The Hedgehog and the Fox is an essay by philosopher Isaiah Berlin that was published as a book in 1953. It was one of his most popular essays with the general public. However, Berlin said, "I meant it as a kind of enjoyable intellectual game, but it was taken seriously. Every classification throws light on something". It has been compared to "an intellectual's cocktail-party game". Summary The title is a reference to a fragment attributed to the Ancient Greek poet Archilochus: ("a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big 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). Turning to Leo Tolstoy, Berlin contends that at first glance, Tolstoy escapes definition into one of the two groups. He postulates that while Tolstoy's talents are those of a fox, his beliefs are that one ought to be a hedgehog and so Tolstoy's own voluminous assessments of his own work are misleading. Berlin goes on to use this idea of Tolstoy as a basis for an analysis of the theory of history that Tolstoy presents in his novel War and Peace. In the latter half of the essay, Berlin compares Tolstoy with the early 19th-century thinker Joseph de Maistre. As Berlin explains, while Tolstoy and de Maistre held violently contrasting views on more superficial matters, they also held profoundly similar views about the fundamental nature of existence and the limits of a rational scientific approach to it. The essay ends with Berlin reiterating his view of Tolstoy—by nature a fox but a hedgehog by conviction—concluding that this duality caused Tolstoy great pain at the end of his life. Influence In business and forecasting James C. Collins refers to