4 Albert Sorel, Tolsto historien, Revue bleue 41 ( JanuaryJune 1888), 4609.This lecture, reprinted in revised form in Sorels Lectures historiques (Paris, 1894),has been unjustly neglected by students of Tolstoy; it does much to correct theviews of those (e.g. Sometimes, as inthe explanation of his intentions which he published before the 1 War and Peace, vol. Those who went about their ordinary businesswithout feeling heroic emotions or thinking that they were actorsupon the well-lighted stage of history were the most useful to theircountry and community, while those who tried to grasp thegeneral course of events and wanted to take part in history, thosewho performed acts of incredible self-sacrice or heroism, andparticipated in great events, were the most useless.1 Worst of all,in Tolstoys eyes, were those unceasing talkers who accused oneanother of the kind of thing for which no one could in fact havebeen responsible; and this because nowhere is the commandmentnot to taste of the fruit of the tree of knowledge so clearly writtenas in the course of history. The Hedgehog and the Fox: A Discussion of the Approaches to the Analysis of ICT Reforms in Teacher Education of Larry Cuban and Yrj Engestrm January 2009 Mind Culture and Activity Culture(1 . Science cannot destroy the consciousness offreedom, without which there is no morality and no art, but it canrefute it. 4 N. N. Gusev, Dva goda s L. N. Tolstym . He added that this conception war without panache or embellishments of which his brotherNikolay had spoken to him, he later had veried for himself duringhis own service in the Crimean War. The historicism of his time doubtlessinuenced the young Tolstoy as it did all enquiring persons of histime; but the metaphysical content he rejected instinctively, and inone of his letters he described Hegels writings as unintelligiblegibberish interspersed with platitudes. Il ne tiendrait qua` moi de vous citer des batailles modernes, des batailles fameuses dont la me moire ne pe rira jamais, des batailles qui ont change la face des affaires en Europe, et qui nont e te perdues que parce que tel ou tel homme a cru quelles le taient; de manie`re quen supposant toutes les circonstances e gales, et pas une goutte de sang de plus verse e de part et dautre, un autre ge ne ral aurait fait chanter le Te Deum chez lui, et force lhistoire de dire tout le contraire de ce quelle dira.1 1 Les Soire es de Saint-Pe tersbourg, seventh conversation: op. AM I A FOX OR A HEDGEHOG? (PDF) The Hedgehog and the Fox: A Discussion of the Approaches to the But Tolstoys point is that no otherscience can explain it, since it is, as used by historians, a meaningless term, not aconcept but nothing at all vox nihili. Power and accident are but names for ignorance of thecausal chains, but the chains exist whether we feel them or not.Fortunately we do not; for if we felt their weight, we couldscarcely act at all; the loss of the illusion would paralyse the lifewhich is lived on the basis of our happy ignorance. This ancient Greek aphorism, preserved in a fragment from the poet Archilochus, describes the central thesis of Isaiah Berlin's masterly essay on Leo Tolstoy and the philosophy of history, the subject of the epilogue to War and Peace. What aregreat men? BothTolstoy and Maistre think of what occurs as a thick, opaque,inextricably complex web of events, objects, characteristics, con-nected and divided by literally innumerable unidentiable links and gaps and sudden discontinuities too, visible and invisible. And there is noevidence that Tolstoy himself ever conceived it possible that thiswas the root of the duality, the failure to reconcile the two liveslived by man. (PDF) The Hedgehog and the Fox: Leadership lessons from D-Day The Hedgehog and the Fox: Leadership lessons from D-Day Authors: Keith Grint Warwick Business School Abstract On 6 June 2014, it. Tolstoy stood at the oppositepole to all this. The Fox and the Hedgehog | Hidden Brain : NPR The heirs of Louis XIV were also weak men, and also governed France badly. He died in 1821, the author of several theologico-political essays,but the denitive editions of his works, in particular of thecelebrated Soire es de Saint-Pe tersbourg, which in the form ofPlatonic dialogue dealt with the nature and sanctions of humangovernment and other political and philosophical problems, as wellas his Correspondance diplomatique and his letters, were publishedin full only in the 1850s and early 1860s by his son Rodolphe andby others. killed a great many people because he was a great genius; and, for some reason, he went off to kill Africans, and killed them so well, and was so clever and cunning, that, having arrived in France, he ordered everyone to obey him, which they did. The other, Filosoya istorii v romane L. N. Tolstogo, Voina imir , by M. M. Rubinshtein, in Russkaya mysl ( July 1911), 78103, is muchmore laboured, but in the end seems to me to establish nothing at all. Yet outof this violent conict grew War and Peace: its marvellous solidityshould not blind us to the deep cleavage which yawns openwhenever Tolstoy remembers, or rather reminds himself fails toforget what he is doing, and why. Alternatively, Mikhailov may have been capitalising onthe fact that an existing Russian expression tted Heines words like a glove, but Ihave not yet seen an earlier published use of it. (The fable of The Fox and the Cat embodies the same . For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side,who relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less ormore coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand,think and feel a single, universal, organising principle in terms ofwhich alone all that they are and say has signicance and, on theother side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and evencontradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, forsome psychological or physiological cause, related to no moral oraesthetic principle. 