Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim likes to quote renowned thinkers in his speeches. Critics have said he likes to parade his erudition, which they argue is pointless because he fails to follow through with implementation.
In his budget speech the other day, he cited Isaiah Berlin, the Latvia-born and English-naturalised philosopher, famed for inventing the “hedgehog and the fox” metaphor in a celebrated essay on Leo Tolstoy’s meditation on history.
Berlin divided history’s seminal thinkers into hedgehogs and foxes: hedgehogs being those who relate everything to a central vision (Marx, Nietzsche); while foxes (Shakespeare, Montaigne, Sophocles) pursue multiform, even contradictory, insights to their finale.
