There's no question but that reading Stanley Fish is always an enjoyable experience. Just as in _There's No Such Thing as Free Speech (And It's A Good Thing Too)_, Fish's skills as a polemicist are, as most of the reviewers here have noted, considerable: he possesses wit, insight, a grasp of history, a command of details, clear and incisive logic, and a gift for demolishing bad arguments.

To a certain extent, _The Trouble With Principle_ repeats the arguments of _There's No Such Thing as Free Speech_, particularly Fish's critique of free-speech absolutism and of the conservative critique of affirmative action. Both these books are less sustained arguments than collections of individual pieces dealing with common concerns and taking a common approach.

This approach is, I must add, somewhat less original that Fish seems to think it is. His argument has two basic points:

1. Ethical principles like "fairness" and "equality" are not self-sufficient, but are used in specific contexts in order to gain certain ends, and skillful rhetoricians pick them up and put them down depending on whether or not they will be likely to obtain those desired ends in a given context;

2. What ends one seeks emerge, ultimately, from some desire or motivation that is not subject to rational argument because it is not held for rational reasons.

Now, this is really nothing except consequentialism; if we desire, for example, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, then sometimes treating everybody equally is going to do that and sometimes making special allowances for particular groups is going to do that.

Whether or not one seeks the greatest happiness of the greatest number is not, of course, up for debate, or, if it is - as Fish points out - then it is only up for debate because something else is not. You can't make an argument without at least one premise and at least one procedural rule. This isn't consequentialism but simply a restatement of the is-ought problem - ethical positions have to start, not even with axioms, but with intuitions that are not, themselves, in discourse.

The paradox of Fish is that he makes this argument very clearly, understanding its implications, and also argues that articulating this changes nothing; we will all continue to do our rhetorical work the same way. Yet the thrust of the particular arguments that Fish makes seem to deny this. He argues that the conservative critique of affirmative action as discriminatory elevates "non-discrimination" from a sometimes useful tool to a deontological (my word) principle that prevents desirable consequences from coming about. Yet why make this argument except as a means of convincing readers to fix their attention _on_ consequences rather than on principles? Unless "we should bring about good consequences" is itself an instrumental and only contextually useful principle - and then the question is, in what contexts would it _not_ be useful?

My biggest disappointment was Fish's slight account of moral change, in which he seems to imply that people only change their minds as a result of a total re-orientation of the personality, an event that is unpredictable. Maybe this applies to the absolute fundamental moral intuitions we hold, but people change their minds in discourse - that is, as a result of arguments and evidence - all the time. It would be interesting to have a more thorough account of that sort of change, which, admittedly, might (or might not) only be possible when important emotional interests are not at stake (I am, for example, willing to be talked into supporting this or that tax policy). In fact, Fish's whole project seems to presuppose the idea that people will change their minds as a result of something as ordinary as, say, reading a book. Wayne Booth's _Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent_ is very interesting on this issue.

But you should definitely read Fish's book, mainly because it is a peach. The introduction, in which Fish bemusedly surveys the rhetoric of the modern right (caught, as always, between the assumption that basically everybody agrees and the claiming of underdog status against a fearsome array of college professors and federal judges) is particularly clever.

In the pragmatist tradition of William James (and initiated, as Fish is never slow to remind us, by Protagoras), Stanley Fish renews his attack on the principled, the products of Liberalism, that current cultural version of the solid ground under our feet. In one sense, this book by Fish is just arguing against such as these in ways which are supremely effective. However, to stop here is to get Fish wrong and also to make him much too monotone in his motives. For which "polemicist" or "rhetorician" would remove the ground from under his own feet too?

