Eulogy

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