The trouble with principle, we learn from Stanley Fish, is that it does not necessarily accord with what we like. And when it doesn’t, instead of sacrificing our desires to principle—as we should—we sacrifice principle to our desires.

It’s not a new point, but Fish, a man of the Left, uses it mainly to attack the stance of liberals toward religion. His book is a collection of previously published articles, all lively polemics employed against professors who do not write as plainly as he does. His opponents are liberals who concoct theories about how to treat people who are not as liberal as they are. Should liberals talk to them, give them a place at the table, deliberate with them? Fish puts his finger on the sore point: Should religious believers, who reject the ultimate authority of reason, be included in debates in which reason is the norm? Isn’t someone who speaks from his faith instead of his reason making an unjustified, special, privileged claim, one that willfully excludes others?

Liberals today are constantly manufacturing theories of toleration or freedom of religion that they claim are neutral among all sects. But in fact, Fish shows, religious believers cannot accept them without abandoning or trivializing their beliefs. So while pretending to be tolerant or "inclusive," as liberals like to say these days, these theories are actually intolerant and exclusive. And this is so not only because they are weak—Fish makes easy sport of them—but more generally because no principle can succeed in checking the partisan agenda or "naked preference" that inspired it. It’s impossible to be principled or consistent. Being consistent requires you to abstract from what is good for you at the moment, but you cannot do that. Most everybody believes in consistency, Fish admits, but nobody practices it.

This is my first experience with Stanley Fish. Years ago when I first heard of him, I asked who he was. The answer came that Stanley Fish would not have cared for that question. One was supposed to know who he was without asking. I have since learned that he is indeed a big name I should have known—a man of parts with a steep upward trajectory. He began his career as a professor of English, and a Milton scholar. This was not grand enough for him, however, and aided by the laxity of our age and especially of our universities, he became a chairman, a law professor, and a mover and shaker both at supercool Duke University and in his profession. The latest is that he has been made a dean at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

A sign of his prominence is that he relies on himself and doesn’t seem to need to drop names like Foucault and Derrida, authors of deconstructionist theories that resemble his argument. Per haps in ignoring his fellow postmoderns Fish is being consistent with his attack on those who propagate theories: He is consistent with his attack on consistency. Or perhaps he wants to be free to be inconsistent, so as to be consistent with his own theory—or is it a non-theory? Fish is a cleverish fellow, and he invites cleverishness in return. But let us look more soberly at the danger he represents.

It is not that Fish is a fiend of some kind. He is, on the contrary, a nice guy whom easy success has left naïve about the world—at bottom, a typical American academic. When he speaks of living by your "naked preference," he refers to liberal professors and their foolish causes, not to tyrants who mean evil. When he takes his stand with Machiavelli (as he does), he pays no attention to Machiavelli’s recommendation of fraud and cruelty for those who want to live by naked truth. When Fish says, "I historicize reason," he does not mean, "I twist it to mean what I want." Although he exposes liberal toleration as a cover for coercion and exclusion, he himself has no program for repression and extermination.

Rather than being a powerful tyrant masquerading as a dean, Fish, one could almost conclude, has no politics at all. In the grossest contradiction in his book, he claims on the one hand that nothing follows from accepting his argument, and asserts on the other that the same argument releases his desire to win from the constraint of seeming to be neutral. What is the "freedom to win" that Fish discovers—not one of FDR’s Four Freedoms!—but a political consequence of his argument? One would want to know how the freedom to win is made compatible with government by consent of the governed, but that little matter is not raised. It is enough that Fish does not want to become a tyrant; we should be happy with that. So, anticipating our gratitude, he feels free to despise our constitutional limits on tyranny. He happens to be "situated" as a dean, and what office could be further from tyranny than that one? Incidentally, when Fish likes the way things are, he calls it a "situation"; when he doesn’t, he calls it the quo."

