Tolstoy and History
ARTICLE, REINHOLD NIEBUHR
Tolstoy and History The Hedgehog and the Fox. By Isaiah Berlin. Simon and Schuster. 86 pp. $2.50. Reviewed by Reinhold Niebuhr Author, "Christian Realism and Political Problems" "The Irony of...
...Tolstoy's polemic against the great actors was prompted by his mystical appreciation of the little people, particularly the peasants...
...His empiricism was that of the artist interested in the variegated dramas of history...
...As he admits, the categories are not mutually exclusive, and his selection of typical hedgehogs and foxes might raise many a question...
...Mr...
...The latter contradiction was most apparent as between his gifts as a great novelist and his religious vision as a world-saver, which turned him into precisely the kind of monstrous pretender which had been the butt of his wit as a novelist...
...Those who have read War and Peace will remember how consistently he portrayed the irony- of historical events taking form in practically the reverse direction of that intended by the actors, thus refuting their pretensions of omnipotence...
...On the basis of this, Mr...
...and Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Moliere, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac and Joyce among the foxes...
...The division is not too persuasive...
...It has relevance to this theme on the basis of Berlin's conviction that "Tolstoy was by nature a fox but believed in being a hedgehog...
...Berlin--in Oxford philosopher and Fellow of All Souls College with an almost legendary reputation for conversational brilliance—places Dante, Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel and Dostoyevsky among the hedgehogs...
...For the inaction which he advocated piled up resentments which the Bolsheviks were ultimately to exploit...
...This empiricism prompted Tolstoy to make war upon the system-builders who tried to comprehend the vast phantasmagoria of history into some logical system...
...The conflict between what he was and what he believed emerges nowhere so clearly as in his view of history, to which he devoted some of his most brilliant and paradoxical pages...
...and his beliefs, and consequently his interpretation of his own achievements, another...
...What, for instance, is Aristotle, with his conviction that all life is governed by a universal rational form, doing among the foxes...
...Berlin divides the world's creative thinkers into hedgehogs and foxes...
...But he was equally opposed to the pretentious "great men" symbolized particularly by Napoleon, but also by the whole hierarchy of Russian military leaders who pretended to shape the course of human history...
...The hedgehogs "relate everything to a single central vision, one system, more or less coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel??a single universal organizing principle in terms of which all they are and say has any significance...
...In taking this stand, he helped prepare the Russian scene for the Marxist world-savers...
...Tolstoy's polemic against the pretenders to omniscience and omnipotence involved him in, or at least proceeded from, a rigorous determinism which stood in contradiction to his artistic appreciation of the significance of the individual, particularly the little individual...
...Berlin brilliantly elucidates his eminence and his inconsistencies as an interpreter of history, and does it in such an illuminating fashion that one closes his little book wishing that he had written a larger one...
...In contrast are the "foxes," who "pursue many ends, often unrelated and frequently contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way for some psychological or physiological cause, but related by no moral or esthetic principle...
...But this contradiction is not exactly identical with that between what Tolstoy was and what he believed himself to be...
...His gifts and achievements were one thing...
...The contradiction between the deterministic and voluntaristic implications in his thought is, incidentally, a familiar malady in much of current thought about history...
...According to Tolstoy," declares Berlin, "all our knowledge is empirical--there is no other--but it will conduct us only to arbitrary bits and pieces of information...
...Reviewed by Reinhold Niebuhr Author, "Christian Realism and Political Problems" "The Irony of American History" This brilliant little book analyzes Tolstoy's interpretation of history...
...His moral and religious notions, which finally flowered in his one-man religious revolt, induced him to frown on any efforts to arouse them politically, lest they lose their innocence as sufferers in history and become guilty as agents in history...
...We know Tolstoy as a novelist and a myopic idealist who died as an apostle of a perfectionist version of the Christian faith which has, incidentally, been persuasive to many contemporary "liberal" Christians and strongly influenced one of the great men of our era, Mahatma Gandhi...
...His targets were the philosophers and reformers of the French Enlightenment, though the Marxist logic could have fallen equally under his interdict...
...That was an irony greater than any which Tolstoy pictured in his novels...
...But we must not stop for such questions, since this classification is but an introduction to Berlin's consideration of Tolstoy's interpretation of history, as presented particularly in his classic novel, War and Peace...
...Therefore, "it seems to him (as much as to any metaphysician of the idealist school which he despises) worthless and unintelligible, save insofar as it derives from, and points to, an inexpressible but very palpably superior understanding, which is alone worth pursuing...
...Its cryptic title is derived from a quotation from the Greek poet, Archilochus: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing...
Vol. 37 • March 1954 • No. 12
