog, because I have got a large central idea, […] there is something unifying, and that’s quite wrong, but there’s something which I’m being accused of, whatever it is. […] What kind of a hedgehog am I in your view? What is my unitary vision, which I strive after? Not pluralism or liberalism, all these conflicting values and all the rest of it. That’s not an obsessive vision. I don’t reduce everything to that.

MI No, my point about you not being a hedgehog is the obvious one, that I don’t think someone who is a liberal pluralist can be a hedgehog, by definition. […] I meant something different by ‘hedgehog’: I think I meant […] a deep emotional interest in those who have a central vision, and a perplexity, a psychological interest in that kind of achievement.

IB Well, only because I’ve studied it, because Karl Marx was one and Tolstoy was one and so on; but no, I don’t think that’s right. I’ve got no either envy of or obsession by or terrible interest in people with a single vision; on the contrary, I think them very grand, important geniuses, but dangerous. […] I do think they can be geniuses of the first order. People who have a single vision of the universe, like Dante or Tolstoy […] – Tolstoy didn’t, in my opinion, but he wanted to – but there are people with this single view of the world, and they can be marvellous, but don’t tempt me, [n]or [do I] object to [them] terribly […]. I admire them and concede their importance or their genius. […] You must be thinking that I have somewhere a desire to put it all together. […] You might be right, because one doesn’t know oneself, but I’m telling you I never have felt a hedgehog in my life, or any temptation to be one. I’ve admired hedgehogs – Toscanini is a hero of exactly that kind. Akhmatova was a hedgehog. Oh, I’m impressed by them, I’m deeply moved by them, but not with them; and I don’t walk the same earth with them. [It’s a] leitmotif in my work – human desire for certainty is unshakeable, noble, incorrigible, highly dangerous; that’s all right. I don’t know about noble, I’m not sure it is; unshakeable, incorrigible and dangerous, yes; maybe it’s a case of noble noble, a case of ignoble ignoble. I don’t think Karl Marx was very noble: brave rather than dignified and worthy of respect. Noble?

29 April 1991

IB Then as a result of learning to dictate in Washington – I’ve always found it very painful to write – I began dictating here [in Oxford], and I found that infinitely easier; and so The Hedgehog and the Fox […] dictated in two days. That was because the Oxford Slavonic Studies [sc. Papers] – no, I had to deliver a lecture on a Slavonic subject, given to me by the Professor of Russian, whom I knew, Konovalov,¹ a fellow of New College; and I delivered the lecture. He said, ‘Well, if you can write that, I’d like to publish it.’ So I wrote it out, then he rejected it. It was not in time. And then somebody intervened and it was saved. It was then published as ‘Notes about the Historical Scepticism of Lev Tolstoy’ [sc. ‘Lev Tolstoy’s Historical Scepticism’]. It was never read by anybody in that form. […] Somebody must have told [George] Weidenfeld. He looked at it and thought it was publishable. […] And then Weidenfeld said, ‘It’s not quite long enough. It doesn’t quite – a pamphlet could be a little longer.’ So

I made it a little longer – added some more – and that was that.

5 June 1994

LATER COMMENTARY

The following extracts are culled from the editor’s archive of material about Berlin. No attempt has been made to locate especially interesting passages from the enormous secondary literature on Berlin’s essay (an exercise for another day, perhaps).

[Berlin] discovered that he was a hedgehog with one big central idea only because everyone else was telling him it was there.

Michael Ignatieff¹