The Trouble with Principle

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by Stanley Fish

Harvard University Press

Due/Published March 2001, 336 pages, paper

ISBN 0674005341

New in paper (S01)

Stanley Fish here turns to the trouble with principle. Specifically, he 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.

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. 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.

"Fish has a distinctive voice--he is clear and fun to read--and a distinctive position as a postmodernist theory skeptic. The Trouble with Principle is an impertinent but powerful challenge to orthodox legal and philosophical thinking about free speech, and, more broadly, to the pieties of liberalism itself. It is his best book on law and political theory."--Richard A. Posner

If liberalism is a noble but(sometimes) sluggish horse, Stanley Fish is its utmost exasperating gadfly, stinging us into a keener awareness of teh substantive commitments that underlie apparently neutral principles. His passion, tenacity, and clarity make a unique contribution to public debate."--Martha Nussbaum

"It is no surprise that The Trouble with Principle, like everything Stanley Fish writes, is both provocative and illuminating in its challenge to conventional pieties, in this instance the claim that 'principled' decision-making is a meaningful possibility. Every chapter presents interesting arguments, but, for me, the best are those chapters in which Fish tellingly criticizes the responses of leading liberal political theorists to religious argumentation within the public sphere. This book further establishes Fish as one of our leading public intellectuals."--Sanford Levinson"Are you a defender of principle? Or a critic of exclusionary tendencies built into it? Either way, Stanley Fish calls the hand you love to play. In this lucid and bracing book Fish uncovers the role of passion in principle, engages the instability of context, and still manages to address us as 'situated moral beings."--William Connolly

Contents

Prologue: Taking Sides

Part 1: Politics All the Way Down
At the Federalist Society
Sauce for the Goose
Of an Age and Not for All Time
Boutique Multiculturalism

Part 2: Fish on the First
The Rhetoric of Regret
Fraught with Death
The Dance of Theory

Part 3: Reasons for the Devout
Vicki Frost Objects
Mission Impossible
A Wolf in Reason's Clothing
Playing Not to Win
Why We Can't All Just Get Along
Faith before Reason

Part 4: Credo
Beliefs about Belief
Putting Theory in Its Place
Truth and Toilets
Epilogue: How the Right Hijacked the Magic Words

Notes
Acknowledgments
Index

Review

Stanley Fish made a name for himself critiquing the notion of a unified and coherent text, arguing, in part, that it is the reader or a community of readers that invests it with meaning. In recent years, Fish has turned his attention to legal and political matters, and in The Trouble With Principle he argues that principles are not neutral fixed concepts but employed to further one’s preferences. Looking at issues of the first amendment, religious freedom, and other political and legal issues, Fish suggests that when people appeal to "principle," understood as an abstract norm and indifferent to particular outcomes, they are in fact arguing for their own understanding of a given concept (fairness, justice, etc.) Though the idea of the neutral principle is highly valued in liberal democratic societies (probably why people invoke it so often), it is really not necessary, possible, or desirable to adhere to it. Fish defends admitting your preferences, contending that this has been the strength of political/legal discourse from Ancient Rome to today. He writes, “...and it is the morality of taking sides, of frank and vigorous political action, that is celebrated (not urged; it is inevitable) in [The Trouble with Principle].”

In a review of the book, Richard Posner writes, “Fish has a distinctive voice -- he is clear and fun to read -- and a distinctive position as a postmodernist theory skeptic. The Trouble with Principle is an impertinent but powerful challenge to orthodox legal and philosophical thinking about free speech, and, more broadly, to the pieties of liberalism itself. It is his best book on law and political theory.”