The debate between Habermas and Foucault has been seen as one between communicative reason and nihilism, but this article argues that it is more usefully understood as a debate between communicative reason and dialogical ethics. Habermas's rhetorically delivered rationality, the author contends, harbors dangerous pressures that are at odds with its most profound insights and lead to normative, methodological, and empirical problems when it comes to understanding new social movements. Alternatively, he insists, themes in Foucault's work provide a better position from which to formulate a dialogical ethics that more adequately affirms both difference and solidarity. At the same time, it offers greater insight into several important new social movements and gestures toward a politics less tyrannized by consensus imperatives.