“The fox knows many things,” said Isaiah Berlin (2013, 1), translating a fragment of Antilochus, “but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” There are those—the foxes, “seers of many things”—who appreciate the plurality of goods, fascinated by values and principles of the most diverse kinds. And then there are the hedgehogs, “who see only one big usually incomplete thing.” The title of Ronald Dworkin's book suggests that he prided himself on falling into the latter category.
But Dworkin was a funny sort of hedgehog. He was not a thinker who worried away at the implications of a single monomaniac idea. Dworkin's hedgehog had the most diverse interests imaginable. He worked in the wake of the fox, showing that various ideas that foxes like Berlin regarded as quite separate from one another, like liberty, justice, equality, dignity, legality, religion, art, ethics, democracy, and rights, could in fact be connected together...
