The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History

by Isaiah Berlin

He is obsessed by the thought that philosophical principles can be understood only in their concrete expression in history.21 ‘To write the genuine history of present-day Europe: there is an aim for the whole of one’s life.’22 Or again: ‘The leaves of a tree delight us more than the roots’,23 with the implication that this is nevertheless a superficial view of the world. But side by side with this there is the beginning of an acute sense of disappointment, a feeling that history, as it is written by historians, makes claims which it cannot satisfy, because like metaphysical philosophy it pretends to be something it is not – namely a science capable of arriving at conclusions which are certain. Since men cannot solve philosophical questions by the principles of reason, they try to do so historically. But history is ‘one of the most backward of sciences – a science which has lost its proper aim’. The reason for this is that history will not, because it cannot, solve the great questions which have tormented men in every generation. In the course of seeking to answer these questions men accumulate a knowledge of facts as they succeed each other in time: but this is a mere by-product, a kind of ‘side issue’ which – and this is a mistake – is studied as an end in itself. Again, ‘history will never reveal to us what connections there are, and at what times, between science, art and morality, between good and evil, religion and the civic virtues. What it will tell us (and that inc...