The Hedgehog and the Fox is an essay by philosopher Isaiah Berlin that was published as a book in 1953. It was one of his most popular essays with the public. However, Berlin said, ‘I meant it as a kind of enjoyable intellectual game, but it was taken seriously. Every classification throws light on something.’ It has been compared to ‘an intellectual’s cocktail-party game.’
The title is a reference to a fragment attributed to the Ancient Greek poet Archilochus: ‘a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing.’ The fable of ‘The Fox and the Cat’ embodies the a related idea: having one simple, reliable skill is better than boasting many clever but useless plans.
Berlin expands upon this idea to divide writers and thinkers into two categories: hedgehogs, who view the world through the lens of a single defining idea (examples given include Plato, Lucretius, Blaise Pascal, Marcel Proust and Fernand Braudel), and foxes, who draw on a wide variety of experiences and for whom the world cannot be boiled down to a single idea (examples given include Aristotle, Desiderius Erasmus, Johann Wolfgang Goethe).
Turning to Leo Tolstoy, Berlin contends that at first glance, Tolstoy escapes definition into one of the two groups. He postulates that while Tolstoy’s talents are those of a fox, his beliefs are that one ought to be a hedgehog and so Tolstoy’s own voluminous assessments of his own work are misleading. Berlin goes on to use this idea of Tolstoy as a basis for an analysis of the theory of history that Tolstoy presents in his novel ‘War and Peace.’
In the latter half of the essay, Berlin compares Tolstoy with the early 19th-century thinker Joseph de Maistre. As Berlin explains, while Tolstoy and de Maistre held violently contrasting views on more superficial matters, they also held profoundly similar views about the fundamental nature of existence and the limits of a rational scientific approach to it.
The essay ends with Berlin reiterating his view of Tolstoy—by nature a fox, but a hedgehog by conviction—by concluding that this duality caused Tolstoy great pain at the end of his life.
Business writer James C. Collins refers to the story in his 2001 book ‘Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t,’ where he clearly shows his preference towards hedgehog mentality.
Philip E. Tetlock, a political psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, drew heavily on this distinction in his exploration of the accuracy of experts and forecasters in various fields (especially politics) in his 2005 book ‘Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?’ Tetlock summarized substantial research claiming that most experts and well-paid pundits think like hedgehogs with one big idea; on average they make poor forecasts. Meanwhile, people who draw information from a large variety of often-conflicted sources, like foxes, make better forecasts. However, both are often beaten by formal models such as an autoregressive distributed lag model (a statistical tool that predicts a variable’s current behavior by looking at both its own history and the past and present influence of other related factors.).
In his 2012 ‘The New York Times’ bestselling book ‘The Signal and the Noise,’ forecaster Nate Silver urges readers to be ‘more foxy’ after summarizing Berlin’s distinction. He cites the work of Philip E. Tetlock on the accuracy of political forecasts in the United States during the Cold War while he was a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. Silver’s news website, FiveThirtyEight, when it was launched in March 2014, also adopted the fox as its logo as an allusion to Archilochus’ original work.
Some authors such as Michael Walzer have used the same pattern of description for Berlin himself, as a person who knows many things, compared to the purported narrowness of many other contemporary political philosophers. Berlin’s former student, Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, was dubbed a hedgehog by Berlin and admitted to it after receiving the 2007 Templeton Prize.
Music historian Berthold Hoeckner applies and extends Berlin’s distinction in his 2007 essay ‘Wagner and the Origin of Evil.’ One of Hoeckner’s key insights is that the historiography of Wagner’s antisemitism, much like that of the Holocaust, has two main branches: a hedgehog-like functionalist branch that sees the composer’s polemic jabs at Jewish culture as mere assimilationist rhetoric, and a fox-like intentionalist branch that sees them instead as violent expressions of genuinely eliminationist Judenhass (Anti-Judaism).
The Daily Omnivore 
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