Towards an Improper Politics
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Edinburgh University Press
Published:7th Jan '20
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

This book systematically introduces the idea of an improper politics. Introducing a conceptual vocabulary, it engages with the politics of the proper, propriety and property from a post-foundational perspective. Mark Devenney argues that this triad is central to understanding the maintenance of global inequality, both economic and political. He characterises democratic politics as improper, challenging the proper bounds of reason, accepted behaviours, and the policing of proper order. The conceptualisation of democracy as an improper practice of equality accords a dignity to forms of politics often deemed marginal.
The strength of the book is Devenney’s knowledgeable and subtle engagement with a range of post-foundational thinkers, bringing forward and accentuating what is useful among its interlocutors. -- Torrey Shanks, University of Toronto * Contemporary Political Theory *
For those with a thorough grounding in left political theory, Towards an Improper Politics provides a thorough, detailed and persuasive argument. Devenney demonstrates a mastery in the field of high radical democratic theory, as well as contemporary political left critique, and populist politics from a decolonial lens, and this book will be of interest to any with an academic interest or expertise in those areas. Devenney’s expertise, creativity and theoretical innovation are undeniable. -- Francesca Kilpatrick * Interfere *
Mark Devenney’s book with its interweaving of high theory, political critique and empirical historical analysis is exemplary within the fields of critical and democratic theory. The result is a work of critical political theory like no other I have read in recent years. -- Liam Farrell, University of Limerick * Journal of Political Power *
To say this book is timely would be pure understatement: we need this book now because we needed it a decade ago. The turn to the question of property as a question of propriety provides an essential analysis of our contemporary social order, because we will not find a future path toward sustaining, re-affirming, or (better) remaking democracy, without the radical rethinking of property on offer here. * Samuel A. Chambers, John Hopkins University *
ISBN: 9781474454032
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 415g
224 pages