Hirsch: Reletivism's Embarrassing Question

It is logically inconsistent to write scholarly books which argue that there is no point in writing scholarly books. For such cognitive atheists, all principles are subject to a universal relativism except relativism itself. But whence comes its exemption? What is the sanction, in a world devoid of absolutes, for its absoluteness? We are never told. This question, so absurdly simply, yet so embarrassing to relativism, is never answered by even the most brilliant of the cognitive atheists.
E. D. Hirsch, Aims of Interpretation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), p.13.