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

    By Isaiah Berlin, Henry Hardy and Michael Ignatieff

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    "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." This ancient Greek aphorism, preserved in a fragment from the poet Archilochus, describes the central thesis of Isaiah Berlin's masterly essay on Leo Tolstoy and the philosophy of history, the subject of the epilogue to War and Peace. Although there have been many interpretations of the adage, Berlin uses it to mark a fundamental distinction between human beings who are fascinated by the infinite variety of things and those who relate everything to a central, all-embracing system. Applied to Tolstoy, the saying illuminates a paradox that helps explain his philosophy of history: Tolstoy was a fox, but believed in being a hedgehog. One of Berlin's most celebrated works, this extraordinary essay offers profound insights about Tolstoy, historical understanding, and human psychology.

    This new edition features a revised text that supplants all previous versions, English translations of the many passages in foreign languages, a new foreword in which Berlin biographer Michael Ignatieff explains the enduring appeal of Berlin's essay, and a new appendix that provides rich context, including excerpts from reviews and Berlin's letters, as well as a startling new interpretation of Archilochus's epigram.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateJun 2, 2013
    ISBN9781400846634

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      The Hedgehog and the Fox - Isaiah Berlin

      Cover: The Hedgehog and the Fox, AN ESSAY ON TOLSTOY’S VIEW OF HISTORY by Isaiah Berlin

      THE HEDGEHOG AND THE FOX

      ISAIAH BERLIN WAS BORN IN RIGA, now capital of Latvia, in 1909. When he was six, his family moved to Russia; there in 1917, in Petrograd, he witnessed the March and October Revolutions. In 1921 his family emigrated to England, and he was educated at St Paul’s School, London, and Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

      At Oxford he was a Fellow of All Souls, a Fellow of New College, Professor of Social and Political Theory and founding President of Wolfson College. He also held the Presidency of the British Academy. In addition to The Hedgehog and the Fox, his main published works are Karl Marx, The Age of Enlightenment, Russian Thinkers, Concepts and Categories, Against the Current, Personal Impressions, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, The Sense of Reality, The Proper Study of Mankind, The Roots of Romanticism, The Power of Ideas, Three Critics of the Enlightenment, Freedom and Its Betrayal, Liberty, The Soviet Mind and Political Ideas in the Romantic Age. As an exponent of the history of ideas he was awarded the Erasmus, Lippincott and Agnelli Prizes; he also received the Jerusalem Prize for his lifelong defence of civil liberties. He died in 1997.

      Henry Hardy, a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, is one of Isaiah Berlin’s Literary Trustees. He has edited (or co-edited) several other books by Berlin, including all those listed on the previous page, and a four-volume edition of his letters. He is co-editor of The One and the Many: Reading Isaiah Berlin (2007), editor of The Book of Isaiah: Personal Impressions of Isaiah Berlin (2009), and author of In Search of Isaiah Berlin: A Literary Adventure (2018).

      Michael Ignatieff, writer, teacher and former politician, is the author of Isaiah Berlin: A Life, reissued in a new edition by Pushkin Press in 2023.

      For further information about Isaiah Berlin visit

      <https://isaiah-berlin.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/>

      <https://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/>

      ALSO BY ISAIAH BERLIN

      *

      Karl Marx

      The Age of Enlightenment

      Russian Thinkers

      Concepts and Categories

      Against the Current

      Personal Impressions

      The Crooked Timber of Humanity

      The Sense of Reality

      The Proper Study of Mankind

      The Roots of Romanticism

      The Power of Ideas

      Three Critics of the Enlightenment

      Freedom and Its Betrayal

      Liberty

      The Soviet Mind

      Political Ideas in the Romantic Age

      with Beata Polanowska-Sygulska

      Unfinished Dialogue

      *

      Flourishing: Letters 1928–1946

      Enlightening: Letters 1946–1960

      Building: Letters 1960–1975

      Affirming: Letters 1975–1997

      Headshot of author Isaiah Berlin seated in a chair and reading a book.

