The Hedgehog and the Fox Author:Isaiah Berlin Why do events--the meaning of which we call history--occur as they do? Is there some single central vision, some unifying principle, some philosophcal "field theory" which can explain the immense variety of human actions on a battlefield, or in a revolution, or in the history of a nation? Here is the central theme of this essay on the attitude t... more »o history of Leo Tolstoy and, more particularly, of his War and Peace--often called the world's greatest novel. A distinguished British scholar, equally at home in English, in Russian, and in the philsophy of history, Isaiah Berlin writes here of War and Peace, of Tolstoy and what he derived from Stendahl and Maistre. He writes of those among the world's great thinkers who seek some unitary inner vision (the "hedgehogs"), those who observe the variety of the world and do not insist on relating what is not related (the "foxes"), and finally those who (like Tolstoy) see only the many but all their life agonize to see the one.« less