He also received the 1979 Jerusalem Prize for his writings on individual freedom. He was President of the British Academy from 1974 to 1978. He was knighted in 1957, and was awarded the Order of Merit in 1971. In 1966, he helped to found Wolfson College, Oxford, and became its first President. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1963 to 1964. From 1957 to 1967, he was Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford. Many of his essays and lectures were later collected in book form.īorn in Riga, now capital of Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire, he was the first person of Jewish descent to be elected to a prize fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford. He excelled as an essayist, lecturer and conversationalist and as a brilliant speaker who delivered, rapidly and spontaneously, richly allusive and coherently structured material, whether for a lecture series at Oxford University or as a broadcaster on the BBC Third Programme, usually without a script. Sir Isaiah Berlin was a philosopher and historian of ideas, regarded as one of the leading liberal thinkers of the twentieth century. Berlin command all the materials of erudition, literary and philosophical, for his task, but he has a deep and subtle feeling for the uzzle of Tolstoy's personality, and he writes throughout, and particularly towards the last pages, with a wonderful eloquence.' - William Barrett, 'New York Times' 'The argument is ingenious and subtle, full of overtones - exactly what good critical writing should be.' - Max Beloff, 'Manchester Guardian' 'Berlin's stunning command of the resources of scholarship, his sensitivity to literature and to character, and his eloquence as a writer give this essay the luster of a virtuoso performance.' - 'Atlantic' 'The Hedgehog and the Fox' is a trium of erudition and a superb entryway into an understanding of Tolstoy's work.

Since its first publication in 1953 Sir Isaiah's long essay has acquired the status of a small masterpiece. He was by nature a fox who wanted to be a hedgehog. Tolstoy longed for a unitary vision, Sir Isaiah observes, but his marvelous perception of people, things, and the moments of history was so acute that he could not stop himself from writing as he saw, felt, and understood.

'The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.' This fragment of verse by the Greek poet Archilochus describes the central thesis of Isaiah Berlin's masterly essay on Tolstoy, in which he underlines a fundamental distinction between those people (foxes) who are fascinated by the infinite variety of things and those (hedgehogs) who relate everything to a central, all-embracing system.

The hedgehog and the fox berlin