The Trouble with Principle
by Stanley Fish
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Book Summary Information
Author: Stanley FishEdition: Paperback
Published: 2001-03-02
ISBN: 0674005341
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Book Reviews of The Trouble with Principle
Book Review: A Masterpiece of Sharp Thought on Contemporary Issues
Summary: 5 Stars
Fish's book on principle, where he dismantles the fanciful notions of "neutral zones" and "non-position positions" of argumentation, is a truly engaging work, like most of his books have been. You can't quite function fully as an American intellectual unless you engage with his thinking at some level, even if it is to disagree. He's often misrepresented in certain circles as "just another academic nutjob," but nothing could be more foolishly dismissive. Think he's a right-winger? Think again -- he supports affirmative action. Think he's a lockstep-leftist? Hold on: he is not a strong pro-abortion guy. Is he an enlightenment liberal? A closet commie, or a neocon? He must at least be a multiculturalist! No -- at least, not the way many academics often are. Is he anti-religion? Anti-Christianity? The answers to these and many questions may surprise you. This is what makes his thinking so much fun, and so fascinating to explore -- in other words, he's about the precise opposite of most academic worker bees.
Any "intellectual" book that opens with a long allusion to "The Wild Bunch" has got to have something going for it. And this one does: Fish moves calmly and with marvellous irony through pop culture, serious philosophy, current case law, classical literature, and questions of faith and knowledge. Sometimes the best irony is when there isn't any. With chapter titles like "Truth and Toilets" and "Beliefs about Belief," you know there's something here, if not for everyone, then at least for a lot of us. For example, the essay "Putting Theory in its Place" uses a (deliberately skewered) quotation from Meatloaf -- "two out of four ain't so good" -- to respond to one speculator's suggestion that Fish was "in favor of affirmative action, abortion rights, and equal treatment of gays and lesbians, and he generally opposes university speech codes." What I like most about this is that he manages to ascribe to Meatloaf, in the middle of all this, the modifying phrase "great singer." Who else is willing to do that? Academics love to hide behind obfuscation, crippling and encrypting their expression with impenetrable jargon, perhaps (apparently) deathly afraid to make any actual assertion whatsoever, lest they be deemed by their peers as either stupid, or, worse yet, actually believing in something instead of holding a "neutral position" or principle.
I studied with Professor Fish (along with eight or nine other PhD students) at Duke in his last Milton seminar there before he left for Chicago. I have to say he's got the sharpest mind I've ever worked with, and he refuses to be pinned down to party lines on either right or left. He just plain thinks -- and thinks well. Nothing escapes critique (or even appreciation!) when merited. This doesn't mean I agree with everything he says, but I've yet to encounter anyone who causes me to enagage with ideas like he does. I have my own students read a variety of his works and they are almost always stimulated, challenged, and startled by his arguments. His texts, more than any other, invigorate classroom discussion among bright students, no matter what they bring to the table individually. A great read for anyone wanting to engage with a great mind that isn't utterly enslaved to the same old thing (whatever that may be...)
Summary of The Trouble with Principle
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.
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