1, p. 52. Butthen he himself had done just that by creating the individuals of hisnovel, who are not trivial precisely to the degree to which, in theircharacters and actions, they summate countless others, whobetween them do move history. economic history (note 4 above), p. 462. By clicking accept or continuing to use the site, you agree to the terms outlined in our. the hedgehog and the fox 463from something more personal, a bitter inner conict between hisactual experience and his beliefs, between his vision of life and histheory of what it, and he himself, ought to be if the vision was tobe bearable at all; between the immediate data, which he was toohonest and too intelligent to ignore, and the need for an interpreta-tion of them which did not lead to the childish absurdities of allprevious views. Or is he wholly unlike either, and isthe question therefore unanswerable because it is absurd? the hedgehog and the fox 477And later: Navons-nous pas ni meme par voir perdre des batailles gagne es? Those who believethis turn out to be dreadfully mistaken. On these subjects he wrote as an amateur, not as aprofessional; but let it be remembered that he belonged to theworld of great affairs: he was a member of the ruling class of hiscountry and his time, and knew and understood it completely; helived in an environment exceptionally crowded with theories andideas, he examined a great deal of material for War and Peace(though, as several Russian scholars have shown,1 not as much asis sometimes supposed), he travelled a great deal, and met manynotable public gures in Germany and France. And the more obsessive the suspicion that perhaps thequest was vain, that no core and no unifying principle would everbe discovered, the more ferocious the measures to drive thisthought away by increasingly merciless and ingenious executionsand more and more false claimants to the title of the truth. Nevertheless he longed for a universal explanatoryprinciple; that is, the perception of resemblances or common1 B. M. Eikhenbaum, Lev Tolstoy (Leningrad, 192860), vol. the profession of faith in his celebrated and militantly moralistic An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History. Like Marx (ofwhom at the time of writing War and Peace he apparently knewnothing), Tolstoy saw clearly that if history was a science, it must 1 ibid. . In Erasmus's Adagia from 1500, the expression is recorded as Multa novit vulpes, verum echinus unum magnum. This terrible dilemma is never nally resolved. Why do the events the totalityof which we call history occur as they do? the hedgehog and the fox 465 The thin, positive doctrine of historical change in War andPeace is all that remains of this despairing search, and it is theimmense superiority of Tolstoys offensive over his defensiveweapons that has always made his philosophy of history thetheory of the minute particles, requiring integration seem sothreadbare and articial to the average, reasonably critical, moder-ately sensitive reader of the novel. For the note see op. (p. 463 above, note 1). In, Isaiah Berlin popularised the saying of the Greek poet Archilochus, 'The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.' Bioinformatics, a word previously known to only a few specialists, entered the lexicon, and is now used commonly, if inappropriately, to encompass the full range of computational activities in the biological sciences, including the management, mining, and analysis of molecular, cellular, and systemic databases. This remainedTolstoys attitude throughout his entire life, and is scarcely asymptom either of trickery or of superciality. the real victor, like the real loser, isthe one who believes himself to be so. 3 War and Peace, vol. Again and again in the1 War and Peace, epilogue, part 1, chapter 1. Maistre sees them as a brood of social andpolitical locusts, as a canker at the heart of Christian civilisation,which is of all things the most sacred and will be preserved only bythe heroic efforts of the Pope and his Church. . 462 the proper study of mankindobservation, historical inference and similar means was, for Kareev,tantamount to denying that we had criteria for distinguishingbetween historical truth and falsehood which were less or morereliable and that was surely mere prejudice, fanatical obscurantism. Do the letters of Ivan the Terrible toPrince Kurbsky explain Russian expansion westward? However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the 'Save PDF' action button. The character of Kutuzov is a case in point. The Hedgehog and the Fox | Princeton University Press Nevertheless the purpose of his selection is not therole he believes himself to play, but slaughter a purposeconceived by beings whose aims neither he nor the other sheep canfathom. I will restrict myself to citing modernbattles, famous battles whose memory will never perish, battles that have changedthe face of Europe and that were only lost because such and such a man thoughtthey were lost; they were battles where all circumstances being equal and withouta drop of blood more being shed on either side, the other general could have had aTe Deum sung in his own country and forced history to record the opposite ofwhat it will say. The translations in the notes are taken from Joseph de Maistre,St Petersburg Dialogues, trans. 