There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, and it's a Good Thing, Too

In an era when much of what passes for debate is merely moral posturing--traditional family values versus the cultural elite, free speech versus censorship--or reflexive name-calling--the terms "liberal" and "politically correct" are used with as much dismissive scorn by the right as "reactionary" and "fascinst" are by the left--Stanley Fish has emerged as a brilliantly original critic of the culture at large, praised and pilloried as a vigorous debunker of the pieties of both the left and the right. His mission is not to win the cultural wars that preoccupy the nation's attention, but rather to redefine the terms of the battle. In There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, Fish takes aim at the ideological gridlock paralyzing academic and political exchange in the nineties. In his witty, accessible dissections of the swirling controversies over multiculturalism, affirmative action, canon revision, hate speech, and legal reform, he neatly eviscerates both the conservatives' claim to possession of timeless, transcendent values (the timeless transcendence which they themselves have conveniently identified), and the intellectual left's icons of equality, tolerance, and non-discrimination.