Isaiah Berlin’s essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox” has been a source of intellectual curiosity and amusement since its publication in 1953. Berlin, a British philosopher and historian of ideas, was inspired by a fragment of poetry from the ancient Greek poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Berlin used this fragment to classify writers and thinkers into two broad categories: hedgehogs, who see the world through the lens of a single idea or principle, and foxes, who have multiple viewpoints and are not constrained by a single ideology.