4, part 1, chapter 4. PDF THE HEDGEHOG AND THE FOX - engage No doubt if we were omniscient we mightbe able, like Laplaces ideal observer, to plot the course of everydrop of which the stream of history consists, but we are, of course,pathetically ignorant, and the areas of our knowledge are incredi-bly small compared to what is uncharted and (Tolstoy vehementlyinsists on this) unchartable. a fox trying to be a hedgehog, as Berlin said of Leo Tolstoy, Elton is the opposite, a hedgehog trying to be a fox.2 2 Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross. What, then, is the historians task? 2 See Adolfo Omodeo, Un reazionario (Bari, 1939), p. 112, note 2. But to say that unless menmake history they are themselves, particularly the great amongthem, mere labels, because history makes itself, and only theunconscious life of the social hive, the human anthill, has genuinesignicance or value and reality what is this but a whollyunhistorical and dogmatic ethical scepticism? Maistre attributes this to the incurable impotence ofhuman powers of observation and of reasoning, at least when theyfunction without the aid of the superhuman sources of knowledge faith, revelation, tradition, above all the mystical vision of thegreat saints and doctors of the Church, their unanalysable, special Originally published 1953 by George Weidenfeld and Nicolson, Ltd. No place of pub - lication listed, pages 3-4. 2201. And so Tolstoy arrives at one of hiscelebrated paradoxes: the higher soldiers or statesmen are in thepyramid of authority, the farther they must be from its base, whichconsists of those ordinary men and women whose lives are theactual stuff of history; and, consequently, the smaller the effect ofthe words and acts of such remote personages, despite all theirtheoretical authority, upon that history. Both Maistre and Tolstoy regard the Western world as in somesense rotting, as being in rapid decay. Turgenev, who found Tolstoys personality and artantipathetic, although in later years he freely and generouslyacknowledged his genius as a writer, led the attack. Perhaps Archilochus simply meant that the hedgehog's single defense defeats the fox's many tricks. . He had no doubt about hisown superlative skill in this very art, or that it was precisely this forwhich he was admired; and he condemned it absolutely. the hedgehog and the fox 467one another by some simple measuring-rod. And yet there is surely a paradox here. On a vast eld covered with all the apparatus of carnage andseeming to shudder under the feet of men and horses, in the midst of re andwhirling smoke, dazed and carried away by the din of rearms and cannon, byvoices that order, roar, and die away, surrounded by the dead, the dying, themutilated corpses, seized in turn by fear, hope, and rage, by ve or six differentpassions, what happens to a man? The Fox and the Hedgehog: Contrasting Approaches to Anticipating the . Our ignoranceof how things happen is not due to some inherent inaccessibility ofthe rst causes, only to their multiplicity, the smallness of theultimate units, and our own inability to see and hear and remember 1 Neskolko slov po povodu knigi: Voina i mir , Russkii arkhiv 6 (1868),columns 51528. cit (p. 445 above,note 2), vol. One man ghting with another is defeated when he hasbeen killed or brought to earth and the other remains standing. The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History This emphasis on the imponderable and the incalcul-able is part and parcel of Maistres general irrationalism. 4 See the severe strictures of A. Vitmer, a very respectable military historian, inhis 1812 god v Voine i mire (St Petersburg, 1869), and the tones of mountingindignation in the contemporary critical notices of A. S. Norov, A. P. Pyatkovskyand S. Navalikhin. 454 the proper study of mankindHe goes on to say that political historians who write in this wayexplain nothing; they merely attribute events to the power whichimportant individuals are said to exercise over others, but do nottell us what the term power means: and yet this is the heart of theproblem. In his early diaries we nd references to his attempts to compareCatherine the Greats Nakaz1 with the passages in Montesquieuon which she professed to have founded it.2 He reads Hume andThiers3 as well as Rousseau, Sterne and Dickens.4 He is obsessedby the thought that philosophical principles can only be under-stood in their concrete expression in history.5 To write thegenuine history of present-day Europe: there is an aim for thewhole of ones life.6 Or again: The leaves of a tree delight usmore than the roots,7 with the implication that this is neverthelessa supercial view of the world. He emphasised the need for absolute authority,punishment and continual repression if civilisation and order wereto survive at all. None of this could possibly have found a sympathetic echo inthe very tough-minded, very matter-of-fact Tolstoy, especially therealistic Tolstoy of the middle years; if the peasant Platon Karataevhas something in common with the agrarian ethos of the Slavophil(and indeed pan-Slav) ideologists simple rural wisdom as againstthe absurdities of the over-clever West yet Pierre Bezukhov inthe early drafts of War and Peace ends his life as a Decembrist andan exile in Siberia, and cannot be conceived in all his spiritualwanderings as ultimately nding comfort in any metaphysicalsystem, still less in the bosom of the Orthodox or any otherestablished Church. This, for both Schopenhauer and Tolstoy, is thecentral tragedy of human life; if only men would learn how littlethe cleverest and most gifted among them can control, how littlethey can know of all the multitude of factors the orderly move-ment of which is the history of the world; above all, whatpresumptuous nonsense it is to claim to perceive an order merelyon the strength of believing desperately that an order must exist,when all one actually perceives is meaningless chaos a chaos ofwhich the heightened form, the microcosm in which the disorderof human life is reected in an intense degree, is war.