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Autumn 5772 / 2011, no. 46 Share Tweet

One Big Thing Reviewed by



Reviewed by David Heyd <em>Justice for Hedgehogs</em><br>

by Ronald Dworkin<br>

Harvard University Press, 2011, 506 pages



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on AzureOnline First name * Last name * Email * Security code * I agree to receive emails from Shalem College B oth the title and cover illustration of Ronald Dworkin’s latest book are a humorous tribute to an animal that has achieved lofty symbolic status in the history of ideas—and to Isaiah Berlin, the renowned scholar to whom this status is due. Inspired by the proverb attributed to Archilochus, the Greek poet who lived in 700 B.C.E., “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing,” Berlin distinguished, in his 1953 essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” between two types of thinkers: the “hedgehogs”—that is, men such as Plato, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky, who enunciated a systematic worldview, a singular vision, and a fixed methodology—and the “foxes”—men such as Aristotle, Shakespeare, and Montaigne, who cultivated many and diverse interests, were wary of dogmas and assumptions concerning the uniformity of truth and reality, and readily navigated between different systems of thought. There are many who, not unjustly, regard Berlin himself as something of a fox, largely on account of his support for value pluralism, which defies reduction to a comprehensive methodology or a single set of principles. By contrast—and as may be deduced from the title he chose for his book—Dworkin counts himself among the opposite category’s members. Indeed, from the opening pages of Justice for Hedgehogs, Dworkin presents himself as someone who seeks to establish a consistent and sweeping system of thought, one capable of answering a wide range of questions in the fields of philosophy, morality, ethics, and law. Dworkin, who has taught at New York University, University College London, Yale, Oxford, and other prestigious academic institutions, is unquestionably one of our generation’s great philosophers of law and morality. In 1969, he succeeded H.L.A. Hart as chair of jurisprudence at Oxford. A pioneer in the analytical philosophy of law, Hart was among the leading proponents of legal positivism, which holds that the law acquires its validity not from the world of values, but rather from specific social facts. Dworkin rose to prominence as a rigorous critic of the positivist approach; his line of reasoning, set forth in such works as Law’s Empire (1986), seeks to anchor legal norms in moral principles. Given this approach, it was only natural for Dworkin to broaden his interest to a systematic investigation of the sphere of values. And indeed, his work, which initially dealt with judicial discourse and liberal theory, gradually encompassed moral discussions concerning the beginning of life (abortion) and its end (euthanasia), conscientious objection, and affirmative action. Dworkin also developed a theory concerning the fundamental function of interpretation in law, politics, and ethics—one that is not dissimilar to its role in art and literature, fields that have always been close to Dworkin’s heart. From there, he began to focus on linguistic philosophy and meta-ethics, disciplines regarded as particularly abstract and complicated, and which occupy a central place in the book before us.



David Heyd is a professor of philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In a way, Justice for Hedgehogs is a summary of a life’s work, and Dworkin presents it as such. That said, although many of its subjects have been discussed in his previous writings, this book also presents original arguments. Dworkin turns out to be a particularly ambitious hedgehog. In a generation of analytical philosophers who fear anything that smacks of “a system,” the work’s broad scholarship attests, first and foremost, to the boldness of its writer’s aspirations. And this is not the book’s only virtue: Dworkin has always been known for his fluent, clear, and instructive writing, and the present volume is no exception. Furthermore, in an admittedly long (perhaps even too long) book, the reader has no trouble following the author’s line of thought; indeed, the Baedeker Dworkin offers in the first chapter more than enables the patient reader to follow the orderly pattern of his intricate argumentation. And while his insistence on tying all loose ends together in accordance with his grand design might come across as an almost dogmatic commitment to a single idea—some might call it stubborn single-mindedness—the result is an undeniably brilliant, challenging, and often quite convincing philosophical treatise.

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