Now, what does it mean when Stanley Fish says we are all "situated"? It means that human beings are always, and only, in a context of contingent and changing circumstances. We have no capacity to rise above or abstract from that context; we can only replace one context with another one. We cannot be objective or rational or universal; we use our reason only to advance our own interests and to fool or befuddle others. Hence we are always politically situated, having friends who help us and enemies who are in the way. Nobody is disinterested or neutral. No occupation or way of thinking is nonpolitical. Everything is "politics all the way down."

Here Fish shows himself to be as naïve morally and philosophically as he is politically. Just as his naughtiness falls pathetically short of tyranny, so does his skepticism fail to sustain its doubt of abstraction. He bravely denies that anything is good or right beyond the given moment when you feel it so, but then he turns submissive and cravenly swallows terms and concepts he should object to. When he criticizes liberal principles, he says they lack substance or content. But "substance" and "content" are metaphysical abstractions to which he, as a deconstructionist, is not entitled. If what we want changes from moment to moment, then there is no enduring self—which means no self-interest, no preferences, only momentary whims. Fish likes to confront presumptuous liberal principles with "reality," but what is reality? How did that get an exemption from politics all the way down?

In truth, Fish lives on a basis of simulacra—copies of which there is no original. Let’s dismiss abstractions as unreal, he says, and then let’s pretend they exist anyway in our cozy "interpretive community." For after denying the possibility of a common good, Fish posits—declares on his own—the possibility of a community if only its members will say there’s a common good.

Such a community of professors and graduate students will no doubt have to be supplemented with sales clerks, garbage men, construction workers, and others, each group with its own exquisite mechanism for interpreting, at any moment, the ordinary goods of life. After arguing that principles are really nothing but rhetoric, Fish concludes that reality too yields to rhetoric. He is confident that any community can survive as long as it continues to agree. Should any difficulty arise, just call out the most significant interpreters to dispel it. It is not as if any necessity could arise—a war, a disaster, or merely a lack of food on the table—that would not yield to rhetoric or interpretation.

In reading this book, I worried constantly as to whether it had any hidden depths. Was Stanley Fish perhaps lying? Was there a message or a lesson underneath the surface? But I concluded that the book is all surface, all the way down. It’s true that Fish has an overdrive to his argument, a postmodern self-awareness into which he sometimes shifts when he wants to be clever. He will anticipate that you will turn his argument against him, and he will help you do it in the belief that if he refutes himself, it doesn’t count as a refutation. Fish is stuck in a context, he says, but somehow, despite all his talk of being embedded and situated, he thinks he is on top of the world.

There is a certain amount of fun in watching Fish go after pretentious liberal theorists. It’s easy to join in the laugh as he exposes their clumsy tricks. He shows how theorists of "democratic discourse" contrive in their utopian schemes to lay down conditions of entry into political debate so that nobody who seriously disagrees with them can even begin talking. Very tolerant! But this objection to liberalism’s formal principles is nothing new and not decisive.

Conservatives, in particular, should not stand by in amusement as people like Fish attack liberal principles. Conservatives have a stake in liberalism in the generic sense; certainly American conservatives cannot ignore the liberalism of the Declaration of Independence. And besides, Fish and his like have it in for all principles, including conservative ones.

Originally, in the 17th century, liberalism did not promote neutrality for its own sake. It tried to teach us to think neutrally and abstractly for the sake of a certain, definite good. It wanted us to put peace ahead of glory and salvation, thus to substitute a lower, more solid good for a rarer, more contentious goal. Later liberalism, in Kant and Mill, sought to ennoble the mere attainment of peace by demanding that self-interest in the material sense be replaced by moral self-development.

Here are two issues raised by liberalism, very relevant today, that all of us need to think about. They are far from being meaningless disputes, such as Fish associates with liberalism. They are matters of choice; they are not settled for us by our situation. They are matters of principle, to be taken up responsibly and not to be decided merely for a single set of circumstances. It’s true that it’s easier to show that we need principles than that we have them—which is my sole concession to Dean Fish. But it’s also true that the need must be admitted, and the search to satisfy it begun over and over again. There’s something human about our dissatisfaction with being situated.