When Stanley Fish, professor of English and law at Duke University, debated conservative Dinesh D'Souza on political correctness in 1991 and 1992, D'Souza argued against the PC movement by drawing upon his book Illiberal Education. At the time, Fish had no appropriate book of his own with which to counter. No longer.

There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, a collection of essays written for those debates as well as other previously published articles, is Fish's take on the so-called culture wars, the First Amendment, and other assorted topics.

The essays vary widely in their clarity and accessibility (at least to those who haven't had the opportunity to study Derrida, deconstructionism, and hermeneutics). And while Fish makes some interesting observations and writes with occasional wit, his essays will likely change few minds.

Fish argues that there are no timeless, transcendental truths beyond partisan vision. There is no such thing as human objectivity, because everything is viewed from a particular vantage point. For Fish, all human activity takes place in local, particular settings or contexts that are tied to specific times and places, and an actor cannot avoid being influenced by the norms and standards of the local endeavor.

Under this view, the call by people like former Secretary of Education William Bennett and former National Endowment for the Humanities Director Lynne Cheney for a canon of literature whose "truths . . . pass beyond time and circumstance; truths that, transcending accidents of class, race and gender, speak to us all," to quote a 1988 NEH report, is impossible to realize. But accordingly to Fish, the anti-PC crowd is more than innocently wrongheaded: Its members are trying to establish and maintain their own political program as the dominant one. The champions of the Western Civilization canon "would arrest the play of democratic forces in order to reify as transcendent a particular and uncommon stage in cultural history. The politics would stop time and elevate one set of tastes to a position of privilege from which it could then label all other tastes as vulgar, inessential, and corrupting."

Ultimately, what Fish wants is for the conservatives to come clean and admit that, in denouncing political correctness, they are in fact pursuing their own political agenda. This seems a fair charge. But, ironically, while Fish accuses his opponents of squelching debate by beating those associated with political correctness about the head with the PC epithet, Fish does the anti-PC forces one better by suggesting that all cultural conservatives are racists -- an allegation that is an even larger club with which to intimidate opponents.

Fish wields the club in a chapter entitled "Bad Company." Here, he briefly describes the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s book The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society, in which Schlesinger, a prominent liberal, asks immigrants and minorities in America to assimilate into "a common culture, a single nation."

Schlesinger is motivated by a non-racial, non-nationalistic belief that the United States was founded upon certain democratic principles, ones that should serve to unite all Americans who came to this country lacking a common ethnic heritage. Fish does not analyze or dispute this argument; it is easier for him to dismiss the argument's proponent by saying that "Schlesinger [and others] may not be racists in the manner of their predecessors, but in the absense of the real thing . . . they will do." This mode of ad hominem argument is unlikely to earn Fish much respect.

Fish's contention that there are no objective standards finds its way into a discussion of First Amendment jurisprudence. Many proponents of free speech will find Fish's gloss inaccurate in its description of current First Amendment practice and insufficiently protective of speech in its prescription of how the First Amendment ought to work. In the title essay, Fish writes: Abstract concepts like free speech do not have any "natural" content but are filled with whatever content and direction one can put into them. . . .

. . . Speech, in short, is never a value in and of itself but is always produced within the precincts of some assumed conception of the good to which it must yield in the event of conflict. When the pinch comes (and sooner or later it will always come) and the institution (be it church, state or university) is confronted by behavior subversive of its core rationale, it will respond by declaring "of course we mean not tolerated -- , that we extirpate," not because an exception to a general freedom has suddenly and contradictorily been announced, but because the freedom has never been general and has always been understood against the background of an originary exclusion that gives it meaning.

Many examples exist to refute the author's argument that the state and other institutions cannot judge speech in a content-neutral way and tolerate speech they find subversive. The government permits subversive speech all the time. Cohen v. California, in which the Supreme Court in 1971 protected anti-draft speech in a courthouse, comes to mind as a well-known illustration. Perhaps even more dramatically, the ACLU regularly defends the free-speech rights of fascists and Ku Klux Klan members who would surely subvert the organization's "core rationale" by circumscribing the civil liberties of others if they could do so, suggesting that the principle of content neutrality does have some meaning.

In a chapter entitled "Jerry Falwell's Mother, or, What's the Harm?" Fish contends that a major flawed assumption underlying First Amendment law is that speech is distinguishable from action on the basis of their respective effects, one being a form of behavior that is safely confined to the realms of cognition and expression, the other a form of behavior whose consequences spill out into the world, where they can threaten a person's bodily comfort or livelihood or quality of life.

But the underpinning of constitutionalized defamation law isn't that "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never harm me." (Although I do believe that Fish exaggerates the injury, if any, that Jerry Falwell suffered by reason of Hustler magazine's crude and ludicrous parody depicting him and his mother together in an outhouse -- in fact, donations to Falwell's Moral Majority increased following the publication of the Hustler parody.) Rather, a major premise of defamation doctrine is that some speech is demonstrably true or false (facts) while other speech is not (ideas or opinions), and that the government will not regulate ideas.

Fish, however, takes issue with the principal articulated in the 1974 decision in Gertz v. Robert Welch Inc, that under the First Amendment "there is no such thing as a false idea," and because he's apparently confident in his ability to decide which ideas are false and which are true, he is willing to take appropriate action.

Although Fish argues that objective line-drawing is impossible and that case-by-case balancing is the way to proceed, he doesn't mind letting legislatures declare, say, that regardless of literary, artistic, political, or scientific value, actionable pornography consists of "the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women, whether in pictures or in words." The quoted language is from the Indianapolis ordinance drafted largely by Catharine MacKinnon and struck down as unconstitutional in 1986 by the Supreme Court in American Booksellers Association v. Hudnut. Fish's support of the ordinance is an example of his comfort in letting one group -- here, the government -- prescribe what shall be orthodox and permissible in matters of politics and speech. It is precisely what critics indict as dangerous political correctness.

Almost as strikingly, Fish is not at all concerned about how judges may interpret undefined terms in the Indianapolis statute such as "subordination," "sexual objects," "exploitation," "servility," and "submission," not to mention "sexually explicit." Nor does Fish acknowledge the chilling effect that such a law has. He extols Canada's less-protective attitudes toward speech, but Canada has enacted a law similar to the Indianapolis ordinance, and there have been reports of several serious books disappearing from the shelves of Canadian bookstores as a consequence.

Many essays in Fish's book were written for highly specialized academic audiences and will not be perspicuous (the author's favorite word) to the general reader who may not know reader-response theory from the New Historicism. Fish himself recognizes the problem when he admits, "There is a set of problems of translation and rhetorical accommodation that one comes upon when attempting to talk to audiences outside the academy which is absolutely fascinating and difficult." Unfortunately, however, the author did little but reprint verbatim several essays directed at narrow segments of the academy. (And the volume's introductory essay is not terribly elucidating or helpful.) Thus, he has not succeeded at the "rhetorical accommodation" he recognizes as necessary to reach a general audience.

Yet one of the book's more interesting insights is that, even if we accept Fish's view that there are no timeless or transcendent truths knowable to man, we need not fear sliding into a standardless abyss because the process of being socialized into a particular field requires one to act within that field's norms and standards.

Perhaps it is because Fish, a non-lawyer, was never socialized into the First Amendment law as a law student and attorney that he has missed the norms and standards of First Amendment doctrine that most of the rest of us find so compelling.