‘Democratic Theory: Beyond the Pale’ By Dr Mark Devenney and Dr Clare Woodford

This event is hosted by the School of Political Science & Sociology’s Power, Conflict and Ideology Research Cluster.

Medieval Ireland was physically divided by a palisade separating an English-ruled enclave stretching from Dublin to Dundalk, from a Gaelic-speaking area whose inhabitants were considered uncivilised, ‘beyond the pale’. In this paper we put this notion of the ‘pale’ to work to rethink the paradoxes of democratic theory, and in so doing to rethink democratic politics. Democratic theorists struggle with the apparent paradox that the demos, in exercising sovereign power, must draw boundaries which violate the equality democracy presupposes. In our view the various paradoxes of democracy – of boundaries, of legitimacy and of founding – only arise because democratic theorists assume that democracy must be a regime. We reject this assumption. Democracy, we contend, is an anarchic ‘instantiation of equality’ which upsets all institutionalisation or ordering. Democracy begins with the assumption that all are equal. It is undermined whenever and wherever equality is limited. All regimes will, then, struggle to determine who belongs to ‘the people’, how to justify these limits, and how to discipline the impropriety let loose by the promise of democratic equality for all. We contend that equality cannot be contained and that democracy is always in excess of any attempt to bind, legitimate or found it. Democratic theory in trying to justify the boundaries of democracy misunderstands its own object. It functions like the English pale of old, demarcating an established distribution of property and behaviours and preventing any reconfiguration of proprietary order. Existing debates fail to account for the specific ways in which propriety as well as property are instrumental to the maintenance of inequality. This is bought into focus by our re-reading of Rousseau’s defence of ‘proprietary order’ which traces the paradox of politics back to the paradox of property in a manner that theorists of the political paradox (Mouffe, Honig and Connolly) have simply ignored. Democracy, we conclude, occurs wherever there is an enactment of equality against proprietary order. 

Dr Mark Devenney is the co-director of the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Economics and lectures in the School of Humanities at the University of Brighton. Mark’s research covers two primary areas: first, contemporary political philosophy, and second improper forms of political action including occupations, theft, squatting, and terrorism. Mark’s recent publications include: ‘The politics of antagonism’ in Contemporary Political Theory (2016); ‘Property, propriety and democracy’, in Social Justice Studies (2011), and Ethics and Politics in Contemporary Theory (Routledge, 2004) in which he critically examines the points of ethico-political difference and convergence between Post-Marxist radical democratic theory and Critical Theory’s deliberative account of democracy. 

Dr Clare Woodford is lectures in the School of Humanities at the University of Brighton. Her research interests include theories of gender, ideology and pedagogy, Marxism and post-Marxism, queer theory, psychoanalysis, democratic struggle, activism and the arts, and performance studies. Clare’s recent book Disorienting Democracy: Politics of Emancipation, was published by Routledge in 2016, and is concerned with drawing out the transformative potentialities of thinking democracy as dissensus in light of the work of Jacques Rancière, for not only left politics, but for society as well.

(Contact: l.farrell7@nuigalway.ie)