considered intuitions while structuring them so as to bring out their internal
logic constitutes a powerful argument in favor of that theory (Kymlicka 1992 , 6 ).
Political theory can help to clarify if not to resolve the tensions that may arise
between our intuitions relating to freedom, equality, or other important values
such as security. It can even serve the realistically utopian task of further
entrenching such values within the limits of what is currently possible. How-
ever, a crucial aim remains the justiWcatory task of providing secure conceptual
and moral foundations for the constitutional principles of liberal democracy
(Rawls 1993 , 101 ).
By contrast, post-structuralist philosophers 1 see themselves as engaged in a
more radical and critical project. Derrida insists that deconstruction seeks to
intervene in order to change things or at least to engage with events and
transformations already under way (Derrida 1992 , 8 – 9 ). InSpecters of Marx,
he endorses a form of Marxism that is heir to the spirit of the Enlightenment
and that in turn justiWes a ‘‘radical and interminable’’ critique of the present
(Derrida 1994 , 90 ). Deleuze and Guattari argue that ‘‘it is with utopia that
philosophy becomes political and takes the criticism of its own time to its
highest point’’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994 , 99 ). By ‘‘utopia’’ they do not mean
some transcendent vision of a better society but those moments or processes
immanent in a given society which embody the potential for change. They
deWne philosophy as the creation of concepts in the service of such immanent
utopianism: ‘‘We lack resistance to the present. The creation of concepts in
itself calls for a future form, for a new earth and people that do not yet exist’’
(Deleuze and Guattari 1994 , 108 ).
Success in this kind of political philosophy is not measured by a test such as
Rawls’s reXective equilibrium or by a contribution to maintaining a well-
ordered society but by the capacity of its concepts to engage productively
with movements of social change. Its aim is to assist new forms of individual
and collective life that, in speciWc ways, are better than those from which they
emerged. In contrast to earlier forms of utopianism, post-structuralists deny
any overarching criteria of progress. In the aftermath of the failure of Com-
munist regimes in Eastern Europe, the failure of revolutionary movements to
materialize in the West, and the collapse of belief in the philosophy of history
which for so long underpinned the hopes of critics of capitalism, the post-
structuralist philosophers sought to outline other strategies for resistance to
1 In this chapter, I focus on Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, and Foucault, taking these to be in
many, although not all, respects representative of the diVerent currents of French post-structuralism.
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