The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History - Second Edition Paperback – June 2, 2013

Berlin's prose is very readable. This addition has a good foreword and appendix.

This has been a great help to understand the second epilogue. It is easy to ready and uses examples for the book.I would heartily recommend this to anyone reading War and Peace or has an interest in Tolstoy.

Great book

Isaiah Berlin does not tell us much about either hedgehogs or foxes in this book but he tells us a lot about Leo Tolstoy who was both and neither. I read this book in order to find out if Berlin had a value judgement about foxes and or hedgehogs, two fundamental systems of looking at the world. Foxes explore many realms becoming expert at none, hedgehogs focus on one thing in their careers and get very good at it. Berlin appears to lean to the hedgehog as the superior of the two but he is subtle about it. Berlin's point regarding Tolstoy is that Tolstoy appeared as a fox in that he was interested in so many aspects of Russo-Euro culture / zeit and explored so many public and private realms in "War and Peace" but he did all this in the service of an over-arching hedgehoggey idea of his search for a unifying concept that might serve to describe mankind. Berlin's not very dog-whistle ulterior motive here is to bust Tolstoy for his plagiarism of both Joseph Maistre and Stephan Zhikarev. Berlin, a jew, taking a big deep shot to the gut of anti-semite Tolstoy. This book can be considered ground zero for late 20th century postmodernism, i.e. the first shot fired in 1953 at a canonic, white male in need of cutting down to size. Berlin's 20-20 hindsight historicism is effective.

Wonderful description of a master work and person. I highly recommend. Just a great conveyancing worldviews. Team Berlin. Thumbs up.

The points being made would be much more profound if I had not had to dissect every sentence. Writing style leaves a lot to be desired. Content is deep and thought provoking.

I read this essay originally around 20 years ago for a Russian Intellectual History class. This essay summarizes many of the anxieties of the time - it is, like the title says, An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History. It was a quick read (~1.5 hours) but might seem a lot longer if you are not familiar with the topics and people like Proudhon, Belinsky, Herzen, The Decemberists etc....The brief summary is that he thinks Tolstoy is a fox who has respect and wishes he could make himself into a hedgehog. The other review is hysterical. Did The Onion write that?The appendix has some good material both by Berlin and reviewers.

The version to get, as the opening essay by Michael Ignatieff frames this whole work quite effectively.

Uno di quei classici casi in cui compri il libro per la frase famosa, e poi scopri che la frase famosa era l'unica cosa valida di tutto il libro.

book in excellent condition, good value for money and speedy delivery.An interesting read even if you are not studying history for exams.