The Hedgehog and the Fox
Encyclopedia
"The Hedgehog and the Fox" is an essay
by the liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin
. It was one of Berlin's most popular essays with the general public. Berlin himself said of the essay: "I never meant it very seriously. I meant it as a kind of enjoyable intellectual game, but it was taken seriously. Every classification throws light on something."
poet Archilochus
:
("the fox
knows many things, but the hedgehog
knows one big thing"). In Erasmus Rotterdamus's
Adagia
from 1500, the expression is recorded as Multa novit vulpes, verum echinus unum magnum. The fable of The Fox and the Cat
embodies the same idea.
, Lucretius
, Dante
, Pascal
, Hegel
, Dostoevsky
, Nietzsche
, Ibsen
, and Proust
) and foxes who draw on a wide variety of experiences and for whom the world cannot be boiled down to a single idea (examples given include Herodotus
, Aristotle
, Erasmus, Shakespeare
, Montaigne
, Molière
, Goethe, Pushkin
, Balzac
, Joyce
, Anderson
).
Turning to Tolstoy
, Berlin contends that at first glance, Tolstoy escapes definition into one of these two groups. He postulates, rather, that while Tolstoy's talents are those of a fox, his beliefs are that one ought to be a hedgehog, and thus Tolstoy's own voluminous assessments of his own work are misleading. Berlin goes on to use this idea of Tolstoy as a basis for an analysis of the theory of history
that Tolstoy presents in his novel War and Peace
.
The essay has been published separately and as part of the collection Russian Thinkers, edited by Henry Hardy
and Aileen Kelly.
, for example) have used the same pattern of description on Berlin himself, as a person who knows many things, compared to the purported narrowness of many other contemporary political philosophers
. Berlin's former student, Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor
, has been dubbed a hedgehog by Berlin and readily admits to it in an interview after receiving the 2007 Templeton Prize
.
Berlin expanded on this concept in the 1997 book The Proper Study of Mankind.
Philip E. Tetlock
, a political psychology professor in the Haas Business school at UC, Berkeley
, draws heavily on this distinction in his exploration of the accuracy of experts and forecasters in various fields (especially politics) in his 2005 book Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?.
The historian Joseph J. Ellis, in his Founding Brothers
about key figures of the American Revolution, uses Berlin's "Hedgehog and Fox" concept in evaluating George Washington, noting that "George Washington
was an archetypal hedgehog. And the one big thing he knew was that America’s future as a nation lay to the West, in its development over the next century of a continental empire,” which was one of the reasons, according to Ellis, Washington was devoted to construction of canals.
James C. Collins
refers to this story in his book Good to Great
where he clearly shows his preference towards Hedgehog mentality.
Claudio Véliz
uses Berlin's construction to contrast Anglosphere
and Spanish patterns of settlement and governance in his 1994 book The New World of the Gothic Fox Culture and Economy in English and Spanish America.
Legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin
's book Justice for Hedgehogs (2011), which argues the case for a single, overarching, and coherent framework of moral truth, takes its title from Berlin's conceit of the hedgehog.
Essay
An essay is a piece of writing which is often written from an author's personal point of view. Essays can consist of a number of elements, including: literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author. The definition...
by the liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin
Isaiah Berlin
Sir Isaiah Berlin OM, FBA was a British social and political theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas of Russian-Jewish origin, regarded as one of the leading thinkers of the twentieth century and a dominant liberal scholar of his generation...
. It was one of Berlin's most popular essays with the general public. Berlin himself said of the essay: "I never meant it very seriously. I meant it as a kind of enjoyable intellectual game, but it was taken seriously. Every classification throws light on something."
Origins
The title is a reference to a fragment attributed to the ancient GreekAncient Greece
Ancient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...
poet Archilochus
Archilochus
Archilochus, or, Archilochos While these have been the generally accepted dates since Felix Jacoby, "The Date of Archilochus," Classical Quarterly 35 97-109, some scholars disagree; Robin Lane Fox, for instance, in Travelling Heroes: Greeks and Their Myths in the Epic Age of Homer , p...
:
("the fox
Fox
Fox is a common name for many species of omnivorous mammals belonging to the Canidae family. Foxes are small to medium-sized canids , characterized by possessing a long narrow snout, and a bushy tail .Members of about 37 species are referred to as foxes, of which only 12 species actually belong to...
knows many things, but the hedgehog
Hedgehog
A hedgehog is any of the spiny mammals of the subfamily Erinaceinae and the order Erinaceomorpha. There are 17 species of hedgehog in five genera, found through parts of Europe, Asia, Africa, and New Zealand . There are no hedgehogs native to Australia, and no living species native to the Americas...
knows one big thing"). In Erasmus Rotterdamus's
Desiderius Erasmus
Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus , known as Erasmus of Rotterdam, was a Dutch Renaissance humanist, Catholic priest, and a theologian....
