The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History

"My fourth choice is The Hedgehog and the Fox , which is also in The Proper Study of Mankind, but as it’s still a separate book I feel entitled to choose it as a separate item. Not only is it one of Berlin’s most famous essays, partly because of its extremely apt title, but it’s also one of his best essays. It exemplifies something that we haven’t yet talked about: his deep knowledge of and interest in the Russian writers of the nineteenth century. It’s a book about Tolstoy and his view of history. It has also given to British and indeed world culture this tool of analysis: the dichotomy which divides writers, in the first place, but in the end all human beings, into hedgehogs and foxes. Hedgehogs pursue one single vision: they’re natural monists in the terms we were discussing earlier. The foxes are natural pluralists who see life in all its teeming variety and don’t try to force all this variety into the Procrustean bed of a single vision of life. This book scores on a number of levels – both in the creation of the dichotomy and in the way in which he deploys it. It’s a brilliant analysis of Tolstoy’s own conflicted attitude to history. Roughly speaking, Berlin argues that Tolstoy was by nature a fox who writes most brilliantly about the fine detail of human life, none of which can be systematised in any way, yet he longs for and tries to find some enormous undergirding pattern which makes sense of it all, some vision of historical inevitability. He was torn by this division, he never managed to reconcile its two components, and ended up a broken figure as a result. That’s very brilliantly expressed. It also contains a lot about a figure called Joseph de Maistre – a right-wing Catholic writer whom Berlin wrote about elsewhere too – and ties him very interestingly to Tolstoy. It’s famous especially for its opening, where Berlin lists the various people whom he regards as hedgehogs and foxes, and for the ending, which has a moving portrait of Tolstoy as a tragic figure: ‘almost wholly isolated, he is the most tragic of the great writers, a desperate old man, beyond human aid, wandering self-blinded at Colonus.’ It’s an astonishing piece of writing. It’s 90 pages long in its new edition. It’s short, but very powerful. The title comes from an isolated line by the archaic Greek poet Archilochus: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’ There are disputes about how exactly this should be interpreted, but the most natural interpretation is simply that the hedgehog responds to all the different threats from the fox, and indeed from anywhere else, by rolling up into a ball: he has only a one-trick repertoire. That can be taken as a metaphor for somebody who interprets everything he discovers in life in terms of his one single issue – a single-issue fanatic."