 Locke, church and state: Stanley Fish's impossible missionJohn William Tate ()
No 2019-12, Newcastle Business School Discussion Paper Series: Research on the Frontiers of Knowledge from The University of Newcastle, Australia Abstract: Stanley Fish’s critique of liberalism is a challenging one. This paper seeks to show how Fish’s most comprehensive attempt to deconstruct the liberal tradition is subject to fundamental flaws due to Fish’s failure to come to grips with the very foundations of liberalism itself. In particular, Fish places great emphasis on the seventeenth century English philosopher, John Locke, as the inaugurator of the basic “contradiction†to which, he believes, liberalism is beset. This paper shows that Fish has fundamentally misunderstood Locke and therefore has misunderstood the “contradiction†which he believes Locke’s political philosophy inaugurates for liberalism. Ultimately therefore, Fish’s broad challenge to liberalism, which he has also pursued in other writings, is weakened by the fact that what he perceives to be the root of the liberal problem was not present within the roots of liberalism at all. Keywords: Stanley Fish; liberalism; liberal tradition; John Locke (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbz:nbsuon:2019_12 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Newcastle Business School Discussion Paper Series: Research on the Frontiers of Knowledge from The University of Newcastle, Australia |
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