Politics is full of words. Although all the theories in Part I of this book take some account of the role of words in politics, discourse theories focus directly on the words – the discourses – that constitute the textual basis of politics. The use of a particular discourse reinforces one set of political possibilities while unconsciously excluding others. As this chapter shows, one role of political scientists is to recover the possibility of political debate about terms such as ‘human rights’ by pointing to the other possibilities that a particular discourse about rights is obscuring. Discourse theorists and post-structuralists thus share a starting point of radical questioning of Australia’s political status quo with the critical theorists discussed in Chapter 4. They differ from critical theorists in the way that they view the relationship of discourses to socio-economic interests. They also refuse to give a particular structure (of class or gender) primacy in the analysis of power, seeing politics as more open and fluid than critical theorists do.