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, 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 the first three volumes of his selected letters, and is currently working on the remaining volume.
Michael Ignatieff, writer, teacher and former politician, is the author of Isaiah Berlin: A Life.
For further information about Isaiah Berlin visit
‹http://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
Frontispiece to George Waring, The Squirrels and Other Animals:
Or, Illustrations of the Habits and Instincts of Many of the Smaller
British Quadrupeds (London, [1842])
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 published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd 1953
This edition is published by arrangement with the Orion Publishing
Group Ltd, London
Copyright Isaiah Berlin 1951, 1953
Second edition © 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
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
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in Garamond Premier Pro
Printed on acid-free paper
Printed in the United States of America
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
CONTENTS
Foreword by Michael Ignatieff
ix
Editor’s Preface
xiii
Author’s Note
xvii
The Hedgehog and the Fox
1
Appendix to the Second Edition
91
Index
117
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.’1