Buckley’s Mix

Grave Robbers and Coal Miners

Posted January 24, 2009, 10:01 ET Comments Off

Sir Isaiah Berlin famously distinguished between two kinds of intellectuals. A fox, like Berlin, is a polymath who can talk intelligently (and amusingly) about an endless variety of things. By contrast, a hedgehog burrows down and makes himself the master of a single subject.

A cute distinction, and one that served Berlin well, after he found that, as a fox, he couldn’t do serious philosophy. But I have another distinction in mind. The grave robber steals from the dead; the coal miner works a narrow vein of original scholarship. Berlin was a grave robber, who took his fox-hedgehog distinction from Archilochus.

The distinction transcends politics. They might dig from different graves, but right-wing straussians and marxists both are both grave robbers. In law we used to live in a world of grave robbers, and now live in a world of coal miners. That’s not meant as a criticism, since the grave robbers were also earnest careerists. But the grave robber had one thing that the coal miner lacks–heroes, and that gave the former a passion that the coal miner lacks.

Category: scholarship
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