The Hedgehog and the Fox

³ OC v 10; SPD 210. ‘Explain why the most honourable thing in the world, according to the judgement of all of humanity, without exception, has always been the right to shed innocent blood innocently?’

¹ Tolstoy visited Proudhon in Brussels in 1861, the year in which the latter published a work which was called La Guerre et la paix, translated into Russian three years later. On the basis of this fact Eikhenbaum tries to deduce the influence of Proudhon upon Tolstoy’s novel. Proudhon follows Maistre in regarding the origins of wars as a dark and sacred mystery; and there is much confused irrationalism, puritanism, love of paradox, and general Rousseauism in all his work. But these qualities are widespread in radical French thought, and it is difficult to find anything specifically Proudhonist in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, besides the title. The extent of Proudhon’s general influence on all kinds of Russian intellectuals during this period was, of course, very large; it would thus be just as easy, indeed easier, to construct a case for regarding Dostoevsky – or Maxim Gorky – as a proudhonisant as to look on Tolstoy as one; yet this would be no more than an idle exercise in critical ingenuity; for the resemblances are vague and general, while the differences are deeper, more numerous and more specific.

² Letter of 8 October 1834 to Gräfin Senfft von Pilsach: Félicité de Lamennais, Correspondance générale, ed. Louis le Guillou (Paris, 1971–81), letter 2338, vi 307.

³ Yet Tolstoy, too, says that millions of men kill each other, knowing that it is ‘physically and morally evil’, because it is ‘necessary’; because ‘in doing so men fulfilled [an] elemental, zoological law’: op. cit. (33/2), 15. This is pure Maistre, and very remote from Stendhal or Rousseau.

¹ Juvenal Satire 3. 78: ‘Graeculus esuriens in caelum jusseris, ibit’ (‘If you order the ravenous little Greek to go to heaven, he will go’).

² ‘Quibbling’ and ‘scribbling’. See Saint-Simon’s ‘Catéchisme politique des industriels’ (1823–4) in Oeuvres de Saint-Simon & d’Enfantin (Paris, 1865–78), xxxvii 131–2.

³ 1 Kings 19:11, Vulgate (King James: ‘the Lord was not in the earthquake’).

¹ Almost in the sense in which the phrase ‘les rapports nécessaires qui dérivent de la nature des choses’ (‘necessary relationships which derive from the nature of things’) is used by Montesquieu in the opening sentence of De l’esprit des lois (1748).

¹ Letter to Vignet des Étoles, 9 December 1793, OC ix 58.

¹ [‘The land and the dead’, a recurrent nationalist leitmotiv used by Barrès (and by later writers following his lead). See, e.g., Maurice Barrès, La Terre et les morts (sur quelles réalités fonder la conscience française) ([Ligue de] La Patrie Française, Troisième Conférence) (Paris, [1899]).]

¹ [‘Reasons of the heart’.]

APPENDIX TO THE SECOND EDITION

I am probably a fox; I’m not a hedgehog.

Isaiah Berlin¹

IB ON HF

To Edmund Wilson, 1 September 1951

The central theme derives from the proposition by Archilochus – an isolated fragment – which I think I quoted to you on Cape Cod where he says ‘the fox knows many things; but the hedgehog one big thing’. Which means, I daresay, no more than that the fox has many tricks but the hedgehog, one worth all of that & can’t be captured. But perhaps it isn’t too improper to divide writers into foxes (Shakespeare: Goethe: Aristotle & other seers of many things:) hedgehogs who see only one big usually incomplete thing (Plato, Pascal, Proust, Dostoevsky, Henry James etc.) anyway it is no worse than naïve v. sentimental & other such categories & dichotomies. Tolstoy I maintain was by nature & gifts a fox who terribly believed in hedgehogs & wished to vivisect himself into one. Hence the crack inside him which everyone knows. This I tried to work out in terms, partly, not of Stendhal or Rousseau, his official inspirers, but Joseph de Maistre who is a far more interesting Nietzschian pseudo-Catholic sort of man than anyone thinks.

To his US publisher Lincoln Schuster, 13 June 1953