The Trouble with Principle

The Trouble with Principle
by Stanley Fish

The Trouble with Principle
List Price: $16.95
Our Price: $12.50
You Save: $4.45 (26%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $6.33 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions


(Click here)
Buy this book at online book store in your country
Canada | UK | Germany | France

Book Summary Information

Author: Stanley Fish
Edition: 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.

Legal Books

Book Subjects
Most talked about in Praiseworthy Provocateurs
The Trouble with Principle ImageThe Trouble with Principle
by Stanley Fish
Harvard University Press; Published: 2001-03-02; Paperback; Book
Best price: $12.50
Price in other shops: $16.95
Against Method ImageAgainst Method
by Paul Feyerabend
Verso; Published: 1993-09; Paperback; Book
Best price: $18.00
Price in other shops: $21.95
The Yanomamo (Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology) ImageThe Yanomamo (Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology)
by Napoleon A. Chagnon
Wadsworth Publishing; Published: 1996-11-15; Paperback; Book
Best price: $19.99
Price in other shops: $39.95
On Human Nature ImageOn Human Nature
by Edward O. Wilson
Harvard University Press; Published: 1988-10-15; Paperback; Book
Best price: $74.97
The Road to Serfdom Fiftieth Anniversary Edition ImageThe Road to Serfdom Fiftieth Anniversary Edition
by F. A. Hayek
University Of Chicago Press; Published: 1994-10-15; Paperback; Book
Best price: $13.50
Price in other shops: $14.00
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil ImageEichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
by Hannah Arendt
Penguin Classics; Published: 1994-01-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.32
Price in other shops: $15.00
Anarchism and Other Essays ImageAnarchism and Other Essays
by Emma Goldman
Dover Publications; Published: 1969-06-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $4.29
Price in other shops: $9.95
Stirner: The Ego and its Own (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought) ImageStirner: The Ego and its Own (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought)
by Max Stirner
Cambridge University Press; Published: 1995-05-26; Paperback; Book
Best price: $25.83
Price in other shops: $32.99
Persian Letters (Penguin Classics) ImagePersian Letters (Penguin Classics)
by Charles Louis de Secondat Montesquieu
Penguin Classics; Published: 1973-04-30; Paperback; Book
Best price: $6.00
Price in other shops: $13.00
Common Sense, The Rights of Man and Other Essential Writings of Thomas Paine (Signet Classics) ImageCommon Sense, The Rights of Man and Other Essential Writings of Thomas Paine (Signet Classics)
by Thomas Paine
Signet Classics; Published: 2003-07-01; Mass Market Paperback; Book
Best price: $2.95
Price in other shops: $5.95
Similar Books and other products
A New Religious America: How a "Christian Country" Has Become the World's Most Religiously Diverse Nation ImageA New Religious America: How a "Christian Country" Has Become the World's Most Religiously Diverse Nation
by Diana L. Eck
Published: 2002-06-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $11.49
Price in other shops: $17.95
Protestant--Catholic--Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology ImageProtestant--Catholic--Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology
by Will Herberg
University Of Chicago Press; Published: 1983-10-15; Paperback; Book
Best price: $12.99
Price in other shops: $27.00
Justifying Belief: Stanley Fish and the Work of Rhetoric ImageJustifying Belief: Stanley Fish and the Work of Rhetoric
by Gary A. Olson
State University of New York Press; Published: 2002-09; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.50
Price in other shops: $21.95
Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change ImageProfessional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change
by Stanley Fish
Harvard University Press; Published: 1999-04-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $5.99
Price in other shops: $16.95
The Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Live Our Faith ImageThe Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Live Our Faith
by Alan Wolfe
University Of Chicago Press; Published: 2005-04-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.00
Price in other shops: $16.00
The Stanley Fish Reader (Blackwell Readers) ImageThe Stanley Fish Reader (Blackwell Readers)
Wiley-Blackwell; Published: 1999-02-02; Paperback; Book
Best price: $27.42
Price in other shops: $41.95
A Secular Age ImageA Secular Age
by Charles Taylor
Belknap Press; Published: 2007-09-20; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $24.95
Price in other shops: $39.95
Doing What Comes Naturally:  Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies ImageDoing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies
by Stanley Fish
Duke University Press; Published: 1990-12; Paperback; Book
Best price: $18.00
Price in other shops: $25.95
Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities ImageIs There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities
by Stanley Fish
Harvard University Press; Published: 1982-06-25; Paperback; Book
Best price: $19.00
Price in other shops: $23.00
There's No Such Thing As Free Speech: And It's a Good Thing, Too ImageThere's No Such Thing As Free Speech: And It's a Good Thing, Too
by Stanley Fish
Oxford University Press, USA; Published: 1994-12-15; Paperback; Book
Best price: $12.74
Price in other shops: $33.00
Book store. Illustrated catalog of books on different categories