Six stories animate this book. They range across time and space, linking the past to the present, thinking of the spaces we live in as haunted, improper to themselves. Each story unpicks aspects of contemporary proprietary ordering. Proprietary orders articulate together differences, differentially distribute precarity, and establish subject positions and forms of power. Hegemony is comprehensible only in light of this global distribution of precarity. The articulation of property and propriety cuts across the normal boundaries of nation and state. If we are to think the demos in terms of the enactment of equality then its reference point is this order – not the conventional bounds that define national peoples. Democracy I contend does not have a proper place. To think democracy is at the same time to challenge dominant relations of property, sovereignty and economic inequality. It requires that we consider how these sedimented orders of property and wealth articulate with other properties – the properties ascribed to human beings, or laid claim to, against these ascriptions. It requires that we think of democracy as the extension of equality to every realm. Such a politics is messy – it fits no box, does not conform to a theory, has no proper place. It reanimates the past genealogically restoring to our histories moments when equality as improper erupted. The occupiers in the City of London did exactly this. Such a politics is impatient. It does not wait for the future to come.

The stories I have told insist that democracy begins with the material organisation of property and propriety. They range from the politics of a brick, to the extraction of the coltan that makes global communication possible. In each case, bodies are at stake when democracy is enacted – the bodies of occupiers, of protesters, or of peoples whose sense of self is articulated in their relation to the land, to others, to themselves, to the dead – the different elements of the relational ontology sketched by Arendt. Democracy and equality do not stop, or even begin, with communication, free speech and discussion. They begin with a rejection of the differential distribution of precarity, a rejection of an order that privileges some bodies and lives, over others. Democratic politics challenges the forms of exclusivity that proper order introduces to our worlds.