Flight from Authority - (Revisions: A Books on Ethics) by Jeffrey Stout (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Jeffrey Stout argues that modern thought was born in a crisis of authority, took shape in flight from authority, and aspired to autonomy from all traditional influence. The quest for autonomy was an attempt to begin completely anew. As such it was bound to fail.

Stout traces the secularization of public discourse and its effect on the relation between theism and culture as well as the severance of morality from traditional moorings in favor of autonomy. He is unabashedly historical in his approach, defending the thesis that all thought is historically conditioned and that historical insight is essential to self-understanding.

Each section of the book takes up a major problem in contemporary philosophy - the nature of knowledge, the rationality of religious belief, the autonomy of morality- and sets that problem against the background of early modern disputes over authority. The result is simultaneously a critique of ahistorical biases, a survey of major developments in modern thought, and a normative treatment of the problems addressed.

The book culminates in the final section with an account of post-Kantian concern with the autonomy of morals. Morality attained relative independence as a form of discourse only in the modern period, but the nature of this independence is distorted when construed in foundationalist or Kantian terms. After criticizing methodological assumptions in recent moral philosophy and religious ethics, Stout sketches his own account of the emergence of autonomy for morality, stressing the need for substantial rethinking of the relationship between religion and ethics. In a concluding chapter, he places his own position in relation to the philosophical tradition descendant from Hegel.

Review Quotes

"It is easy to praise the word of Jeffrey Stout--and unjust not to. He writes with clarity and grace about complex questions in moral philosophy. He joins to his remarkable analytical skills a fine historical sensibility and a moral seriousness. In The Flight from Authority Stout argues compellingly that the shift toward the secularization of moral discourse occurred not because of the intellectual triumph of Descartes and Enlightenment foundationalists but because religious communities failed to provide a common language for debating and deciding questions of public importance without resort to violence." -Calvin Theological Journal

"Jeffrey Stout traces the decline of philosophy and ethics based on authoritative presuppositions of Christian theism and the subsequent quest for an independent criterion of rationality that could replace tradition as the starting point for thought and moral choice...this book thus belongs to the growing body of philosophical literature that challenges the modern, positivist, scientific understandings of rationality...The Flight from Authority is a considerable achievement." -Journal of Religion

"Stout argues, that the autonomy of morals was invented in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In addition to the emergence of the idea of probability, violent religious disagreements in the sixteenth century, as well as the arrival of Newtonian science (undermining the Aristotelian-Thomist notion of a goal of human nature) produced the need to base morals on something other than religious or theoretical positions." -The Thomist

"We are indebted to Stout for introducing to the field of religious studies a philosophical program of singular importance in current academic circles. As an extention of Rortyian principles into new areas of inquiry, this book is both exemplary and valuable, faithful to its intellectual origins and clever in its historical insights." -Religious Studies Review

"...the first extended application of Rortyian insights and methods to subjects that interest those of us in religious studies: the secularization of discourse, religious epistemology, religious ethics, inter alia." --Religious Studies Review

About the Author

Jeffrey Stout is professor of religion at Princeton University. He is a member of the Department of Religion, and is associated with the departments of Philosophy and Politics, the Center for the Study of Religion, and the Center for Human Values. Stout is the author of The Flight from Authority, Ethics after Babel, Democracy and Tradition, and Blessed Are the Organized: Grassroots Democracy in America. With Robert MacSwain, he edited Grammar and Grace: Reformulations of Aquinas and Wittgenstein. His essays have appeared in such journals as Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, The Monist, New Literary History, The Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and The Journal of Religious Ethics. He serves as an associate editor for the JRE.