The Hedgehog and the Fox

"The fox knows many little things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." This fragment from a Greek poet is the starting point for Isaiah Berlin's essay on Tolstoy's view of history, as it is presented in War and Peace. Berlin offers an intriguing interpretation of these characterizations, suggesting that they

mark one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general. For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who who relate everything to a single central vision.......and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory.

He further suggests that

The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes; and without insisting on a rigid classification, we may, without too much fear of contradiction, say that, in this sense, Dante belongs to the first category, Shakespeare to the second; Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen and Proust are, in varying degrees, hedgehogs; Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Moliere, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce are foxes.

Because it is amusing to classify authors, colleagues or friends according to this rubric, this part of Berlin's essay is fairly well-known. I started reading this (lengthy) essay many years ago, enjoyed the "game" but then found the following discussion of Tolstoy's view of history to be inpenetrable and put it down. But I had not then read War and Peace!

As my review of War and Peace suggests, I found Tolstoy's views of history interesting, but presented at such length and so argumentatively, that they quickly became an annoying distraction from the narrative - but Berlin is another story! He presents Tolstoy's views in an engaging, fascinating light and offers his own analysis of why it is so difficult to classify Tolstoy as either a fox or a hedgehog.

My recommendation: Read the first three pages of the essay for insight into the intriguing "game" - or read all of War and Peace first, and then enjoy the meat of Berlin's essay!