Anand Atre is an alum of the MLA Program at Johns Hopkins University.
commentary
The Fox’s Dilemma: Berlin, Peacock, and the High Cost of Certainty
Anand Atre, Johns Hopkins University
Commentaries are brief opinion pieces that are intended to introduce an idea or identify connections between works which beg for deeper investigation and analysis. Explicitly not an account of a research project or a comprehensive investigative endeavor, a Commentary in Confluence is a snapshot, a single moment from the initial encounter with an idea or connection that suggests possibilities for interrogation toward new understanding. The Commentary is an appeal to think about an idea, to consider a question, and to take up in earnest the possible conversation toward which the Commentary points.
When Thomas Love Peacock penned The Misfortunes of Elphin in 1829, he unwittingly drafted a satire that would echo across centuries: a prescient diagnosis of leadership’s fatal attraction to absolutism, later dissected by Isaiah Berlin in The Hedgehog and the Fox in 1953. This commentary explores how Peacock’s Romantic-era allegory and Berlin’s Cold War–era typology converge to illuminate a timeless dilemma: the catastrophic allure of absolutism in human affairs. This literary–philosophical pairing offers a diagnosis and warning in an age where leaders increasingly govern by dogma rather than discernment.
Peacock’s The Misfortunes of Elphin is a satirical romance set in medieval Wales, blending Arthurian legend and political allegory with the author’s trademark wit. The story unfolds in the crumbling kingdom of Dyfed, ruled by the ineffectual King Elphin, whose reign is marked by decay and incompetence. His land is sinking into the sea due to neglected infrastructure. Elphin’s virtuous yet naïve rule contrasts with the scheming of his rival, King Melvas. The plot loosely parallels the abduction of Guinevere in Arthurian myth; the abducted character in Peacock’s satire is Princess Angharad, Elphin’s wife.
The kingdom of Dyfed was sinking in more ways than one. As the sea swallows its crumbling shores, King Elphin holds fast to his noble ideals, composing odes to chivalry while his people’s homes slipped beneath the waves. His court had become a theater of the absurd. Bureaucrats debated ceremonial protocols as floodwaters lapped at the castle gates, and ministers drafted eloquent proclamations about the virtues of dry land while refusing to repair the breached seawall. Peacock’s Elphin performs a tragicomic autopsy of kakistocracy, or rule by the least qualified, while ceremonial governance accelerates societal collapse.
Peacock’s irony saturates every line, etching a kingdom’s collapse with the precision of a satirist’s scalpel. Through Elphin’s ineffectual rule, Peacock skewered the Romantic era’s obsession with medieval nostalgia, exposing how lofty ideals become hollow when divorced from practical action. The bumbling monarch embodied the worst of absolutist thinking, committed to his singular vision of kingship yet failing at the actual work of ruling. Meanwhile, the villainous King Melvas plays the brute to Elphin’s dreamer, and his crude tyranny is a dark mirror of Elphin’s passive incompetence.
The resolution comes not through heroic conquest but rather through cunning artistry. Taliesin the bard, the story’s true hero, understands what the absolutist rulers do not: that real power lies in adaptability. Taliesin engineers Angharad’s liberation through psychological manipulation, a subversion of chivalric tropes that privileges cunning over coercion. Taliesin’s victory is a triumph of pluralism over absolutism, proof that complex problems demand multifaceted solutions.
As the last towers of Dyfed disappear beneath the waves, Peacock leaves his readers with a biting satire of power and its discontents. The sinking kingdom stands as a warning: societies crumble when led by those who prize ideology over competence, when style substitutes for substance, and when leaders become so enamored with their “big idea” that they fail to see the waters rising at their feet. Although written as a medieval parable, Elphin’s misfortunes are not confined to this era.
Written over a century after Peacock’s satire, Berlin’s seminal essay The Hedgehog and the Fox takes its title from a fragment by the ancient Greek poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Berlin expands this idea into a sweeping typology of thinkers, writers, and historical figures to explore fundamental differences in how humans engage with knowledge, morality, and the complexity of existence.
