When it was first published, in 1953, it looked like a humble little book, only 80 small pages, framed by a jokey fable about animals. But this year, with its 60th anniversary celebrated by a new edition, The Hedgehog and the Fox (Princeton University Press) confirms its status as one of the most persuasive concoctions of Isaiah Berlin, a great historian of ideas.
And not only that: It’s also a game that all can play as well as a device that a couple of generations of professors have used when explaining ideas to their students. And at the same time it’s an essay on the thinking of Leo Tolstoy and a subtle commentary on the Cold War. No wonder people have been writing about it ever since it appeared.
A fox, when attacked, can run and hide. A hedgehog can only roll into a tight ball, with its sharp spines pointing outward
Michael Ignatieff, Berlin’s biographer, notes in the introduction to the new edition that this remarkable piece of work has passed into culture as a way to describe two different ways of looking at reality.
It all began when an Oxford friend of Berlin’s told him about a line from Archilochus, a Greek lyric poet who died in 645 BC: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” A fox, when attacked, can run and hide. A hedgehog can only roll into a tight ball, with its sharp spines pointing outward. But sometimes the hedgehog’s strategy works.
Berlin was soon sorting his friends into human equivalents of those two minor mammals. He defined a hedgehog as someone who relates everything to a single vision, an organizing principle that seems to cover all of history. A human fox, on the other hand, pursues many ideas, not necessarily related and often contradictory.
Berlin soon transferred this to the vast plain of ideas on which he lived his intellectual life. He identified Dante as a hedgehog, Shakespeare as a fox. Plato and Hegel were hedgehogs, Montaigne and Balzac foxes. Berlin gave a lecture at Oxford on this theme, then published it in a scholarly journal, which led to this book. Most of The Hedgehog and the Fox was devoted to Berlin’s view that Tolstoy was a fox who believed he should be a hedgehog.
Berlin was deeply serious and endlessly playful. He was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1909, the son of a wealthy timber merchant. The family later lived in St. Petersburg, where he saw glimpses of the February and October Revolutions of 1917. In 1921 the family migrated to Britain.
Isaiah knew little English when they arrived but learned quickly. St. Paul’s School and Oxford left him sounding considerably more English than the average duke. Some called his way of speaking almost a parody of upper-class intonation, interrupted by a stutter and a disjointed laugh. I first heard it long ago, when he appeared on a CBC television panel. I knew who he was, and what he was discussing, but I didn’t understand even one sentence. I discovered that both the producer and the program’s host were equally baffled. Later his speech grew clearer. His recorded essays, available now as podcasts, require only a little patience.
In 1932, Berlin became the first Jew made a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, the Everest of English scholarship
In 1932, he became the first Jew made a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, the Everest of English scholarship. He became known in the best circles as the cleverest man in England, the best conversationalist and a every hostess’s favourite guest. People called him a Magus, a seer. He died, aged 88, in 1997.
He was a serious thinker whose work opened to his readers ideas they might never have considered. He wrote on subjects from Machiavelli to Dostoyevsky, from John Stuart Mill to Stalin. He was also a serious gossip who loved “long, dangerous, indiscreet conversation.” At one point he wrote to a friend about scandals in Oxford. “So many funny things happen between my colleagues, such cold persecutions, such peculiarly grotesque views of one another.”
In the 1950s, The Hedgehog and the Fox captured a large audience. W.H. Auden, Arnold Toynbee and Arthur Schlesinger were among the mid-century intellectuals who praised it. Edmund Wilson, most admired of American literary critics, said that Berlin, “like all serious Jews, aspires to the unity of the hedgehog.” Translations soon appeared in Finnish, Korean and many other languages. Bryan Magee, the BBC’s popularizer of philosophy, said that Berlin’s formula revived a joke that went back to Robert Benchley in the 1920s: “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.”
His favourite quotation was from Immanuel Kant: ‘Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made’
Given Berlin’s history, it seems obvious that the hedgehog he feared was totalitarianism. He saw the first signs of it in Russia, then followed its development across Germany and Eastern Europe. Of all the great single-minded thinkers he studied, the most hedgehog-like was Marx. Berlin was a liberal in the old sense, an heir to the liberalism that defined the 19th-century Russian intelligentsia.
He was also a pluralist. His favourite quotation was from Immanuel Kant: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” The world, being run by humans, will always be imperfect. Yet it yearns for perfection, believing wrongly that sometime we will find the perfect form of life. No, said Berlin. He did not believe in utopia and suspected anyone who did.
There must have been times when Berlin grew weary of his most celebrated essay. “It was a joke, you know, I never meant it seriously,” he told Ignatieff, by which he meant the title, not the contents of the essay.
Nevertheless, two decades after it appeared he was still up for a good game of hedgehog. In 1974, he replied to H. Paul Simon of the University of Toronto, who had suggested that Berlin preferred foxes to hedgehogs.
Not at all, Berlin said. There’s no greater poet than Dante, no greater philosopher than Plato — “yet they seem to me to have been hedgehogs.” He speculated that this way of thinking, the devotion to one great idea, may be the price paid by certain forms of genius.
Berlin admitted that he had more personal sympathy for foxes, finding them more enlightened, tolerant and humane. But this does not mean that they are in all ways more valuable or admirable. To the end Berlin refused to join either the hedgehog or the fox party.