Word: archilochus
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...distinguished himself mostly as a truculent ideologue. Among his causes have been a guaranteed annual income for the poor and reparations for descendants of slaves. "A fox knows many, many things, while a hedgehog knows only one larger truth," says a House Democrat, paraphrasing the ancient Greek poet Archilochus. "John Conyers has been a hedgehog...
...knows many things," wrote the ancient Greek poet Archilochus, "but the hedgehog knows one big thing." In his famous 1953 essay, the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin used that conceit to divide Russian writers into hedgehogs and foxes. Hedgehogs, he suggested, are individuals who relate everything to a single, all embracing principle, while foxes are those who see a multiplicity of things without fitting them into some universal system. (Dostoevsky was a hedgehog, Tolstoy a fox.) Berlin regarded this contrast as a profound philosophical difference that divided writers, thinkers and even politicians...
...fragment of poetry by the Greek Archilochus recorded these enigmatic lines: "The fox knows many things, the hedgehog knows one big thing." In a famous essay, Isaiah Berlin described Tolstoy as a fox who knew many things and Dostoyevsky as a hedgehog who knew one big thing. The Old Paradigm knew one big thing (centralized government, one organizing ideology, one big idea). The New Paradigm is a fox that accommodates many things -- it is decentralized, undoctrinaire, pragmatic, multifaceted...
...cites Isaiah Berlin's study "The Hedgehog and the Fox," which takes its title from a quotation from Archilochus: "The fox knows many things, the hedgehog one big thing...
RUSSIAN THINKERS by Isaiah Berlin Viking; 312 pages; $14.95 "The fox knows many things," the Greek poet Archilochus wrote in one of his fragments. "The hedgehog knows one big thing." Sir Isaiah Berlin the political philosopher, used that enigmatic formula as the framework for one of the most luminous essays of the century, The Hedgehog and the Fox, a study of Tolstoy first published in 1951. Berlin divided the world's writers and thinkers into two categories. The hedgehogs (men like Dante, Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche) are monists-they organize their universe into a central vision...