Adagia
Adagia
Adagia is an annotated collection of Greek and Latin proverbs, compiled during the Renaissance by Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus. Erasmus' collection of proverbs is "one of the most monumental ... ever assembled" Adagia (adagium is the singular form and adagia is the plural) is an...
from 1500, the expression is recorded as Multa novit vulpes, verum echinus unum magnum. The fable of The Fox and the Cat
The Fox and the Cat (fable)
The Fox and the Cat is an ancient fable, with both Eastern and Western analogues involving different animals, that addresses the difference between resourceful expediency and a master strategem. Included in collections of Aesop's fables since the start of printing in Europe, it is number 605 in the...
embodies the same idea.
Summary
Berlin expands upon this idea to divide writers and thinkers into two categories: hedgehogs, who view the world through the lens of a single defining idea (examples given include PlatoPlato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
, Lucretius
Lucretius
Titus Lucretius Carus was a Roman poet and philosopher. His only known work is an epic philosophical poem laying out the beliefs of Epicureanism, De rerum natura, translated into English as On the Nature of Things or "On the Nature of the Universe".Virtually no details have come down concerning...
, Dante
DANTE
Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe is a not-for-profit organisation that plans, builds and operates the international networks that interconnect the various national research and education networks in Europe and surrounding regions...
, Pascal
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal , was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Catholic philosopher. He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen...
, Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher, one of the creators of German Idealism. His historicist and idealist account of reality as a whole revolutionized European philosophy and was an important precursor to Continental philosophy and Marxism.Hegel developed a comprehensive...
, Dostoevsky
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky was a Russian writer of novels, short stories and essays. He is best known for his novels Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov....
, Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet, composer and classical philologist...
, Ibsen
Henrik Ibsen
Henrik Ibsen was a major 19th-century Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. He is often referred to as "the father of prose drama" and is one of the founders of Modernism in the theatre...
, and Proust
Marcel Proust
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu...
) and foxes who draw on a wide variety of experiences and for whom the world cannot be boiled down to a single idea (examples given include Herodotus
Herodotus
Herodotus was an ancient Greek historian who was born in Halicarnassus, Caria and lived in the 5th century BC . He has been called the "Father of History", and was the first historian known to collect his materials systematically, test their accuracy to a certain extent and arrange them in a...
, Aristotle
Aristotle
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...
, Erasmus, Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
, Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne , February 28, 1533 – September 13, 1592, was one of the most influential writers of the French Renaissance, known for popularising the essay as a literary genre and is popularly thought of as the father of Modern Skepticism...
, Molière
Molière
Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, known by his stage name Molière, was a French playwright and actor who is considered to be one of the greatest masters of comedy in Western literature...
, Goethe, Pushkin
Aleksandr Pushkin
Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin was a Russian author of the Romantic era who is considered by many to be the greatest Russian poet and the founder of modern Russian literature....
, Balzac
Honoré de Balzac
Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon....
, Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
, Anderson
Philip Warren Anderson
Philip Warren Anderson is an American physicist and Nobel laureate. Anderson has made contributions to the theories of localization, antiferromagnetism and high-temperature superconductivity.- Biography :...
).
Turning to Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist...
, Berlin contends that at first glance, Tolstoy escapes definition into one of these two groups. He postulates, rather, that while Tolstoy's talents are those of a fox, his beliefs are that one ought to be a hedgehog, and thus Tolstoy's own voluminous assessments of his own work are misleading. Berlin goes on to use this idea of Tolstoy as a basis for an analysis of the theory of history
History
History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...
that Tolstoy presents in his novel War and Peace
War and Peace
War and Peace is a novel by the Russian author Leo Tolstoy, first published in 1869. The work is epic in scale and is regarded as one of the most important works of world literature...
.
The essay has been published separately and as part of the collection Russian Thinkers, edited by Henry Hardy
Henry Hardy
Henry Robert Dugdale Hardy is a British author and editor.- Career :Hardy was born in London and educated at Lancing College...
and Aileen Kelly.
Influence
Some authors (Michael WalzerMichael Walzer
Michael Walzer is a prominent American political philosopher and public intellectual. A professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, he is co-editor of Dissent, an intellectual magazine that he has been affiliated with since his years as an undergraduate at...
, for example) have used the same pattern of description on Berlin himself, as a person who knows many things, compared to the purported narrowness of many other contemporary political philosophers
Political philosophy
Political philosophy is the study of such topics as liberty, justice, property, rights, law, and the enforcement of a legal code by authority: what they are, why they are needed, what, if anything, makes a government legitimate, what rights and freedoms it should protect and why, what form it...
. Berlin's former student, Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor
Charles Taylor (philosopher)
Charles Margrave Taylor, is a Canadian philosopher from Montreal, Quebec best known for his contributions in political philosophy, the philosophy of social science, and in the history of philosophy. His contributions to these fields have earned him both the prestigious Kyoto Prize and the...
, has been dubbed a hedgehog by Berlin and readily admits to it in an interview after receiving the 2007 Templeton Prize
Templeton Prize
The Templeton Prize is an annual award presented by the Templeton Foundation. Established in 1972, it is awarded to a living person who, in the estimation of the judges, "has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life's spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical...
.
