[In the following review, Connor provides a summary of Fish's concerns and arguments in There's No Such Thing as Free Speech and It's a Good Thing, Too.]

In these courteously combative, affably brawling essays [in There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech and It’s a Good Thing, Too] Stanley Fish continues to rage against the mistaken objectivism and universalism that he detects not only in the neoconservative defenders of cultural tradition and the American way but also in the liberal promoters of difference and multiculturalism. First and last for Fish is the principle of the unavailability of transcendent truths or values of any kind, where ‘transcendent’ would mean not formed or governed by the restrictions and particularities of place, culture, and time. Unfortunately for the perspectivists and antifoundationalists who might go along with Fish’s arguments up to this point, he also holds that the acknowledgement of the relativity of all truth gives one absolutely no epistemological edge over those still mired in relativity, or exemption from their condition.

In a number of essays in the first part of this volume, Fish attacks the neoconservative attackers of political correctness for the rhetorical quarantining of disinterested truth from ideology or political interests (in order, for example, to protect the canon of Great Books from the imagined anarchy of the multiculturalist curriculum), arguing that all truths are partial, perspectival, and therefore political. The savage indignation of these essays makes Fish hard to recognize as the svelte sophist that he is made out to be by some critics of the left. Fish is also cheerfully disdainful of arguments founded on the principle of free speech, as they are deployed by left and right alike. Free speech cannot exist for the same reason that liberalism cannot exist; that it will always be the expression and vehicle of particular values and interests, as will the carving out for whatever ostensibly disinterested purpose of any definition of free speech.

The second part of this generously filled volume includes three wide-ranging essays on legal theory, along with essays on multidisciplinarity, on New Historicism, and on Milton studies. There is also an essay that widens out from a discussion of the alleged preference of North American academics for ugly but safe cars to an attack on the institutionalized masochism of academic culture. Fish’s titles are, as ever, good fun: this last is called ‘The Unbearable Ugliness of Volvos’, though I think I like even better the title that Fish offers in an aside: ‘An Academic Is Being Beaten’. The final item is the text of a longish interview, in which Fish pokes in the embers of old and current feuds and restates a number of his convictions.

Fish’s introductory essay suggests that the pieces in the second part of the book are concerned with considering the consequences of the principles argued for in the first, but it is really the purpose of all the essays in the book to argue that there are no necessary consequences of any theory, just as there are no politics in particular that follow automatically from the recognition, itself strongly urged by Fish, that everything is political. If Fish declines to acknowledge any principle or theory underlying or emerging from his attacks on principles and theories, it is above all because this would be flagrantly self-contradictory: ‘The point is that there is no point, no yield of a positive programmatic kind to be carried away from these analyses […] it would be contradictory for me to have a point beyond that point’ (p. 307), he carefully protests. Fish demands this coherence of others as well as himself, and most of the arguments he offers depend upon the rooting out of unrecognized or unacknowledged self-contradiction in his adversaries. However, it is not all that easy for Fish to remain consistent on these matters, since this requires him precisely to embrace inconsistency. ‘Give me a break’, he teasingly implores at one point, ‘I am not in the business of organizing my successive actions so that they all are available to a coherent philosophical account’ (p. 299). I cannot imagine how Fish is ever going to be able to make up his mind about whether to be consistently inconsistent or inconsistently consistent on these questions. In the indefinite meantime, though, the unflagging energy of his assault on theory and its claims to coherence is an indication of how much, for him, the question of whether theory matters, matters.