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.
Publishers Weekly
American democracy rests its freedoms and legal procedures on principles that are impersonal and universal (e.g., freedom, equality). A good idea? No, says Fish. He 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--a controversial literary scholar and theorist who has applied his theories of interpretation to the study of law--we can never find a neutral position that will fully transcend our prejudices, commitments and beliefs. And worse yet, high-minded abstractions can be used to mask undemocratic privilege. He offers the current controversy over affirmative action and reverse discrimination as a case in point. Those who agitate for an end to affirmative action usually do so on the principled grounds that it ignores "merit." But what is merit? It describes, says Fish, "whatever qualifications are deemed desirable for the performance of a particular task, and there is nothing fixed about those qualifications." Fish supports affirmative action because he believes we must take into account the history of oppression suffered by the groups that affirmative action is meant to benefit. Yet Fish is no liberal. In fact, he devotes most of his book to the problems entailed in the liberal understanding of freedom of speech and freedom of religion. Liberals, he says, duck behind the comforting fiction--or "principle"--that we are all the same underneath. Fish--hard-nosed, unflinching and persuasive--maintains that differences are real and must be faced squarely without recourse to timeless, abstract principles. His cautiously reasoned argument, not easily dismissed, will excite controversy. (Dec.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.