Design for living

The first thing to be said about this remarkable book is that it has nothing to do with animal rights. The title is borrowed from the archaic Greek poet Archilochus, who is known mainly for a single aphorism: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’ Isaiah Berlin borrowed this gnomic utterance for the title of his essay on Tolstoy, using it to illustrate his idea that great thinkers can be divided into two categories, the more focussed spirits who bring insights to a single great idea and the versatile universal men who skate over the whole surface of human knowledge.

Ronald Dworkin is a self-proclaimed hedgehog. He is an American academic lawyer and philosopher who is well known for his elegant and opinionated contributions to American legal and constitutional controversies, although much of his professional life has in fact been passed in England, where he held chairs in jurisprudence at Oxford and London for some 40 years.