3 Review(s)

"I appear before you," writes Stanley Fish, "by virtue of a mistake made by central casting which has tapped me for the role of ardent academic leftist, proponent of multiculturalism, and standard bearer of the politically correct." Indeed, as head of Duke University's English Department, Fish has drawn fire for supposedly championing campus speech codes (he does not, in fact); for his embrace of deconstruction (he would call himself a pragmatist), and for being a "professor who revels in his affluence" (as one journalist wrote)--despite his own status as a white male and a leading scholar in the traditional field of Renaissance literature. But as Adam Begley wrote in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Fish is "the epitome of he academic as showman," a professor of both English and law who is "willfully provocative, politically conservative." In There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, Fish shows what all the fuss is about, with seventeen of his pivotal, provocative writings. Fish ranges across reverse discrimination, the First Amendment and hate speech codes, the nature of the law, and the state of the academy, lending his distinctive, insistent voice to the debate with sharply drawn and closely argued opinions. He goes straight to the core of America's orthodox platitudes, arguing that such liberal stand-bys as free speech, tolerance, equality, and nondiscrimination are meaningless in themselves; these concepts only exist in the context of the political views of those who invoke them (the assault on civil rights, he notes, has advanced under the David Duke banner "Equal Rights for All; Special Privileges for None"). Throughout, Fish applies techniques of literary criticism to the political debate, forcing us to examine the basis of our most sacrosanct principles. In the title essay, Fish writes that the First Amendment is "the first refuge of scoundrels." The concept of "free speech" always exists only in reference to speech which is banned in advance because it undermines the basis of a community; it takes a political struggle to decide where to draw the boundary of tolerance--and he finds good reason to put "hate speech beyond the pale. If left-leaning readers take comfort from such arguments, they will be discomforted in the second part of the book when Fish turns his searing critical attention to some of their cherished ideals and programs (including the expansion of tolerance and the politicization of humanistic studies). He concludes his critique of the academy by mocking the masochistic consumption of Volvos by affluent professors. Perhaps no other scholar in America has earned the notoriety achieved by Stanley Fish--notoriety he seems compelled to justify, relentlessly critiquing the values so many take for granted. This remarkable volume captures the essential Fish, with eloquent, witty, argumentative essays that are impossible to ignore.