Against the Current in the Kingdom of God: Isaiah Berlin’s Value-Pluralism and the Teachings of Leo Tolstoy
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) opens one of his most famous essays, “The Hedgehog and the Fox” with a quote from the Greek poet Archilochus, “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Even if this classification may be overly simplistic, “every classification throws light on something,” and this scale can be particularly useful when discussing the central subject of Berlin’s essay on hedgehogs and foxes: Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910). Berlin posits that “Tolstoy is a fox who believed passionately in being a hedgehog,” meaning that, in his literature, Tolstoy paints pictures of life as complex, full of diversity and contradictions, and not adherent to any singular ideology or worldview. Meanwhile, in his didactic writings, particularly on the subject of history, Tolstoy seeks to explain events with a monist view; thus, Berlin believes that Tolstoy is “in constant contradiction with himself.” However, just as this classification of hedgehogs and foxes can provide insight into the nature of Tolstoy’s literary and philosophical writings, it can also be turned back upon Berlin to help one understand why Berlin may reach this conclusion about Tolstoy in the first place. This paper argues that Berlin himself is actually in the same quagmire he accuses Tolstoy of being trapped in, as he is a fox who nevertheless has a central hedgehog idea. Berlin is foxlike in rejecting the idea that a utopia can be created on earth according to one unitary set of scientific, historic, political, or even aesthetic values. This approach leads Berlin to seek many varied answers to life’s problems, but in seeking these answers, he has become so obsessed with value-pluralism that it is the one big idea he continually returns to, even if the subject in question does not demand it.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Publication date | August 31, 2022 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Sweetser, True |
|---|
Subjects
| Subject | Berlin, Isaiah, 1909-1997 |
|---|---|
| Subject | Tolstoy, Leo, graf, 1828-1910 |
| Subject | Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770-1831 |
| Subject | Herder, Johann Gottfried, 1744-1803 |
| Subject | Vico, Giambattista, 1668-1744 |
| Subject | Voĭna i mir (Prokofiev, Sergey) |
| Subject | Maistre, Joseph Marie, comte de, 1753-1821 |
| Subject | Enlightenment |
| Subject | Counter-Enlightenment |
| Genre | Text |
| Genre | Capstone |
| Genre | Thesis |
| Genre | Student project report |
Bibliographic information
Access conditions
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC).
Preferred citation
- Preferred citation
- Sweetser, T. (2022). Against the Current in the Kingdom of God: Isaiah Berlin’s Value-Pluralism and the Teachings of Leo Tolstoy. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at https://purl.stanford.edu/jk490bt8087
Collection
Masters Theses in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies
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