Locke, church and state: Stanley Fish's impossible mission

Title: Locke, church and state: Stanley Fish's impossible mission
Creator: Tate, John William
Relation: Newcastle Business School Discussion Paper Series: Research on the Frontiers of Knowledge Number 2019-12
Resource Type: working paper
Description: 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.
Subject: Stanley Fish; liberalism; liberal tradition; John Locke; Newcastle Business School Discussion Paper Series: Research on the Frontiers of Knowledge
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1400836
Identifier: uon:34819
Language: eng
Full Text

		Thumbnail	File	Description	Size	Format
View Details Download			ATTACHMENT01	Author final version	651 KB	Adobe Acrobat PDF	View Details Download