      Isaiah Berlin at Harvard, 1949, by Walter R. Fleischer

      THE HEDGEHOG AND THE FOX

      AN ESSAY ON TOLSTOY’S VIEW OF HISTORY

      ISAIAH BERLIN

      Second Edition

      Edited by Henry Hardy

      Foreword by Michael Ignatieff

      PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

      PRINCETON AND OXFORD

      Published in the United States of America, its territories, dependencies, and the Philippine Islands by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

      Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, Princeton University Press

      press.princeton.edu

      First edition published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd 1953 This second edition first published by Princeton University Press 2013 by arrangement with the Orion Publishing Group Ltd, London

      Reprinted with corrections 2023

      Copyright Isaiah Berlin 1951, 1953

      Second edition © The Trustees of the Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust and Henry Hardy 2013

      Editorial matter © Henry Hardy 2013

      Foreword © Princeton University Press 2013

      Exchange in the New York Review of Books © John S. Bowman, Jonathan Lieberson, Sidney Morgenbesser and Isaiah Berlin 1980

      Photo of Isaiah Berlin by Walter R. Fleischer:

      HUP Berlin, Isaiah (3A), olvwork359130, Harvard University Archives

      The moral right of Isaiah Berlin and Henry Hardy to be identified as the author and editor respectively of this work has been asserted

      All Rights Reserved

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Berlin, Isaiah, 1909–1997.

      The hedgehog and the fox : an essay on Tolstoy’s view of history / Isaiah Berlin ; edited by Henry Hardy ;

      foreword by Michael Ignatieff. – Second Edition.

      pages cm

      Previously published: London : Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1953.

      Includes index.

      ISBN 978-0-691-15600-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Tolstoy, Leo, graf, 1828-1910–Knowledge–History. 2. Tolstoy, Leo, graf, 1828–1910–Political and social views. 3. History–Philosophy. I. Hardy, Henry. II. Title.

      PG3415.H5B4 2013

      891.73´3–dc23

      2012035272

      eISBN 9781400846634

      Version 2.0

      British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

      CONTENTS

      Foreword by Michael Ignatieffix

      Editor’s Prefacexiii

      Author’s Notexvii

      The Hedgehog and the Fox1

      Appendix to the Second Edition91

      Index117

      FOREWORD

      Michael Ignatieff

      IT IS WORTH TRYING to understand why this extraordinary essay, first delivered as a lecture in Oxford, then reprinted in an obscure Slavic studies journal in 1951, then re-titled and re-published in 1953, has been enjoying such a robust and enduring afterlife. Along with ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’,¹ the distinction between the hedgehog and the fox has proved to be enduringly fertile, and has been put to uses Berlin could never have imagined or intended. What began life as a common-room parlour game in the late 1930s – an Oxford undergraduate introduced him to the shimmering and mysterious sentence in the Greek original and Isaiah took it up to divide his friends into hedgehogs and foxes² – Berlin then turned into the structuring insight for a great essay on Tolstoy. It has now passed into the culture as a way to classify those around us and to think about two basic orientations towards reality itself.

      It is not merely that the fox knows many things. The fox accepts that he can only know many things and that the unity of reality must escape his grasp. The critical feature of foxes is that they are reconciled to the limits of what they know. As Berlin puts it, ‘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.’³

      A hedgehog will not make peace with the world. He is not reconciled. He cannot accept that he knows only many things. He seeks to know one big thing, and strives without ceasing to give reality a unifying shape. Foxes settle for what they know and may live happy lives. Hedgehogs will not settle and their lives may not be happy.

      All of us, Berlin suggests, have elements of both fox and hedgehog within us. The essay is an unparalleled portrait of human dividedness. We are riven creatures and we have to choose whether to accept the incompleteness of our knowledge or to hold out for certainty and truth. Only the most determined among us will refuse to settle for what the fox knows and hold out for the certainties of the hedgehog.