For, of course, it is Fish's argument throughout this book that "the ground under our feet" is both real and also thoroughly political with principles as the retrospective reasons we always (situatedly) bring to bear when persuasion is the name of the game (which is usually). We are hostages to our practices and all we can do is persuade, persuade, persuade by the use of our in place standards these practices have provided us with. The recourse to "principle" is just the latest move in this game. So Fish (as much as he matches up to his own words) is NOT removing his OWN grounds but only the grounds of those who think they need something else. (Strictly speaking, Fish claims to remove nothing but, rather, to announce the evanescence of the Liberal cognitive land.) Fish tells us that "the ordinary resources that come along with your situation, education and personal history are both all you have and all you need" (from the opening page of the wonderfully titled 16th chapter, "Truth and Toilets"). Thus, Fish is the supporter of reasons and not of Reason ("there is no such thing as reason apart from its appearance in historical circumstances") and this makes him a radical contextualist.

Now some reviewers find this thesis unconvincing or somehow unintellectual, lacking in cognitive power. Some can't let go of absolutes and so, no matter how much they like the fact that Fish has a pop at some people who's views they don't share, they can't finally stand beside him. I say that this is a common sense approach to public discourse and to political society and that it provides all that we need.

It is a point that Fish's critics often miss that he is not actually in the game of removing very much at all from the table. Rather, he is taking it away, reconfiguring it, and then placing it firmly back on that very same table. For example, when he writes in "Vicki Frost Objects" that "exposure is indoctrination" (and so the Liberal idea of free speech abrogates the rights of some to their own freedoms [the right not to be indoctrinated] by allowing the freedoms of others [the right to expose students to their own valued and situated ideas]) isn't this just a pretty obvious truth? People can only, and are more likely to, believe that which they have been exposed to (and how much more so if you are a student in a school system which teaches and reinforces things over and over again as truth so exposing you both to a given framework and the truths which take their places as truths exactly within that very framework?) The (hopefully obvious) point here is exactly that frameworks can and will be different and that this is both the point at issue and the thing which has no overarching position from which to view or judge between said frameworks. Surely, then, the case to make here (the more than common-sense one) is NOT Fish's case but rather that case which would claim a universal or abstract validity? (Fish's point, argued in my words, now becomes that "common-sense" is always what public debate, politics, is about. If you have "common-sense" on your side then the battle is going your way.)

For it is the truth that "we can't all just get along". Fish tells us why. We are all situated human beings with past histories and present contexts which will lead to conflicts of interest and of desire. The recourse to the Liberal land of cognitive absolutes is bankrupt to deal with this exactly because it is never, in its practice, that which it claims in its theory (something from which nothing follows for Fish exactly because it NOT situated in a practical context). When not in practice it is not in practice! So I read Fish as "Mr Common-sense Account of Necessarily Situated Human Behaviour" and I think this book is a worthy successor to "There's No Such Thing As Free Speech - And Its A Good Thing Too!". But did I persuade you?

PoSTmodERnFoOL

If I recall correctly, Voltaire once suggested that we should cherish those who seek the truth but beware of those who find it. This seems to be Fish's attitude toward "principle." He is not opposed to it, per se. Rather, he opposes what he views to be abuses of "principle" when invoked to validate a given position, especially one to which he is opposed. In the Prologue, he observes that "bad things are now being done in the name of neutral principles, and I hope it is clear by now that it is no paradox to say that bad things are being done by something that doesn't exist." For Fish, a "neutral principle" is one favored by liberal theorists whose claim is that "abstractions like fairness, impartiality, mutual respect, and reasonableness can be defined in ways not hostage to any partisan agenda."

The argument of his book, therefore, is that political realism "can be a resource for politics, not for politics in the rarefied sense named by chimeras like fairness and mutual respect but for politics as it has always been practiced, and practiced honorably, in the wards and boroughs of ancient Rome, seventeenth-century London, and twentieth-century Chicago."

The first section of his book sets out the aforementioned "argument" against neutral principle and for politics. The second section focuses on the "arena" of First Amendment jurisprudence within which neutral principles are most active. In the third section, Fish concentrates on the religion clause of the First Amendment, explaining why " the dream of liberal neutrality" encounters so many difficulties when subjected to a discourse "that refuses to be confined within the precincts of the private." In the fourth and final section, Fish shares a number of "general speculations" and then a few of his personal beliefs. The title of the Epilogue ("How the Right Hijacked the Magic Words") correctly indicates Fish's concern that liberals and progressives have lost control of "the vocabulary of America's civil religion" to their traditional opponents, the conservatives. According to Fish, this is a lamentable but undeniable political reality.

