At the moment, the biggest One Big Thing is race-the key, it seems, to all of America, to the innermost meanings of the country and its history. Hedgehogs are thick on the ground, all of them advancing One Big Thing or another-each peering through the lens of a particular obsession. In just two weeks, Zombies fans around the world will get their hands on the first chapter of the Dark Aether story in Die Maschine on November 13th. The world’s hedgehog population tends to expand in times of stress and change. Roosevelt was a restlessly improvising fox. Karl Marx was a supreme hedgehog: Everything, for him, was about the conflict of economic classes.
In a famous essay, published as a book in 1953, Berlin suggested that the world is divided between hedgehogs and foxes-between those who believe in One Big Thing (one all-sufficient super-explanation), and those who are content with a more modest, irrational and even incoherent idea of history’s unfolding. The political philosopher Isaiah Berlin turned an obscure fragment by the ancient Greek poet Archilochus (“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”) into an intellectual’s cocktail-party game.
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