      The essay endures, in other words, because it is not simply about Tolstoy – it is about all of us. We can be reconciled to our ‘sense of reality’⁴ – accept it for what it is, live life as we find it – or we can hunger for a more fundamental, unitary truth beneath appearance, a truth that will explain or console.⁵

      Berlin contrasted this longing for unitary truth with a fox’s sense of reality. He was adamant that even a fox’s knowledge could be solid and clear as far as it went. We are not in a fog. We can know, we can learn, we can make moral judgements. Scientific knowledge is clear. What he disputed is that science or reason can give us a final certainty that cuts to the core of reality. Most of us settle for this. Wisdom, he writes, is not surrender to illusion, but rather an acceptance of the ‘unalterable medium in which we act’, ‘the permanent relationships of things’, ‘the universal texture of human life’.⁶ This we can know, not by science or by reasoning, so much as by a deep coming to terms with what is. Berlin himself, in his final years, achieved this kind of serenity. It seemed to be rooted in the acceptance and reconciliation that imbued his sense of reality.⁷

      A select few refuse to come to terms with reality. They refuse to submit, and seek – whether through art or science, mathematics or philosophy – to pierce through the many disparate things that foxes know, to a core certainty that explains everything. Karl Marx was such a figure, the most implacable hedgehog of them all.

      The grandeur of hedgehogs is that they refuse our limitations. Their tragedy is that they cannot be reconciled to them at the end. Tolstoy was ruthlessly dismissive of every available doctrine of truth, whether religious or secular, yet he could not abandon the conviction that some such ultimate truth could be grasped if only he could overcome his own limitations. ‘Tolstoy’s sense of reality was until the end too devastating to be compatible with any moral ideal which he was able to construct out of the fragments into which his intellect shivered the world.’⁸ At the end he was a figure of tragic grandeur – ‘a desperate old man, beyond human aid, wandering self-blinded at Colonus’⁹ – unable to be at peace with the irremediable limitations of his own humanity.

      This essay asks basic questions of anyone who reads it: What can we know? What does our ‘sense of reality’ tell us? Are we reconciled to the limits of human vision? Or do we long for something more? If so, what certainty can we hope to achieve one day? Because these are enduring questions of human existence, this great essay will last as long as people come seeking answers.

      ¹ Available in two of Berlin’s collections: The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays, ed. Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer (London, 1997: Chatto and Windus; New York, 1998: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 2nd ed., London, 2013: Vintage), and Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy (Oxford, 2002: Oxford University Press).

      ² Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (London, 1998: Chatto and Windus; New York, 1998: Metropolitan; 2nd ed., Pushkin Press, 2023), 215–16.

      ³ 79 below.

      ⁴ 43, 70, 71, 76, 85, 90, 105 below.

      ⁵ See also Berlin’s ‘The Sense of Reality’ (the Elizabeth Cutter Morrow Lecture, Smith College, 1953), in his collection of the same title, ed. Henry Hardy (London, 1996: Chatto and Windus; New York, 1996: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 2nd ed., Princeton, 2019: Princeton University Press).

      ⁶ 75–6, 74 below.

      ⁷ See my ‘Berlin in Autumn’, repr. in Henry Hardy (ed.), The Book of Isaiah: Personal Impressions of Isaiah Berlin (Woodbridge, 2009: Boydell).

      ⁸ 90 below.

      ⁹ ibid.

      EDITOR’S PREFACE

      I am very sorry to have called my own book The Hedgehog and the Fox. I wish I hadn’t now.

      Isaiah Berlin¹

      THIS SHORT BOOK IS ONE of the best-known and most widely celebrated works by Isaiah Berlin. Its somewhat complicated history is perhaps worth summarising briefly.

      The original, shorter, version, based on a lecture delivered in Oxford, was dictated (the author claimed) in two days, and published in a specialist journal in 1951 under the somewhat less memorable title ‘Lev Tolstoy’s Historical Scepticism’.² Two years later, at George Weidenfeld’s³ inspired suggestion, it was reprinted in a revised and expanded form under its present, famous, title,⁴ afforced principally by two additional sections on Tolstoy and Maistre, and dedicated to the memory of the author’s late friend Jasper Ridley (1913–43), killed in the Second World War ten years earlier.

      Twenty-five years after that, it was included in a collection of Berlin’s essays on nineteenth-century Russian thinkers, of which a second, much revised, edition appeared a further thirty years thereafter.⁵ It also appeared in the year of Berlin’s death in a one-volume retrospective collection drawn from the whole of his work.⁶ Numerous translations have been made over the years: work on a French version in the mid-1950s by Aline Halban,⁷ soon to be Berlin’s wife, was the occasion for

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