Berlin’s typology bifurcates intellectual temperaments dichotomously: hedgehogs, who construct monolithic totalizing epistemologies; and foxes, who navigate pluralistic frameworks. Hedgehogs are those who relate everything to a single central vision, unifying principle, or system through which they interpret the world. Examples of hedgehogs include Plato and Marx, both of whom created all-encompassing systems to explain reality, morality, and history, unifying diverse phenomena under a single central idea. Plato’s entire philosophy revolves around the Theory of Forms, the claim that abstract, perfect ideals (such as Justice, Beauty, and the Good) are the actual reality, whereas the material world is a shadowy imitation. Marx’s entire system rests on historical materialism, the claim that class struggle (economic forces) drives all historical change.
In contrast, foxes pursue many ends, often unrelated or contradictory, embracing plurality and nuance, qualities antithetical to hedgehogs. Examples of foxes include Aristotle and Montaigne. Unlike Plato (his hedgehog teacher), Aristotle refused to reduce reality to a single principle. He studied everything: biology, ethics, politics, and poetry, tailoring his methods to each subject. For Montaigne, his essays revel in posing questions, not providing answers; chapters like “On Cannibals” and “That to Philosophize is to Learn to Die” explore opposing viewpoints without resolving them. According to Berlin, Aristotle’s fox-like adaptability made him the father of multiple disciplines. Still, it prevented him from building a monolithic system, while Montaigne’s fox-like doubt was a bulwark against ideological zealotry.
Berlin demarcates the fox’s pluralism from relativism by foregrounding their engagement with the ontological reality of objectively irreconcilable values (e.g., liberty versus equality) that cannot be reduced to a single hierarchy or dismissed as mere personal preference. Unlike relativists, who claim all truths are equally valid, resulting in indifference, foxes like Montaigne and Aristotle grapple with real tensions: they acknowledge that some choices are morally weightier than others, even when no perfect resolution exists. For Berlin, this is the essence of pluralism: the world is complex but not arbitrary. The fox’s wisdom lies in holding competing truths without collapsing into “anything goes.” It is a stance that demands rigor, not retreat. Between the two ways of thinking, Berlin favored the fox’s pluralistic approach and warned against the dangers of rigid, all-encompassing systems.
The essay’s centerpiece is Leo Tolstoy, whom Berlin perceives as a fox by nature, as his genius lay in observing life’s diversity. However, Berlin believed that Tolstoy was a hedgehog by aspiration, as he longed for a unifying theory of history, as in War and Peace. Berlin argues that this tension haunted Tolstoy’s life and work. The fox’s dilemma is learning how to thrive through adaptability in a world that rewards those who see only in binary epistemologies.
Berlin’s essay is erudite yet accessible, seamlessly weaving philosophy, literary criticism, and intellectual history into a compelling narrative. Its enduring influence lies in its flexible framework, which has been applied far beyond its original context, encompassing political theory to business leadership. The hedgehogs–foxes dichotomy serves as a lens for examining history, literature, and politics, illuminating how different minds grapple with or struggle against ambiguity.
In a crumbling Welsh castle, King Elphin scribbles poetry while his realm vanishes into the sea. Across the centuries, Leo Tolstoy paces his study, agonizing over whether history follows grand laws or chaotic whims. Though separated by time and genre, Peacock’s The Misfortunes of Elphinand Berlin’s The Hedgehog and the Fox engage in the same urgent conversation, revealing why human societies keep repeating the old, disastrous dance between absolute certainty and adaptive wisdom.
Elphin, Peacock’s hapless monarch, is a hedgehog wearing a crown. Convinced that kingship means embodying noble ideals, he neglects the practical work of governance while his kingdom suffers. His tragedy exposes the folly of those who cling to “one big idea” while the world floods or fractures around them. Meanwhile, Taliesin the bard, Peacock’s cunning fox, solves problems through wit and adaptability, much like Berlin’s foxes, who thrive by embracing contradictions. Unlike Guinevere, who needs a chivalric Lancelot to rescue her, Taliesin, the archetypal fox, rescues Princess Angharad not through force but by exploiting Melvas’s vanity; he exemplifies the fox’s creed: by understanding many things, not one thing obsessively.