I was curious to know what others have said about this book. Although I have not read all of the reviews, those I have read seem to fall within two predictable categories: readers who share Fish's concerns and convictions praise the book; those who do not tend to dismiss it as misguided polemics. Why do I rate it so highly? There are three basic reasons. First, it is very well written. Second, the power of Fish's assertions has forced me to re-examine my own convictions (eg about "the vocabulary of civil religion" and the larger issue of how any terms are defined). Third, Fish has directed me to a number of other books and articles which were previously unknown to me. He thus helps to broaden and deepen my frame-of-reference. I am eager to explore all of these sources.

Dante reserved the seventh (and worst) ring in Hell for those who, in a moral crisis, maintained their neutrality. Perhaps this is what Fish had in mind when he observes (in the Prologue): "Taking sides, weapon in hand, is not a sign of zealotry or partisanship; it is the sign of morality; and it is the morality of taking sides, of frank and vigorous political action, that is celebrated (not urged; it is inevitable) in the pages that follow." Fish need have no fear of that seventh ring.

Excellent for the teacher with extensive classroom resources who wishes to introduce young students to the field of chaos, but it does not truly explain any of the mathematics or concepts behind the field.

I'd give it 3 1/2 stars actually, if that were one of the options. This book, in a format of similar volumes, consists of contributions from four scholars who each give their point of view, followed by responses from the other three. Three of the authors more or less agree with one other in the reasons God commanded what the title dubs the "genocide" of the Canaanites (the reasons being those generally advanced by evangelical authors and given in the biblical text: to preserve Israel from idolatry, to judge the sins of the inhabitants of Canaan, etc.). Where they differ is in the meaning and application of "holy war" or "Yahweh war" for today. None believes we should engage in physical holy war, but for example, one author sees it as a model for spiritual warfare in the church.

C. S. Cowles provides a lively counterpoint to the other three, as his position is essentially that God never did command the destruction of the Canaanites, nor would he; he was misconstrued or believed to have commanded it, but God is love and would never condone such a massacre. Unfortunately, his responses to each of the other authors, is simply along the same lines: God is love as revealed in Christ, and is not someone who commands the massacre of whole peoples. He chastises Eugene Merrill for a "clinical" analysis of the situation, as though there were no place for exegesis or philosophical analysis of ethics. He appears to believe in the reality of hell, and the same arguments he marshalls against "Yahweh war" could be extended to an all-embracing universalism.

Recently I read the book "The Pianist," on which the recent movie was based. At the end, they include excerpts from the diary of a German soldier who had helped the author, Wladyslaw Szpilman, to hide and to survive. In his diary, maybe 4 or 5 times the German solider says that the Germans did such horrible things to the Jews and to others, they will have to suffer, innocent and guilty alike, one and all. It was amazing to me that someone who lived through the Holocaust and participated in its machinery, could state that even innocent people will have to die as a result of Germany's wickedness -- whereas Cowles, who I take it has a fairly comfortable life (like many of us in this country) as an American professor, was quick to say, how dare anyone say that God would order the killing of "innocent" Canaanites.

The book did a better job at answer the question, why can't we destroy people today, in the church age, than at answering, how can we justify the destruction of the Canaanites in the Old Testament? I felt a stronger apologetic was needed in light of current events (Israelis/Palestinians; Tutsis/Hutus; Bosnia).

As a totally different evangelical point of view, Glenn Miller in his web site "Christian Think-Tank" argues that deportation and people movements are a better description of what took place; only a small portion of the people, those who did not re-locate, were put to death. ...

In any event, if one thinks that God justly commanded the killing of the Canaanites, I am not sure that "genocide" is a helpful word, as useful as it is in grabbing attention. The word carries overtones of injustice and inhumanity -- precisely what three of the authors believe was NOT involved, since it came at God's command.

The book excels at laying out the pattern and identifying marks of "Yahweh war" vs. other kinds of war.