The Greek poet Archilochus wrote that ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing‘. That was the basis for Berlin’s famous distinction between two styles of thinker:
For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel – a single, universal, organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance – and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related to no moral or aesthetic principle
I’ve always thought I was a fox. Indeed I’ve got rather defensive about it at points. However since I managed to craft some order out of the chaos of my working life in the last year, I’ve had a dawning realisation that I am in fact much more of a hedgehog in the sense that everything I do ultimately comes back to the same question: what’s the relationship between personal, social and technological change? I’ve been circling around this question my entire life and underpinning everything I’ve ever done are particular corollaries of it:
- How do we study this relationship?
- What does it mean to live well at this intersection?
- What does it mean for how universities themselves change?
- How do these changes in universities in turn impact upon the wider changes?
These questions are coming into view in my 40th year with a clarity that has previously eluded me. Indeed I feel like I’m directly working on them for the first time. It feels like something fundamental has shifted in my intellectual style but it’s a process of emergence rather than a transformation.
Mark Carrigan 