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{Bookshelf Recommendation}
Are you a Hedgehog or a Fox?
By Gary L. Gregg, Ph.D
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| Gary L. Gregg, Ph.D |
John Lewis Gaddis, distinguished historian of the Cold War from Yale University, has just published On Grand Strategy, a look at decision making, leadership, and strategy from the Ancient Greeks to the Cold War.
There is a fragment of a poem that has survived from ancient Greece that goes like this: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” In the 20th century, Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin resurrected this statement as a way to think about Tolstoy and his work. Since then, many have used this insight, and Gaddis uses it as the overall point structuring this book. Among great thinkers, Plato, he says, is a hedgehog, while Aristotle is a fox.
Within this context, grand strategy is the way of aligning potentially unlimited aspirations with necessarily limited capabilities. To be both a hedgehog and a fox, which the good grand strategist must be, takes considerable education in what has been done and thought before. This is something that, as Gaddis points out, is particularly problematic in today’s society in which we have so sharply segregated “general education, professional training, ascent within an organization, responsibility for it, and then retirement.” Put another way by Henry Kissinger, the problem is that when leaders reach their pinnacle, there is no longer time and encouragement to learn and they must live on their accumulated intellectual capital.Now is the time to accumulate that capital! Make the most of it, and this book might be a good place to start (along with reading Plato, of course!).
Gary L. Gregg, Ph.D. directs the McConnell Center, a nonpartisan program at the University of Louisville that attracts the best and brightest students from around Kentucky and grooms them for careers in effective leadership. Since 2000, he has also held the Mitch McConnell Chair in Leadership at the University of Louisville.Views expressed here are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the McConnell Center.
This recommendation is part of the McConnell Center's Meditations publication series, which features the center's educational resources in a monthly e-newsletter. Content includes a great books podcast series hosted by McConnell Center Director Gary Gregg, book recommendations, student research and writing, and notable lectures available in video format. Subscribe