Reflections on my work and on rhetoric as a methodology

Arie Dubnov, author of the new intellectual biography of Isaiah Berlin, gets one big thing right: despite all the virtues it has, Michael Ignatieff’s authorised biography, Isaiah Berlin: A Life, is...

<i>Justice for Hedgehogs</i>

‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing’. -Archilochus quoted in Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox, 22The fragment from the Greek poet Archilochus, quoted in Isaiah Berlin’s essay ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’, serves as a metaphor for the long-standing contrast and rivalry between two radically different approaches to public ethics, each of which is couched in a radically different vision of the structure of moral value. On the one hand, the way of the hedgehog corresponds to the creed of value monism, reflecting a faith in the ultimate unity of the moral universe and belief in the singularity, tidiness and completeness of moral and political purposes. On the other hand, the way of the fox corresponds to the nemesis of monism, the philosophical tradition of value pluralism, to which this collection of essays is devoted. This dissenting countermovement, which emerges most clearly in the writings of Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire, Bernard Williams and John Gray, is fuelled by an appreciation of the perpetuity of plurality and conflict and, correspondingly, by the conviction that visions of moral unity and harmony are incoherent and implausible. In the view of the value pluralists, ‘there is no completeness and no perfection to be found in morality’ (Hampshire 1989a: 177).

Isaiah Berlin's famous essay about Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, called 'The Hedgehog and the Fox' takes its title from a tag by an ancient Greek poet, who said something like 'The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing'. Berlin used it to talk more about temperament and preoccupation than about knowledge. That's how I'd like to use it now, and 'come out' to you as an unabashed hedgehog who, in various (and sometimes wildly divergent modes), has had one thing on my mind all my life.

Reviewed by: Leon Blum: Prime Minister, Socialist, Zionist by Pierre Birnbaum Saul Lerner Leon Blum: Prime Minister, Socialist, Zionist By Pierre Birnbaum. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. 217pp. In her 1939 essay, “The Art of Biography,” Virginia Woolf said biographers “stimulate the imagination” and reveal the essence of character “by telling us the true facts, by sifting the little from the big, and shaping the whole so that we perceive the outline.” This is what Pierre Birnbaum attempts in his brief biography of Leon Blum published as a part of Yale University’s “Jewish Lives” series of interpretive biographies. To reveal the essence of Blum’s character, Birnbaum seems to have used the distinction made by Archilochus, “The fox knows many little things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing,” which was brilliantly employed in Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog and the Fox (1953) to explore Leo Tolstoy’s concept of history in War and Peace. Birnbaum sought to make Blum a hedgehog, pursuing, in the words of Berlin, “a single central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate,” as opposed to “those [End Page 130] who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory” (3). The “one big thing,” the focus of Blum’s life and the essence of his character as a secular Jew, arose from his experience during the profoundly antisemitic period of the Dreyfus Affair, which deeply influenced Blum, diverted him from literary pursuits, and ultimately convinced him to be a Juif d’ Etat, a “state Jew,” secularly maintaining a life-long commitment to the heart of the French Revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity and employing the social justice of his mentor, Jean Jaures, leader of the French Socialist Party, to expand justice for all French citizens. Birnbaum’s charming, interesting, and, on the whole, thoughtful book on Blum introduces an important historical figure about whom most Americans know little, if anything. For this reason, Yale’s publication of Leon Blum adds much to the portrayal of significant “Jewish Lives” and to a greater understanding of Blum. Birnbaum, a distinguished French historian, provides an important analysis of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century antisemitism and the struggle between the advocates and opponents of the Enlightenment that resulted in the tragedy of the Dreyfus Affair. More recently Birnbaum has been assessing modern French antisemitism. Blum’s life, the story of a Jew granted equal rights as a consequence of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment, illustrated the late nineteenth-century outcome of justice for Jews. So enamored was Blum with the importance of justice, even for women, that in 1907 he published an extremely controversial book, Du marriage, in which he argued that women, like men, should be permitted to sow their wild oats prior to marriage. Blum’s sense of justice also led him to head the French Zionist Union which endeared him neither to French Jews and to non-Jews of the period. For Birnbaum, Blum, in seeking to extend justice, believed that “the origin of French antisemitism “is not in the lower classes, but in high society,” and “he laid plans to revolutionize French society,” enhancing justice through socialism (27–29). Thus, becoming a “state Jew” (a concept developed by Birnbaum), Blum used the state to expand emancipation and reduce antisemitism. Starting his political career as a rapporteur of case law in 1896, Blum ultimately interpreted “266 cases, and between 1902 and 1919 he drafted 1,800 opinions” (74). As Birnbaum asserts, while the state was neither a dominant nor authoritarian power, its role was that of managing services and expanding the area of the public domain. In his 1927 speech to Parliament’s lower house, Blum said “the Government derives from its prerogatives as a public power, from its command authority over firms, and from its national and legislative authority” (75). [End Page 131] Because the state was the center “of social and economic life,” Blum sought to strengthen the state as an agent for justice. The trajectory of Blum’s career would eventually lead him to the position of Prime Minister of France in 1936. Jean Jaures had urged Blum to pursue a career in public life...