Berlin expanded on this concept in the 1997 book The Proper Study of Mankind.
Philip E. Tetlock
Philip E. Tetlock
Philip E. Tetlock is Leonore Annenberg University Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. He has also written several non-fiction books on politics, including Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics and "Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We...
, a political psychology professor in the Haas Business school at UC, Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
, draws heavily on this distinction in his exploration of the accuracy of experts and forecasters in various fields (especially politics) in his 2005 book Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?.
The historian Joseph J. Ellis, in his Founding Brothers
Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation
Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation is a Pulitzer Prize–winning book written by Joseph Ellis, a professor of history at Mount Holyoke College...
about key figures of the American Revolution, uses Berlin's "Hedgehog and Fox" concept in evaluating George Washington, noting that "George Washington
George Washington
George Washington was the dominant military and political leader of the new United States of America from 1775 to 1799. He led the American victory over Great Britain in the American Revolutionary War as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army from 1775 to 1783, and presided over the writing of...
was an archetypal hedgehog. And the one big thing he knew was that America’s future as a nation lay to the West, in its development over the next century of a continental empire,” which was one of the reasons, according to Ellis, Washington was devoted to construction of canals.
James C. Collins
James C. Collins
James C. "Jim" Collins, III is an American business consultant, author, and lecturer on the subject of company sustainability and growth. Jim Collins frequently contributes to Harvard Business Review, Business Week, Fortune and other magazines, journals, etc...
refers to this story in his book Good to Great
Good to Great
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't is a 2001 management book by James C. Collins that aims to describe how companies transition from being average companies to great companies and how companies can fail to make the transition...
where he clearly shows his preference towards Hedgehog mentality.
Claudio Véliz
Claudio Véliz
Claudio Véliz is a prominent historian, sociologist and author from Chile, who has held numerous academic posts in various institutions of higher learning including La Trobe University , Harvard and Boston University....
uses Berlin's construction to contrast Anglosphere
Anglosphere
Anglosphere is a neologism which refers to those nations with English as the most common language. The term can be used more specifically to refer to those nations which share certain characteristics within their cultures based on a linguistic heritage, through being former British colonies...
and Spanish patterns of settlement and governance in his 1994 book The New World of the Gothic Fox Culture and Economy in English and Spanish America.
Legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin
Ronald Dworkin
Ronald Myles Dworkin, QC, FBA is an American philosopher and scholar of constitutional law. He is Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law and Philosophy at New York University and Emeritus Professor of Jurisprudence at University College London, and has taught previously at Yale Law School and the...
's book Justice for Hedgehogs (2011), which argues the case for a single, overarching, and coherent framework of moral truth, takes its title from Berlin's conceit of the hedgehog.
Editions
- The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History (London, 1953: Weidenfeld & NicolsonWeidenfeld & NicolsonWeidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd is a British publisher of fiction and reference books. It is a division of the Orion Publishing Group.-History:...
; New York, 1953: Simon and Schuster; New York, 1957: New American Library; New York, 1986: Simon and Schuster, with an introduction by Michael Walzer) - Russian Thinkers (Penguin, 25 Mar 2008: ISBN 9780141442204: Isaiah Berlin, Author; Henry Hardy, Editor; Aileen Kelly, Introduction by; Jason Ferrell, Glossary; Aileen Kelly, Editor.)
See also
- Hedgehogs in cultureHedgehogs in culture- Europe :As animals native to Europe, hedgehogs hold a rightful place in European folklore. Since the mammal did not possess any "righteous" qualities, it never made it to the court art; however, its relationship with fairy tales has been a long and fruitful one....
- Homo unius libriHomo unius libriHomo unius libri is a phrase that is generally attributed to Thomas Aquinas. According to a literary tradition at least three centuries old, Saint Thomas Aquinas is reputed to have employed the phrase "hominem unius libri timeo" .-Interpretations:Aquinas's phrase has been interpreted in various ways...
, similar sentiment - Lumpers and splittersLumpers and splittersLumping and splitting refers to a well-known problem in any discipline which has to place individual examples into rigorously defined categories. The lumper/splitter problem occurs when there is the need to create classifications and assign examples to them, for example schools of literature,...
- The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's PoxThe Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's PoxThe Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox is Stephen Jay Gould's posthumous volume exploring the historically complex relationship between the sciences and the humanities in a scholarly discourse....
, by Stephen Jay GouldStephen Jay GouldStephen Jay Gould was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was also one of the most influential and widely read writers of popular science of his generation....
External links
- Kristof, Nicholas D., "Learning How to Think" NYTimes.com (retrieved April 6, 2009) Report on the book "Expert Political Judgment" by Philip Tetlock, who uses the fox and the hedgehog as a parable for political and economics experts.
- “Why Foxes Are Better Forecasters Than Hedgehogs” at Long Now FoundationLong Now FoundationThe Long Now Foundation, established in 1996, is a private organization that seeks to become the seed of a very long-term cultural institution. It aims to provide a counterpoint to what it views as today's "faster/cheaper" mindset and to promote "slower/better" thinking...
Philip Tetlock