The Hedgehog and the Fox

Berlin's 1953 essay on Tolstoy used a fragment attributed to the Greek poet Archilochus — the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing — as a lens for illuminating a permanent intellectual temperament. Hedgehogs relate everything to a single central vision, a single organizing principle in terms of which all that they are and say has significance. Foxes pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way. The distinction was not meant as rigid taxonomy but as a diagnostic instrument, a way of revealing the deep temperamental difference between minds drawn to monist unity and minds comfortable with pluralist multiplicity. Berlin's reading of Tolstoy — a fox by nature who believed he ought to be a hedgehog, whose genius lay in depicting the irreducible multiplicity of experience but who desperately sought a single law of history — remains one of the most cited works of twentieth-century intellectual