Peacock’s satire and Berlin’s philosophy converge in their critique of ideological rigidity. Dyfed sinks because its leader prized ceremony over competence, a precursor to modern kakistocracies where loyalty trumps ability. Berlin locates Tolstoy’s existential torment in the dialectic antinomy between his fox-like empirical acuity and his hedgehog-like yearning for teleology, echoing Elphin, tormented by his useless idealism.
The pairing of these readings offers us valuable lessons. First, beware of hedgehog leaders, whether medieval kings or modern ideologues; those who govern by singular visions risk drowning their people in unintended consequences. Second, societies thrive through foxes. Be they bards, independent investigative journalists, or active scientists, those who adapt, question, and improvise are invaluable to societies. Third, we benefit more when we learn to embrace productive doubt. Both works suggest that personal and political maturity entails tolerating ambiguity without despair. Finally, and perhaps the insight that will remain timeless, is that Peacock’s drowning realm and Berlin’s divided Tolstoy remind us that the world is too complex for any single theory, leader, or ideology to “fix.” Those who insist otherwise are either fools like Elphin, tyrants like Melvas, or tortured geniuses like Tolstoy. The antidote is to develop fox-like humility, the wisdom to act while doubting absolutes.
An objection to this position is that the fox’s commitment to pluralism and adaptability reveals the absence of integrity, making them more likely to compromise with oppressive power than resist it. A hedgehog, rigid in principle, might refuse any collaboration with tyranny, while a fox, seeing nuance and multiple paths, might rationalize tactical concessions. After all, foxes prioritize survival over purity; their flexibility could slide into appeasement. If foxes reject absolutes, do they also reject absolutes like “never collaborate?”
The rebuttal is that foxes resist oppression precisely because they value multiple goods, such as freedom, dignity, and culture, that tyranny destroys. The foxes’ adaptability is strategic, not amoral, such as Taliesin’s use of wit to free Angharad rather than dying nobly but uselessly. The hedgehog’s fatal flaw is failing to recognize that rigid resistance often backfires. For example, Socrates’ martyrdom does not stop Athens’ decline. In contrast, foxes seek effective resistance; Toussaint Louverture, a formerly enslaved leader, navigated multiple colonial powers (France, Spain, and Britain) during Haiti’s revolution (1791–1804); he temporarily allied with Spain against France, then switched tactics when France abolished slavery, securing arms and legitimacy without compromising the pursuit of liberation. Unlike absolutist rebels who rejected all negotiations, Louverture’s tactical alliances liberated Haiti without sacrificing principles.
Moreover, the claim that the fox mindset lacks integrity conflates integrity with dogma in disguise. History is replete with heinous crimes committed by those who never doubted their virtue. Berlin would counter that the fox’s integrity is rooted in a praxis of engaging in complexity responsibly, a commitment to weigh conflicting truths without recourse to absolutism. For Berlin, the fox’s adaptability is moral labor, not moral surrender. The fox’s dilemma is not a flaw but the price of living responsibly in a messy world. Grounding integrity in accountability to complexity enables foxes to check their own biases.
Embracing the fox’s strategy may lead to the normalization of collaboration. As such, defenders of the fox’s mindset would have to concede that foxes need to protect themselves from corruption; however, purity tests benefit no one, further highlighting the complexities of living with the fox’s dilemma.
How can an education instill a fox-like pragmatism in future generations? Education systems must rebel against the hedgehog tendencies of standardized curricula, ideological dogmas, and rigid testing to nurture fox-minded citizens who are adaptable, skeptical, and comfortable with complexity. A fox-minded graduate will hold strong opinions weakly, be passionate yet open to revision, embrace interdisciplinary analysis to learn like a polymath, and thrive in ambiguity, where the phrase “it depends” is not a cop-out answer but an invitation to inquire further.
Peacock’s portrayal of Elphin’s crumbling polity and Berlin’s depiction of a divided Tolstoy form a brilliant, cautionary pair. One is a satirical fable, the other a philosophical dissection, both warning of the same peril: the human hunger for singular truths in a pluralistic world. Collectively, Peacock’s satire and Berlin’s philosophy transcend mere analytical utility, offering a pragmatic survival kit for modernity’s ideological aporias, equipping us to navigate a world where the price of certainty is often catastrophe.