Day of the Hedgehog
By David Ignatius

George W. Bush is a "hedgehog," to paraphrase the late philosopher Isaiah Berlin.  That is, he is a man "who knows one big thing." The other animal in Berlin's bestiary was the fox, who "knows many things."

The one big thing Bush knows is that the civilized world must stand firm against the threat of terrorism. That ineffable, unarguable goal has overwhelmed every other theme of his presidency -- to the point that Bush often

seems off key when he speaks about other subjects.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is a hedgehog, too. The one big thing he knows is that war is about breaking the will of an enemy. He has never fought a war quite like this one, where the application of military force only increases the future threat. But it's obviously impossible for Sharon to change: He is a hedgehog.

It turns out that Yasser Arafat is a hedgehog,  too. I had always imagined him to be the epitome of the wily fox. He was a man of the moment. That was why he always missed his chance to do the one big thing -- because he was thinking about all the little things. But it turns out that Arafat, too, knows just one big thing -- and that is

how to survive by saying "no," or, when necessary, "maybe."

Frankly, the world has too many hedgehogs these days -- too many absolutists wedded to mystical, immutable goals. It could do with a few more foxes -- a few more pragmatic people who can maneuver, manipulate, cut the deal, get it done.

Berlin's 1953 essay "The Hedgehog and the Fox" is so famous that few people actually bother to read it. Which is a shame, because it is particularly illuminating now, at a time when people are struggling with Berlin's underlying theme -- namely, how should we understand the meaning of events? Should we comprehend them through empirical observation (like a fox) or through intuition of a deeper truth (like a hedgehog)?

The animal imagery wasn't original with Berlin, as it happens. He was quoting a fragment from the Greek poet Archilochus. And it wasn't even Berlin who unearthed this pithy Greek epigram.  According to Berlin's biographer, Michael Ignatieff, it was brought to his attention in the late 1930s by a classics scholar at Balliol College named, appropriately enough, Lord Oxford.

Once he had heard the phrase, "Isaiah immediately began dividing the great minds of the past into hedgehogs and foxes: Goethe and Pushkin were foxes; Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy were hedgehogs," writes Ignatieff.

By the time he got around to writing his famous essay, Berlin had changed his mind about Tolstoy. (The work is actually subtitled "An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History.") Berlin's conclusion was that the author of "War and Peace" was in fact a fox yearning to be a hedgehog.  Tolstoy's "genius lay in the perception of specific properties," explained Berlin, but at the same time he sought to evoke "the permanent relationship of things, and the universal texture of human life."

Berlin himself was riven by the same fissure as Tolstoy, according to Ignatieff. "Most of his friends saw him as an arch-fox -- nimble, cunning, quick-witted, darting from one subject to another, eluding pursuit," Ignatieff writes. "Yet he was also the type of fox who longs to be a hedgehog -- to know one thing, to feel one thing more truly than anything else."

Which brings us back to Bush, Sharon and Arafat -- the hedgehogs who have been so focused on their own visions of the one big thing that they have failed to achieve the big thing of making peace in the Middle East. Their admirers actually seem to applaud their pigheadedness, as if adherence to a "deeper" truth were a sign of leadership.

 Certainly, the hedgehog has his virtues. In the months immediately after Sept. 11, it was immensely valuable to have one in the White House. Bush knew just one thing, which was that Osama bin Laden, "the evil" one, threatened the United States and the world and must be stopped.  The very simplicity of his formulation steadied the nation and conveyed a confidence like that of another recent hedgehog president, Ronald Reagan.

But it's a mistake to believe that great leaders are by definition hedgehogs. More likely, they are--like Tolstoy and Berlin -- foxes who yearn to be hedgehogs. That is, they are pragmatic, cunning people who are also able to evoke great ideals and pursue them with determination.

That description applies to America's greatest wartime leaders -- Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. They were both practical politicians, leaning toward different advisers at different times. But they had the toughness to fight and win, and they understood that making a stable peace was as important as waging war.

George W. Bush will never be a Lincoln or a Roosevelt, but he can stretch himself. To cope with the spiraling Mideast crisis, this hedgehog needs to take on the cunning, worldly tools of the fox, and he needs to do so quickly.


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