There's No Such Thing as Free Speech: And It's a Good Thing, Too

Now, sitting comfortably? Are you a liberal or a conservative? Do you think your views, sane, rational, fair, unbiased or generally decent? Well what if I told you that you are a biased, interested, often irrational and double-dealing individual who rigs debates, fixes the meanings of discourses (and things) and generally configures things to your own advantage and your opponent's disadvantage? OK, you would disagree with me: BUT THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT STANLEY FISH IS SAYING ABOUT YOU!! He does this in a series of extraordinary essays attacking conservatives and liberals alike (though under the post-Enlightenment rubric of "liberalism" in general, that belief system shared by most modern, Western thinkers) for their slipperiness in debate and their use of fake and polemical principles, actually the products of politics (a noble because unavoidable category for Fish). Fish's aim in all this seems to be to drag everyone back to their contextual and historical time and place(s) and to do away with the notion that we can avoid this or retreat into our various cognitive, abstract and universalising hiding places. What is left is what we had before Fish started writing and what, according to Fish, we will always have: political debate, the opportunity to convince your peers that this way is better than that, that this conclusion is better than that one. But, after Fish, we won't be able to do this by appealing to principles anymore since he has exposed them all as partisan and political. So "hoorah" for Stanley Fish's eye opening book, let's build a better world, and watch out, Stanley Fish is after you!PoSTmodERnFoOL

This series of essays is extremely thought-provoking and intellectually rigorous. I have returned to this book numerous times either for an essay or the entire collection. It makes me wish I could have been there for his debates with D'souza. Fish's thoughts on affirmative action, free speech, etc... are very timely and really make you ponder some of the deeper issues that face us literally every day because of legislation, simple discussion or introspection. I always love reading someone who takes you far away culture either as an american or a human being and reminds us that things do not always have to be as they are. He can make you look at you the world in a new way (as Edward Hall does for cultural anthropology). The essay format makes it very readable. I wanted to put in a word for those who may be browsing but are not part of the academic elite, don't know who Mencken, is and aren't into Milton critiques.

Stanley Fish is not content to be one of the greatest Milton scholars of our time--he also has to write brilliantly about the state of the academy and the nation. Clearly he has learned his rhetoric lessons from Milton. Fish is a rare creature, an extremely sharp intellect able to convey points without taking an anti-intellectual turn or resorting to the rather exclusive vocabularly common to so many of his colleagues. This particular outing finds the good professor Fish critiquing Free Speech as it is often resorted to in contemporary politics, taking issue with both right and left. But make no mistake: Fish has his politics, and the reader can chase them through some 307 pages of engagements with Supreme Court decisions, New Historicist literary scholars, the Critical Legal Studies movement, and plenty of neoconservatives. The only that's dry here is Fish's ample wit. The result is stunning: a critique of the Left from the Left which goes beyond the now-tired critique of political correctness to ask some very astute questions about how America will face its dark self in its past, present, and future. Flinch we might, but Fish won't let us simply turn our back and run in whichever direction we should choose