‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Rarely have so few words — a fragment of poetry from the sixth-century Greek poet Archilochus — come to mean so much. Sixty years ago, with the publication of his essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” Isaiah Berlin yoked these little critters to large symbols. Their tracks lead us not just to the great thinkers Berlin pursued during his life, but also back to this most English of Russian-born intellectuals and his elusive relationship to Judaism.
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