The Hedgehog and the Fox

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.¹ It also appeared in the year of Berlin’s death in a one-volume retrospective collection drawn from the whole of his work.² Numerous translations have been made over the years: work on a French version in the mid-1950s by Aline Halban,³ soon to be Berlin’s wife, was the occasion for regular meetings in the period preceding their marriage. Finally, an excerpted text has been published as Tolstoy and History.⁴ The free-standing complete text has remained in print ever since it was first published, and now enters the latest phase in its history.

For each of the collections of essays by Berlin that I have edited or co-edited – that is, in 1978, 1997 and 2008 – corrections were made in the text and corrections and additions to the notes. Translations of passages in languages other than English (some of them rather long) were also added. The present edition of the essay includes all these revisions and more besides.

New to this edition are the foreword by Berlin’s biographer Michael Ignatieff, and the appendix, which includes (extracts from) letters Berlin wrote about the essay at the time it was written and published, and later, and also (extracts from) contemporary reviews and later commentary.

The book was enthusiastically reviewed when it first appeared, and has become a staple of literary criticism. Berlin’s distinction between the monist hedgehog and the pluralist fox, like his celebration of Kant’s ‘crooked timber of humanity’,¹ has entered the vocabulary of modern culture. It is invoked so frequently in speech, in print and online that it has developed an untrackable life of its own, inspiring (among much else) a parody by John Bowle in Punch (reproduced in the appendix) and cartoons such as the one by Charles Barsotti reproduced overleaf.²

Since the new edition has been reset, the pagination differs from that of the various earlier editions. This will cause some inconvenience to readers trying to follow up references to those editions. I have therefore posted a concordance of the editions, compiled by Nick Hall, at ‹http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/published_works/hf/concordance.html›, so that references to one edition can readily be converted into references to another.

Page references are mostly given as plain numerals. Cross-references to notes (in this volume, unless otherwise stated) are given in the form ‘123/4’, i.e. ‘page 123, note 4’.

Tribute should be paid to Berlin’s friend Julian Asquith,³ from whom he learned of the fragment that gave the book its title. I am extremely grateful to Aileen Kelly for invaluable help with the text and references during the preparation of the first edition of Russian Thinkers. Thanks in connection with the present edition are also due to Al Bertrand, Ewen Bowie, Quentin Davies (John Bowle’s literary executor, for allowing me to reprint Bowle’s parody), Leofranc Holford-Strevens, Eva Papastratis, John Penney and above all Mary Merry.

Henry Hardy

Heswall, May 2012

¹ Letter to Morton White, 2 May 1955. This may be sincere, but the intellectual influence of the book has surely been significantly enhanced by its felicitous title.

² Oxford Slavonic Papers 2 (1951), 17–54.

³ George Weidenfeld (b. 1919), joint founder in 1948 of the publishing house Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

⁴ The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History (London, 1953: Weidenfeld and Nicolson; New York, 1954: Simon and Schuster).

¹ Russian Thinkers, ed. Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly (London, 1978: Hogarth Press; New York, 1978: Viking; 2nd ed., revised by Henry Hardy, London etc., 2008: Penguin Classics).

² 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).

³ ‘Le hérisson et le renard’, in the French edition of Russian Thinkers – Les Penseurs russes (Paris, 1984: Albin Michel). There was a thirty-year delay in the publication of this translation. On 3 December 1954 Berlin wrote to his friend Rowland Burdon-Muller: ‘Aline came in to continue with the translation of The Hedgehog and the Fox, on which she seems fanatically intent. This flatters me, but I wonder if any publisher is rash enough to publish it.’

⁴ London, 1996: Phoenix.

¹ ‘Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht’ (‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’, 1784), Kant’s gesammelte Schriften (Berlin, 1900– ), viii 23, line 22.

² First published in the New Yorker, 9 November 1998, 54. © The New Yorker Collection 1998 Charles Barsotti from cartoonbank.com. All right reserved.

³ Julian Edward George Asquith (1916–2011), 2nd Earl of Oxford and Asquith, who read classics at Balliol College, Oxford, 1934–8, was a British colonial administrator.