The Hedgehog and the Fox

‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog one big thing.’ Berlin made Archilochus’ line famous by using it as a metaphor to distinguish (I put it crudely) single-issue fanatics from those who welcome MacNeice’s ‘drunkenness of things being various’.² Steven Lukes offers a typology of Berlinian hedgehogs and foxes and places Berlin within it as ‘an empiricist, realist, objectivist, anti-irrationalist, anti-relativist fox’. Fair enough, though the endless discussion of where precisely to place Berlin on the erinaceous/vulpine continuum is, to quote Berlin’s own description of the result of pressing the distinction too far, ‘artificial, scholastic, and ultimately absurd’.

Henry Hardy¹

Berlin’s famous essay on Tolstoy, most noted (and cited) for its distinction between The Hedgehog and the Fox, is an analysis of Tolstoy’s vision of history; the essay’s power, its motivation and momentum, comes less from the opening metaphor than from Berlin’s insight into the struggle within Tolstoy between his own natural ‘sense of reality’² – that of the ‘fox’ who ‘knows many things’ and is honestly aware of the multifarious facets of life in all their distinctness, and which resists all attempts at simplification and systematisation – and his desire for a simple, unified, harmonious vision of life as a whole. This irreconcilable conflict between instincts and aspirations, which Tolstoy strove and failed to resolve, ultimately made Tolstoy a tormented, tragic figure, as Berlin powerfully explains in the essay’s magnificent conclusion.

Joshua Cherniss and Henry Hardy³

[Berlin] loved categorising individuals in the spirit of a party game. […] most often there were two categories and two alone: either you were, when it came right down to it, a conservative or a radical, shall we say; or you were either a hedgehog or a fox; or you were either a bishop or a bookmaker – he was inexhaustibly fertile in his ‘two sorts of’ distinctions. It gave rise to a joke against him: ‘The world is divided into two sorts of people: those who think the world is divided into two sorts of people and those who don’t.’

Bryan Magee¹

Perhaps the best-known phrase associated with Berlin’s view of the world and humanity is the one used as the title for his essay The Hedgehog and the Fox. It comes from a fragment of Greek poetry by Archilochus: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’ As he applied this saying to the major actors of history, Berlin was not praising one beast and condemning the other. Everyone combines both, although in different proportions and interactions. In that sense, the proverb doesn’t quite work as a bumper-sticker for life – which is appropriate, since Berlin was wary of slogans and nostrums. He did, however, have one big idea of his own – his own personal hedgehog – and it was (also appropriately) paradoxical: beware of big ideas, especially when they fall into the hands of political leaders.

Strobe Talbott¹

AN EXCHANGE IN THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS²

Letter from John S. Bowman

The joint authors of the review of Isaiah Berlin’s writings refer to [an] oft-quoted phrase – in this instance, Berlin’s use of a fragment of Archilochus, the early Greek poet, for epigram [sc. epigraph], title and governing metaphor of his essay, ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’.³ As quoted by Berlin, Archilochus is saying: ‘The fox knows many little things. The hedgehog knows one big thing.’ Berlin then proceeds to compare Tolstoy, the ‘fox’, to Dostoevsky, the ‘hedgehog’, and before he is through, the Archilochus epigram seems to be saying that there are two different ways of approaching or knowing reality – put quite simplistically, the way of the far-ranging generalist and the way of the concentrated specialist.

As I admit, that is oversimplifying Berlin’s subtle arguments, but it is not my intention to accuse Berlin of anything. I do not even know who is responsible for the translation of the Archilochus that he uses. My point is that it is this reading of the Archilochus epigram that has held sway since Berlin used it many years ago: when people refer to ‘the hedgehog and the fox’ these days, they are usually referring to this contrasting approach to the world. Furthermore, there is a general disposition to favour the way of the fox – although this may be entirely my own bias. For instance, the reviewers of Berlin refer to his ‘pluralism’ and other aspects of our Western–liberal tradition that Berlin so epitomises, in a way that suggests we all are better for knowing a lot of things.