Were history’s greatest leaders generalists or specialists?
Painting of the Battle of Salamis by Wilhelm von Kaulbach. Xerxes depicted in the top left sitting on throne holding scepter. Image via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
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The Greek poet Archilochus said “a fox knows many things, a hedgehog knows one big thing.”
This phrase inspired a famous essay by a 20th century philosopher named Isaiah Berlin, who said that pretty much all people can be categorized as either “foxes” or “hedgehogs”. Foxes tend to be agile and perceptive, whereas hedgehogs tend to be resolute and hyper-focused on their end goal.
Historian John Lewis Gaddis took Berlin’s framework one step further. In his book On Grand Strategy, Dr. Gaddis categorizes great political leaders as landing somewhere on the fox-hedgehog spectrum: Xerxes I, Philip II, Ronald Reagan are all classic hedgehogs. Elizabeth I, Shakespeare, and Hillary Clinton are all examples of foxes. And Gaddis says if you’re lucky, you’ll sometimes have a leader who embodies both, as was the case with Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
On this episode of UnTextbooked, producer Will Bourell interviews Dr. Gaddis about the traits that make for effective and ineffective leaders.
Book: On Grand Strategy
Guest: John Lewis Gaddis, Professor of history at Yale University
Producer: Will Bourell
Music: Silas Bohen and Coleman Hamilton
Editors: Bethany Denton and Jeff Emtman
