In a famous essay, Isaiah Berlin contrasted two intellectual styles: that of the fox, who knows many small things, and the hedge hog, who “knows one big thing”. Stanley Hoffmann was both hedgehog and fox.
As a commentator on the messy empirical reality of international relations, Hoffmann was a fox. In his first major work, published in 1960, he declared that “the most general ‘laws’ of international relations are bound to be fairly trivial generalizations… Exclusive emphasis on regularities leads to the rediscovery of platitudes”. The study of international relations is therefore, he thought, a form of what Clifford Geertz called “thick description,” not searching for laws but for meaning.
If Stanley Hoffmann was a fox in his descriptive work, on ethical issues he was a hedgehog. He always wanted to show that an ethical dimension is inherent in cogent interpretation. He kept seeking, in his own words, “a way out of conflicts within the constraints of the Westphalian system”. Although he gave Henry Kissinger a nod as “the best recent example” of a conservative statesman, he emphasized the “extraordinary shortcomings of conservative statecraft.” Particularly telling was the shift in prevalent verb modes between the fox-like Hoffmann of empirical analysis to the hedgehog of ethics: from the cool descriptive language of “is” and the conditional forecasts of what “may” occur, to the language of “must” and “ought.” In his writings over his last 30 years, he was a hedgehog who knew one big thing: the sanctity of human rights and the moral obligations of those with power to defend the rights of the weak…