In his essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox”, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin quotes the Greek poet Archilochus, who cryptically had jotted down the following axiom in antiquity: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one thing.”
Out of this saying, Berlin extrapolates a larger meaning that outlines a fundamental epistemological difference dividing all thinkers and writers:
“[T]there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel – a single, universal, organizing, principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance – and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause related to no moral or aesthetic principle.”
Berlin notes that the first kind of people belong to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes. The philosopher does note that this is naturally an oversimplification and somewhat “artificial.” However, his distinction is quite useable to highlight two different types of defense pundits: the ideological defense policy expert versus the fact-driven security analyst. Applying Berlin’s definition, it immediately becomes clear that defense policy scholars and analysts always ought to be foxes, rather than hedgehogs.
For Berlin notes that the thoughts of foxes are often “scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves.” Hedgehogs on the other hand, consciously or unconsciously, seek to fit their analyses into an “all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical unitary inner vision.”
In short, the unitary vision of hedgehogs makes them (consciously or subconsciously) unreliable analysts and advisors, since they have to discard or distort facts to fit their theories or Weltanschauung — they may, however, make great politicians (e.g., Churchill, Lincoln etc.). In addition, the majority of hedgehog defense analysts suffer from one particular kind of unitary vision, what I would call “The Gathering Storm Syndrome,” named after the first volume of Winston Churchill’s magnificent history of the Second World War....The Diplomat
What Can Isaiah Berlin Teach Us About Defense Analysis?
Franz-Stefan Gady
1 comment:
Reagan...the hedgehog. And all the GOP since.
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