The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing
I read Isaiah Berlin's classic in the bath last night, where he attempts to make sense of Leo Tolstoy.
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, organizing 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 by no moral or aesthetic principle; these last lead lives, perform acts, and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal, their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision. The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes;
Dostoevsky is a hedgehog, Pushkin a fox, and Tolstoy a fox who thought he was a hedgehog.
In The New Evolutionary Microeconomics Jason Potts (from the University of Queensland) proposes a synthesis of heterodox economics, as a study of the connections within the economic system. He presents the continuous twice differential plane utlitised by mainstream economists as merely an extreme case (and mostly unapplicable), of a more general canvass.
Whilst neoclassical economics prides itself in being straightforward, conclusive and harmonious, various alternatives such as Austrian, post-Keynesian, evolutionary, Behavioural, Institutional et al have emerged as seemingly diverse nodes of attack. By illuminating their common threads, and retreating to a vantage to judge the soul, he demonstrates that connections really do matter.
You cannot see the picture, when you're standing inside the frame....
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