In business and forecasting

James C. Collins refers to the story in his 2001 book Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't , where he clearly shows his preference towards hedgehog mentality.

Philip E. Tetlock, a political psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, drew heavily on this distinction in his exploration of the accuracy of experts and forecasters in various fields (especially politics) in his 2005 book Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?^[4][5] Tetlock summarized substantial research claiming that most experts and well-paid pundits think like hedgehogs with one big idea; on average they make poor forecasts. Meanwhile, people who draw information from a large variety of often-conflicted sources, like foxes, make better forecasts. However, both are often beaten by formal models like autoregressive distributed lag models.^[6]

In his 2012 The New York Times bestselling book The Signal and the Noise, forecaster Nate Silver urges readers to be "more foxy" after summarising Berlin's distinction. He cites the work of Philip E. Tetlock on the accuracy of political forecasts in the United States during the Cold War while he was a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. Silver's news website, fivethirtyeight.com, when it was launched in March 2014, also adopted the fox as its logo "as an allusion to" Archilochus' original work.^[7]

In 2018, the author John Lewis Gaddis refers to Berlin's essay as well as Tetlock's work in his 2018 book On Grand Strategy.^[8]

In other disciplines

Some authors such as Michael Walzer have used the same pattern of description for Berlin himself, as a person who knows many things, compared to the purported narrowness of many other contemporary political philosophers. Berlin's former student, Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, was dubbed a hedgehog by Berlin and admitted to it after receiving the 2007 Templeton Prize.^[9]

Legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin's 2011 book, Justice for Hedgehogs, argues the case for a single, overarching, and coherent framework of moral truth.

Music historian Berthold Hoeckner applies and extends Berlin's distinction in his 2007 essay "Wagner and the Origin of Evil". One of Hoeckner's key insights is that the historiography of Wagner's antisemitism, much like that of the Holocaust, has two main branches: a hedgehog-like functionalist branch that sees the composer's polemic jabs at Jewish culture as mere assimilationist rhetoric, and a fox-like intentionalist branch that sees them instead as violent expressions of genuinely eliminationist Judenhass.^[10]

In his book Wittgenstein's Place in Twentieth-Century Analytic Philosophy, Oxford philosopher Peter Hacker uses this metaphor to contrast Berlin's Tolstoy (a fox who wants to be a hedgehog) with philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was "by nature a hedgehog, but after 1929 transformed himself, by great intellectual and imaginative endeavour, into a paradigmatic fox".^[11]

Claudio Véliz uses Berlin's construction to contrast Anglo-American and Spanish patterns of settlement and governance in his 1994 book The New World of the Gothic Fox Culture and Economy in English and Spanish America.

Peter Kivy refers to the essay when describing philosophy of art in the current day as the age of the fox (best represented by Noël Carroll), contrasting it with the previous era of the hedgehog (best represented by Arthur Danto).^[12]

Harvard political economist Dani Rodrik applies the distinction to "hedgehog" mainstream orthodox economists who apply the "Liberal Paradigm" to everything everywhere always and "fox" heterodox (political) economists who have different answers to different times, places, and situations in his 2015 book Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science.^[13]

Leading Judge, Lord Hoffmann, observed that "Copyright law protects foxes better than hedgehogs" in his Judgment in the case Designers Guild Ltd v Russell Williams (Textiles) Ltd in the UK House of Lords.^[14]

Linguist Mark Aronoff divides linguists into these two groups, essentially those that emphasize linguistic theory versus those focused on empirical accuracy and generalizations. He identifies as a fox and states, "I find it hard to understand why hedgehogs make the moves that they make. It has always been especially puzzling to me why they react with such vehemence to what strikes me, a fox, as entirely reasonable or even unremarkable."^[15]

Hedgehogs

Foxes