The Trouble with Principle - Hardcover

Fish, Stanley

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674910125 ISBN 13: 9780674910126

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1999

Synopsis

Stanley Fish is an equal opportunity antagonist. A theorist who has taken on theorists, an academician who has riled the academy, a legal scholar and political pundit who has ruffled feathers left and right, Fish here turns with customary gusto to the trouble with principle. Specifically, Fish has a quarrel with neutral principles. The trouble? They operate by sacrificing everything people care about to their own purity. And they are deployed with equal highmindedness and equally absurd results by liberals and conservatives alike.

In this bracing book, Fish argues that there is no realm of higher order impartiality--no neutral or fair territory on which to stake a claim--and that those who invoke one are always making a rhetorical and political gesture. In the end, it is history and context, the very substance against which a purportedly abstract principle defines itself, that determines a principle's content and power. In the course of making this argument, Fish takes up questions about academic freedom and hate speech, affirmative action and multiculturalism, the boundaries between church and state, and much more. Sparing no one, he shows how our notions of intellectual and religious liberty--cherished by those at both ends of the political spectrum--are artifacts of the very partisan politics they supposedly transcend. The Trouble with Principle offers a provocative challenge to the debates of our day that no intellectually honest citizen can afford to ignore.

About this title

About the Author

Stanley Fish is Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His many books include There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It's a Good Thing Too.

Review

[Stanley Fish's] attacks are so smartly provocative that they are worth reading. (Edward Rothstein New York Times)

[A] beautifully written and genuinely provocative book. (Raymond Tallis Times Literary Supplement)

The Trouble with Principle continues the assault on liberal shibboleths that Fish first launched with There's No Such Thing as Free Speech...and It's a Good Thing Too...He is a penetrating thinker and, rarity of rarities, a clear and accessible writer...He will challenge, if not change, the way liberals think about, say, multiculturalism. (Sanford Pinsker Philadelphia Inquirer)

In The Trouble with Principle, his latest collection of papers, Fish deploys a master argument that goes like this: The trouble with principle is that they are either so abstract and contentless that all the work is done filling in the details, or else sufficiently concrete as to be very controversial indeed. (Richard Rorty New Leader)

Fish's main target in The Trouble with Principle is the influential school of liberal thought developed by such well-known theorists as John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, Amy Gutmann, and Jurgen Habermas. What unites these writers--and their many followers, especially in legal circles--is a deep commitment to the principle of 'neutrality,' that is, to the idea that the essence of liberalism is to be open to all points of view and ways of life...As Fish convincingly shows, however, this pose of neutrality is little more than a sham, a rhetoric of tolerance that often serves as a cover for intolerance...There is much to recommend in The Trouble with Principle, not least the wit and elegance with which Stanley Fish punctures the pretensions of modern liberalism. (Adam Wolfson Commentary)

That his arguments so crisply challenge traditional ways of thinking about jurisprudence is what makes The Trouble with Principle so provocative and engaging. Lawyers or anyone else interested in examining and questioning the foundations of judicial thought should consider this book required reading. (Randall J. Peach New Jersey Law Review)

I consider this book a splendid rarity: a work by a non-Christian with the (unintended?) virtue of making those Christians more devout. It's also a good read: Fish is master of a lucid and witty prose of a kind rarely written by academics these days. (Paul J. Griffiths Christian Century)

Sports, film, TV and radio, politics and journalism--Fish is fluent wherever he goes... His rhetorical style is surgically precise, and in The Trouble with Principle it is his best friends who are put under the knife--liberals comfortable with beliefs whose rightness they take for granted...In the art of argument, he is formidably skilled...He will unravel your every position, reducing it to words of reversible meanings...The Trouble with Principle is a shrewd, unsparing critique of liberalism by a man most people assume to be one of them. (Michael Skube Atlanta Journal Constitution)

No stranger to controversy, Fish smashes an idol sacred to conservatives and liberals alike: the principle of government neutrality in cultural disputes. Taking on conservatives, Fish challenges the racial neutrality championed by opponents to affirmative action, arguing that such neutrality serves only to obscure historical inequalities crying out for redress. But he pours out his most scalding criticisms on the liberal theorists--from Locke to Rawls--who have formulated the neutralist rhetoric and its underlying logic...True liberals will rally to defend the principled neutrality Fish assails, but many readers will welcome his call for an end to doctrinal paralysis. Sure to become a touchstone in debates on political theory. (Bryce Christensen Booklist)

[Fish] argues vigorously that universal principles actually impede democracy. Counterintuitive as his claim may appear, Fish makes a strong and lucid case. The trouble with principle, he explains, is this: it disregards history, tradition and contexts of every sort that shape understanding. According to Fish, we can never find a neutral position that will fully transcend our prejudices, commitments and beliefs...Fish--hard-nosed, unflinching and persuasive--maintains that differences are real and must be faced squarely without recourse to timeless, abstract principles. His cautionary reasoned arguments, not easily dismissed, will excite controversy. (Publishers Weekly)

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0674910125
• ISBN 13: 9780674910126
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336