If as Archilochus' famous fragment goes 'The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing' then Herbert Simon is, at face value, a star example of a fox. Popularized by Isaiah Berlin (1978), the fox-hedgehog distinction has been interpreted (overly simplistically as Berlin acknowledged) in terms of mutually exclusive or ideal types. Hedgehog-type intelligences are motivated by an overarching grand idea or scheme that they then apply to — or through which they filter — everything else. By contrast, fox-type intelligences are highly adaptive and come up with new ideas more suited to a specific situation or context. We are of the view that the supposed hedgehog-fox dichotomy is way too trite and one-dimensional an assessment of Simon. If there were a golden thread to Simon's work it would be the development of a more adequate theory of human problem-solving and derivatively (but no less deeply) his interest in the computer simulation of human cognition — all in the service of the former (Frantz and Marsh, 2014). The upshot is that Simon made significant contributions to economics, political science, epistemology, sociology, cognitive science, philosophy, public administration, organization theory, and complexity studies (and more besides); and while ascriptions of 'polymath' and 'Renaissance man' are not without merit, they gloss over the distinctive quality of such a mind.

C IR ISAIAH BERLIN, in his essay on J Tolstoy and de Maistre, quotes a saying of an ancient Greek poet: fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing. This distinction serves Sir Isaiah as a guide to an intellectual typology, a distinction between those minds who seek and sniff out many little things and those whose intellectual ears pick up out of the multifarious sounds of the world surrounding them one big recurring thing the melody not yet audible to the ears of the foxes. Ideally the security analyst should be both a fox knowing many little things and a hedgehog knowing one big thing: he should combine the knowledge and experience of all the little everyday things that establish the criss-cross pattern of economic and financial affairs with the sensitivity of a mind listening to the rhythm of a distant drum. Like most other professionals, security analysts do not usually possess such an ideal cast of mind, able to combine the clear-sightedness of the microscopic eye with the distant sweep of telescopic vision. The knowledge of the fox is as essential as that of the hedgehog. Concentrating on one and losing sight of the other will lead to a crazy-quilt picture of reality. This occurs particularly when an intoxication with numbers and the many little things that may be dredged up in their nets causes the practitioners to overlook the imprecision of the seemingly precise. The hedgehog with his knowledge of one big thing telescopes terrestrial time into tiny little dots on an epochal scale and, so, frequently loses his knowledge in a cloudland casting only a fleeting shadow on the world of economic affairs. The risks and difficulties arising from their self-appointed tasks have never yet deterred either the fox or the hedgehog. Other professions have met with similar obstacles and have not allowed themselves to be inhibited by the difficulties. The inherent imprecision of economics has taught the economist to be satisfied with broad statements and to claim the right, by the knowledge of the fox, to make short-term forecasts, aware that change takes time and that there is a momentum in human affairs arising out of the finite nature of the mind of man. Because of this, to modify men's beliefs and motives for action is a complex and multi-faceted matter-even to convey an understanding of the significance of current news events at times raises nearly insuperable obstacles. It becomes difficult to determine the intersection between the things seen by the fox and the foreknowledge of the hedgehog. To combine the active pursuit of the many little things with the perspective of the one big and essential thing is the never-ending task of security analysis as a profession. At times the active pursuit of the many little things appears as the all-absorbing task; at others the wide sweep of new horizons opening attracts attention. It seems to me that, at the current juncture, the hedgehog deserves to be accorded a greater authority by the profession than in the past. The widening and deepening of science and technology in their application to more areas and broader segments of economic and financial life tends to lower the significance of the old guideposts so carefully described and numbered by the analyst and to lead into territory the geography of which can be charted in outline only. It has become trite to say that we have entered a period of accelerated technological change and that such change will necessarily affect all areas of everyday life and their interrelationships. As the recent report of the National Commission on Technology, Automation and Economic Progress put it: Past trends and current prospects suggest that the present is, and the near future will be a time of rapid technological progress.... It is beyond our knowledge to know whether the computer, nuclear power and molecular bilogy are quantitatively or qualitatively more 'revolutionary' than the telephone, electric power and bacteriology. . . . Our broad conclusion

