The great historian of ideas starts with an animal parable and ends, via a dissection of Tolstoy’s work, in an existential system of thought “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” When Isaiah Berlin, as a young Oxford don in the late 1930s, first encountered this tantalising fragment of verse by the 7th-century BC Greek poet Archilochus, it became an entertaining way by which Berlin and his circle could categorise their friends: as hedgehogs or foxes. However, this mysterious shard of wisdom stuck in Berlin’s mind and eventually became the animating principle for an extraordinary essay on Tolstoy, dictated in the course of two days, and originally entitled Lev Tolstoy’s Historical Scepticism. (It was the publisher George Weidenfeld who suggested the substitution.) As well as interrogating the text of _War and Peace_, Berlin explored the fundamental distinction that exists between those who are fascinated by the infinite variety of things (foxes) and those who relate everything to a central, all-embracing system (hedgehogs). By then, and in subsequent critical discourse, the division of humanity into hedgehogs and foxes had become not only a witty means of classification, but also an existential way of confronting reality. Foxes, for instance, will come to understand that they know many things, that a coherent worldview is probably beyond them and that they must be reconciled to the limits of what they know. In his life of Isaiah Berlin, the biographer Michael Ignatieff quotes Berlin thus: “We are part of a larger scheme of things than we can understand; we ourselves live in this whole and by it, and are wise only in the measure to which we make our peace with it.” Continue reading...
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