"Two elements, therefore, enter into the object of
our investigation; the first, the idea, the second the
complex of human passions; the one the warp, the other
the woof of the vast arras- web of history."
Hegel, Philosophy of History
The 'mythopoesy' of civility and order is the seminal philosophical
and theological literature that gave rise to, and reflected, various problems
in Western thought focusing on the relationship between citizen and
state, in particular, the germinal question of civil obligation: why ought
one obey the law?
Political theorists engage in metaphoric/raythopoeic thinking in a
variety of ways ranging between the archetypal poles of the 'hedgehog' and
the 'fox'. Citing the Greek poet Archilochus, Isaiah Berlin interprets the
symbol of the fox as those persons who take the objects of experience for
what they are and adamantly reject an all-embracing moral principle of unifying
vision. By contrast, Berlin portrays the hedgehog as the writers who
relate phenomena to a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of
which alone all that they are and say has significance.
While the hedgehog and the fox do not lend themselves to neat and
mutually exclusive categories, they nevertheless suggest something important
about the nature and problem of metaphor in political literature.
Plato and Hobbes are surely hedgehogs; Machiavelli is equally clearly a
fox; Rousseau, consistent with his work, remains a paradox. We cannot
claim that the hedgehog is always a monist or nominalist because Plato and
Hobbes divide on this point. Nor can we assert that foxes are exclusively
pluralist or naturalist, for Hobbes is not a fox though a nominalist, and
Machiavelli, though a fox, shows occasional signs of the hedgehog. Any
dichotomy over-simplifies and in the extreme voids a complex and diverse
world of its fluidity. Yet, when taken as suggestive points of departure,
such categories as these aid us in discussing the presuppositions and
implications of political metaphors
