The Hedgehog and the Fox and the Newt
A tweet by Newt Gingrich caught my eye:
Clinton is a fox who knows many things you can fact check. Trump is a hedgehog who knows one very big thing: We need change.
— Newt Gingrich (@newtgingrich) September 25, 2016
It was sort of a weird tweet, fun to riff on; but an alert follower showed me this: It’s an essay by Isaiah Berlin. (Note: I’m not familiar with him even slightly; just reporting the facts.) Here’s what wikipedia wikisays about the essay:
“The title is a reference to a fragment attributed to the Ancient Greek poet Archilochus: πόλλ’ οἶδ’ ἀλώπηξ, ἀλλ’ ἐχῖνος ἓν μέγα (“a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog one important thing”). In Erasmus’s Adagia from 1500, the expression is recorded as Multa novit vulpes, verum echinus unum magnum. The fable of The Fox and the Cat embodies the same idea.Berlin expands upon this idea to divide writers and thinkers into two categories: hedgehogs, who view the world through the lens of a single defining idea (examples given include Plato, Lucretius, Dante Alighieri, Blaise Pascal, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henrik Ibsen, Marcel Proust and Fernand Braudel), and foxes, who draw on a wide variety of experiences and for whom the world cannot be boiled down to a single idea (examples given include Herodotus, Aristotle, Desiderius Erasmus, William Shakespeare, Michel de Montaigne, Molière, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Aleksandr Pushkin, Honoré de Balzac, James Joyce and Philip Warren Anderson).”
It seems a rather obscure reference to me. I wonder if Newt used it to troll liberals into saying things like this:
“The Hedgehog Who Knew One Very Big Thing” is prolly my least favorite children’s book. https://t.co/SlqxN81ApL
— bspencer (@vacuumslayer) September 25, 2016
If so, well-played, Newt. Well-played.