![]() ![]() Yet when Berlin reaches the case of Tolstoy, he finds a fox by nature, but a hedgehog by conviction a duality which holds the key to understanding Tolstoy’s work, illuminating a paradox of his philosophy of history and showing why he was frequently misunderstood by his contemporaries and critics. In 1953 Oxford Don, Isaiah Berlin, published an essay that proposed people could be segmented into two categories hedgehogs or foxes. ![]() ![]() It can be applied to the greatest creative minds: Dante, Ibsen and Proust are hedgehogs, while Shakespeare, Aristotle and Joyce are foxes. In his work, published by Weidenfield and Nicholson in 1953, Berlin divides thinkers into two categories: hedgehogs, who know one big thing (or interpret the world according to one big idea), and foxes, who know many little things (or interpret the world according to many ideas). ![]() The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.įor Isaiah Berlin, there is a fundamental distinction in mankind: those who are fascinated by the infinite variety of things – foxes – and those who relate everything to a central all-embracing system – hedgehogs. Exactly what good critical writing should be’ Max Beloff, Guardian ‘When reading Isaiah Berlin we breathe an altogether different air’ New York Review of Books ![]()
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