Archilochus, a Greek lyricist, once wrote that "the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."
This quote provided inspiration and a central concept for the founders of The Hedgehog Review, a new cultural analysis journal at the University that strives to connect the discussion of cultural problems in scholarly circles to the world outside academia.
"Our desire is to put out a journal that addresses many of the most important issues of the day, but in a way that is accessible to intelligent and well-educated people who are non-specialists," said James Davison Hunter, William R. Kenan Professor of sociology and religious studies and Review executive editor. "The challenge is to get our authors to write in ways that meet the standards of serious academic reflection but with as little specialized jargon as possible."
The Review is published three times a year by the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, an interdisciplinary research center at the University that "investigates contemporary cultural change and its implications for individuals and for society," said Jennifer L. Geddes, Review editor and an Institute fellow.
The Institute is comprised of graduate student, permanent and faculty fellows.
Hunter, also the Institute's executive director, said that Review's initiative "will be oriented toward making sense of the cultural complexities of contemporary social life. In short, the problems of meaning and moral order under the conditions of late modernity."
Each issue of the journal revolves around a central theme or "one big thing," Geddes said.
The theme "brings together a number of different perspectives and orientations into focus on one question," she said.
She added that using different views to examine a single concept will help the journal have "both the breadth of the fox and the depth of the hedgehog," one of its many goals.
"We wanted to produce a journal that was truly interdisciplinary, that resisted the isolation characteristic of much scholarly work and that focused on questions important to contemporary life," Geddes said.
To decide on each issue's theme, the Institute fellows try to choose topics that have a large impact on contemporary life.
"We spend a good deal of time just brainstorming about what we think are important and consequential issues, not just for the academy but for society at large," Hunter said.
Work began on the journal last year. The Institute fellows "had to come up with a name, a design, a sense of what we wanted each issue to contain, and a plan for the next several issues," Geddes said.
The Institute fellows decided to produce a thematic journal that would include essays, interviews, review essays and bibliographies written by scholars of the humanities and social sciences.
Drawing material from different fields "would give us, in a sense, the best of both worlds: the depth of focus and the breadth of interdisciplinarity," Geddes said.
The Institute, along with publishing The Hedgehog Review, sponsors graduate and faculty fellowships as well as conferences, lecture series and surveys. It also has sponsored major projects, most recently a national survey of American political culture conducted with the Gallup Poll to discover the public's views on the state of political life and democracy.
The central theme of the first issue, published this fall, is "Identity." Institute Program Director Joseph Davis guest-edited the issue.
Davis said identity is a subject that has been discussed "widely in both the academy and in the broader culture in recent years."
Though discussions of this sort have been useful, he said, "they have tended to neglect broader questions of the problematization of identity in contemporary society.
"My concern was to take up some of these neglected questions, specifically with regard to how recent social, economic and technological changes were impacting matters of identity and identity-formation," he added.
The fall 1999 issue focuses on identity problems relating to glamour, consumerism, cyberspace, ethnicity and the body, and, according to Davis, answers questions such as "why so many people are concerned with their ethnic identity" and "what type of impact the Internet may have on our sense of ourselves as democratic citizens."
Slated for February 2000, the spring issue's central theme is democracy. It will include an interview with Michael Walzer, author and professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study, as well as articles by Richard Sennett, Michael Sandel, Jean Bethke Elshtain, John Gray, John Patrick Diggins, Richard Merelman and Richard Horner.
The Institute fellows consider scholars who have done work on topics being considered for publication in the Review, Geddes said
She added that next fall's issue will publish the papers presented at the Institute's Spring Colloquium, a series of one-day conferences. This spring the Colloquium's theme is "What's the University For?" In addition to these lectures, the fall 2000 edition also will include an interview with Martha Nussbaum, University of Chicago Law School dean, a review essay and an annotated bibliography.
Fellows of the Institute often contribute to the Review by writing review essays and putting together the annotated bibliographies that appear in each essay.
"While the articles will mostly be scholars, we hope to attract a wide readership," Geddes said. "Anyone interested in contemporary culture and in current research on contemporary culture should find The Hedgehog Review of interest."
The Review "aims to be a provocative forum for thoughtful, engaged discussion about important cultural questions," she said. "We hope it will be a useful resource for anyone interested in making sense out of the changes taking place in our world today."
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