His essay “Historical Inevitability” is an important elaboration of the basis of his criticism.

He also developed his views by examining and criticizing notions of historical determinism in Marx and others, and by studying the origins of historical thinking in Vico and Herder. These lectures discussed eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century figures such as Rousseau, Fichte, Hegel, and Saint-Simon. Put another way, Berlin recognized that not all problems are soluble, and that there is no reason to suppose that mankind can progress toward a realm in which all goods will coincide without friction or cost, a notion that seemed to be animating, if only implicitly, much thinking in the West.īerlin first began to express his ideas in lectures and BBC radio broadcasts that he delivered after the Second World War. Recognition of this fact forces us to take an honest look at the necessary tradeoffs that societies must make.

Contrary to many twentieth-century thinkers, Berlin recognized the possibility that there could be a number of goods for human beings and societies that are not all compatible. The central idea of Berlin’s thought is his belief in a value pluralism that, he judges, does not slip into relativism. Berlin, by contrast, appears from his diverse, and seemingly disparate topics to be a fox, but in fact his thought revolves around a single central idea. Berlin drew this distinction from a fragment of the Greek poet Archilochus, which reads, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” The essay itself advances the hypothesis that Tolstoy was a fox who thought he was a hedgehog. In one of his most famous essays, “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” Berlin distinguishes between those thinkers who “relate everything to a single central vision, one system…a single, universal, organizing principle”-hedgehogs-and those “who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way…related to no moral or aesthetic principle”-foxes. A prolific essayist, Berlin wrote on topics ranging from philosophy and the history of ideas to Russian literature. Isaiah Berlin was one of the twentieth century’s most significant intellectual defenders of liberty and liberalism.

Isaiah berlin hedgehog