the present. It is at this point that they diVer most sharply, not only from
much liberal theory, but also from those forms of critical theory which insist
on the need for what Habermas calls ‘‘a transcendent moment’’ to provide a
secure basis for such critique of the present (Habermas 1996 , 15 ).
The radicalism of the post-structuralist philosophers leads to the accus-
ation that they focus on the diVerences that divide individuals and groups at
the expense of the shared values and institutions that are necessary if political
community is to Xourish. For this reason, many commentators Wnd it
impossible to envisage any reconciliation between post-structuralist and
liberal political philosophy. Richard Rorty, for example, famously condemns
the entire tradition that extends from Hegel and Nietzsche to Foucault and
Derrida as ‘‘largely irrelevant to public life and to political questions’’ (Rorty
1989 , 83 ). He accepts the signiWcance of this tradition for the private pursuit
of self-transformation but thinks that it is has no bearing on the public
political culture of contemporary liberal democracies. Others draw attention
to the variety of ways in which post-structuralism fails to address the central
institutions of liberal democracy. Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari,
et al. provide no foundations for institutions such as the rule of law or the
nature and limits of public reason; they provide no theory of justice, equality,
or freedom; they do not even spell out the normative foundations of their
own opposition to particular kinds of oppression or their support for par-
ticular liberation movements (Habermas 1987 , 276 ; Fraser 1989 , 32 – 3 ). In
France the rediscovery of normative ethics and political philosophy has led
critics to charge the entire May 1968 generation with rejection of liberal
democracy and refusal to accept the revolutionary social and economic
changes for which it was responsible in postwar France (Mengue 2003 , 89 ).
There is substance to these accusations. There are undoubted diVerences of
nuance and tone between Deleuze and Guattari’s extreme utopianism, the
more moderate utopianism associated with the liberal egalitarianism of
Rawls, Kymlicka, and others, and the apparent complacency of some varieties
of contemporary liberalism. Rorty’s suggestion that ‘‘Western social and
political thought may have had the last conceptual revolution it needs’’
(Rorty 1989 , 63 ) stands in sharp contrast to Deleuze and Guattari’s call for
the creation of untimely concepts in Nietzsche’s sense of this term: ‘‘acting
counter to [our] time, and therefore acting on our time and let us hope, for
the beneWt of a time to come’’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994 , 112 ; Nietzsche 1983 ,
60 ). However, we should be wary of overstating the real political diVerences at
issue. Against the received opinion of irreducible diVerences, I will argue that
post-structuralism and liberal pragmatism 127