Stanley Fish: There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech (…and it’s a good thing too)Oxford University Press, 1994 | Stanley Fish, born 1938
Synopsis
Stanley Fish’s controversial book, There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech (…and it’s a good thing too), offers a powerful critique of the idea of freedom of speech. He rejects, in the first place, the idea that speech can ever really be separated from action, and argues that the practical concerns bound up with speech always bring with them some kind of constraint on speech. He concludes that all arguments about freedom of speech are arguments that seek to replace one broadly accepted system of constraints on speech with another.
Fish, Stanley. There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech: And it’s a Good Thing Too. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Fish, Stanley. Versions of Academic Freedom: From Professionalism to Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.
Fish, Stanley. “Truth but No Consequences: Why Philosophy Doesn’t Matter.” Critical Inquiry 29, No. 3 (2003): 389-417.
Find it on JSTOR (free access).
Fish, Stanley. “Liberalism Doesn’t Exist.” Duke Law Journal No. 6 (1987): 997-1001.
Find it on JSTOR (free access).
Firing Line Debate on Freedom of Speech in Higher Education, with John Silber, Glenn C. Loury, Dinesh D’Souza, Catharine R. Stimpson, Leon Botstein, Ronald W. Walters, Stanley Fish, August 28, 1991.
Panel on the State of Free Speech in America, Stanley Fish, Eric Posner, Greg Lukianoff, Jonathan Rauch, and Jeffrey Rosen, National Constitution Center, March 25, 2014.
“Campus as a Safe Space or Free Speech Zone.” Panel hosted by Creighton University’s Institute for Economic Inquiry, September 27, 2016.