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

by Isaiah Berlin

Rousseau must have strengthened, if he did not actually originate, his growing tendency to idealise the soil and its cultivators – the simple peasant, who for Tolstoy is a repository of almost as rich a stock of ‘natural’ virtues as Rousseau’s noble savage. Rousseau, too, must have reinforced the coarse-grained, rough peasant in Tolstoy, with his strongly moralistic, puritanical strain, his suspicion of, and antipathy to, the rich, the powerful, the happy as such, his streak of genuine vandalism, and occasional bursts of blind, very Russian rage against Western sophistication and refinement, and that adulation of ‘virtue’ and simple tastes, of the ‘healthy’ moral life, the militant, anti-liberal barbarism, which is one of Rousseau’s specific contributions to the stock of Jacobin ideas. Perhaps Rousseau influenced him also in setting so high a value upon family life, and in his doctrine of the superiority of the heart over the head, of moral over intellectual or aesthetic virtues. This has been noted before, and it is true and illuminating, but it does not account for Tolstoy’s theory of history, of which little trace can be found in the profoundly unhistorical Rousseau.