Gerhard lenski, some false oppositions, and the religious factor
Craig Calhoun
Journal article · 2004 · Sociological Theory
Abstract
CalhounIsaiah Berlin famously declared that there are two kinds of intellectuals: hedgehogs and foxes.The former have one big idea, stick to it throughout their careers, and find it significant for all issues.1 The latter flit from idea to idea, theme to theme, glorying more in diversity and range than in depth or perseverance.The opposition is illustrative but Gerry Lenski proves it too simple.2 Lenski wrote three great books on three different important subjects: religion, stratification, and social evolution.There is indeed a unifying theme, since all are concerned in significant part with the social organization and implications of inequality.But only one has that as its primary subject.The Religious Factor may say more about 1 'The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing'.The line comes from the Greek poet Archilochus; see Berlin (1953).Berlin originally entitled his essay “Leo Tolstoy's Historical Skepticism,” but George Weidenfeld suggested the new and vastly more evocative title.“For 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 by no moral or aesthetic principle; these last lead lives, perform acts, and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal, their thought is 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, without consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision.The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes; and without insisting on a rigid classification, we may, without too much fear of contradiction, say that, in this sense, Dante belongs to the first category, Shakespeare to the second; Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust are, in varying degrees, hedgehogs; Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzak, Joyce are foxes.” 2 “Of course, like all over-simple classifications of this type, the dichotomy becomes, if pressed, artificial, scholastic, and ultimately absurd.But if it is not an aid to serious criticism, neither should it be rejected as being merely superficial or frivolous; like all distinctions which embody any degree of truth, it offers a point of view from which to look and compare, a starting-point for genuine investigation.”Berlin used the phrase, in fact, precisely to point out how hard it is to classify Tolstoy, partly because Tolstoy himself recognized the limits of each approach and sought to present himself as embodying both.