In a famous essay, Isaiah Berlin contrasted two intellectual styles, that of the fox, who knows many small things, and that of the hedgehog, who ‘knows one big thing’ – who has one big idea or works within one theoretical tradition. Stanley Hoffmann's work reflects both styles. In his descriptive work he is a fox, who knows many things. In his discussions of ethics, he is a hedgehog who knows one big thing: that an ethical dimension is inherent in cogent interpretation. As a critic of American foreign policy, Hoffmann has combined these styles, arguing that the United States is too prone to lecture others rather than to engage in the give-and-take of bargaining. And he has always emphasized the layered and complex nature of world politics.

'The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.' This fragment of Archilochus, which gives this book its title, describes the central thesis of Isaiah Berlin's masterly essay on Tolstoy. There have been various interpretations of Archilochus' fragment; Isaiah Berlin has simply used it, without implying anything about the true meaning of the words, to outline a fundamental distinction that exists in mankind, between those who are fascinated by the infinite variety of things (foxes) and those who relate everything to a central all-embracing system (hedgehogs). When applied to Tolstoy, the image illuminates a paradox of his philosophy of history, and shows why he was frequently misunderstood by his contemporaries and critics. Tolstoy was by nature a fox, but he believed in being a hedgehog.

Beyond issues of the research we need are issues arising from the research we already have. Research in mathematics education lacks critical friends, but that phrase implies someone who is on the outside. We in the community especially need insiders who can help us see our work whole. These insiders should have a synoptic view. Isaiah Berlin once drew an important distinction between the hedgehog (who knows one big thing) and the fox (who knows many things). Drawing primarily on my own experience in the field, I argue that more of us in mathematics education ought to become critical foxes.

Isaiah Berlin’s contrast between the fox, who “knows many things,” and the hedgehog, who “knows one big thing,” is the starting point for a consideration of monolithic and pluralistic approaches to hypnosis.

Over the years, observers of highbrow and popular culture have assembled a large menagerie of metaphorical pets to better their social commentary – Archilocus, and later Isaiah Berlin, befriended a wily fox who knew many things and a ponderous hedgehog who understood one big thing; the proverbial three little pigs learned to build their houses “as best they could”; the Japanese have their three wise monkeys who “see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil”; George Orwell created a whole farm of political animals; and Aesop put together a whole stable of fabled beasts. Although the law cannot compete with this rich and varied brood, it does have its own favored animals. Leaving aside that lawyers themselves are often depicted in the popular imagination as snakes and weasels, one the most celebrated of these legal creatures is a small and dead Scottish mollusk. Foraying for a safe and food-rich environment, it managed to force its way into the legal world in August 1928 in a way that few would have imagined. The fact that its actual existence in these particular legal circumstances has always been in doubt only adds to its notoriety. So, along with the unfortunate fox in Pierson (see Chapter 4), the humble snail holds pride of place in the legal garden.

There is a memorable line by ancient Greek poet Archilochus: 'The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.' Drawing on this metaphor made popular by Isaiah Berlin, this book sets out to 'think like a fox' about transitional justice in an intellectual environment largely dominated by hedgehogs. Critical of the unitary 'hedgehog-like' vision underlying mainstream discourse, this book proposes a pluralist reading of the field. It asks: What would it mean for transitional justice to constructively deal with conflicts of values and interests in societies grappling with a violent past? And what would it imply to make meaningful room for diversity, to see 'the many' rather than just 'the one'?

Journal Article Leadership Styles and Policy Breakdown: Bush and Rumsfeld and the War in Iraq Get access Leaders in Conflict: Bush and Rumsfeld in Iraq. By Dyson Stephen. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014. 160 pp., $95.00 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-0-719-09170-4). David B. MacDonald David B. MacDonald Reviewer Department of Political Science, University of Guelph Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Studies Review, Volume 17, Issue 3, September 2015, Pages 487–489, https://doi.org/10.1111/misr.12239 Published: 04 September 2015

Isaiah Berlin in Hedgehog and the Fox quoted the Greek poet Archilochus, wrote, The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. This essay on the Electrification of America is about hedgehogs. Sir Isaiah describes them as those who relate everything to a single central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate. Foxes, in contrast, pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory. Berlin categorizes Dante, Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, and Proust among the hedgehogs.1 I want to add Thomas Edison, Samuel Insull, and S. Z. Mitchell.