Why have political theorists given up on the critique of property? What has happened to our understanding of inequality as centred on the politics of property? Might we rescue this critique of inequality, without resorting to the prescriptive politics of propriety so characteristic of Marxism? Property is central to every aspect of contemporary politics. The financial crisis of 2008 had its root in sub-prime mortgages. The demands of indigenous peoples reject the logics of property established through colonial violence. The damage caused to our environment and climate has its origins in a very particular notion of land and cattle as property. In these, and many other instances, a failure to think the politics of property limits our ability to imagine better ways of living together. The wager of this book is that thinking improperly about property and propriety allows for an original critique of inequality. Theoretical and political debates of the past half century have circled around different notions of the improper – différance, the real, the ‘other’, antagonism, excess. They all allude to an impossibility that disturbs, yet concurrently lends coherence to, what is deemed proper, what can be rendered a property in itself. However, the play between the proper, propriety and the improper is ignored in post-foundationalist debates about the political. In introducing an improper politics I develop a conceptual vocabulary to engage with the politics of property and inequality from a post-foundational perspective. I characterise property, propriety and the proper as central to hegemonic order and rethink hegemony in proprietary terms. This critique of the politics of the proper also requires a rethinking of democracy. I characterise democratic politics as improper, one way to reanimate the proper bounds of reason, dominant ontologies and the policing of property, propriety and subjectivity. Thinking democracy as an improper practice of equality accords a dignity to forms of politics often deemed marginal in democratic theories. I argue that theorists of democracy have confused democratic politics with the forms taken by the state and political regimes. The text responds to two related problems of critical thought and practice. First, many argue that post-foundationalist theories of the political undermine a politics committed to material equality. The charge is patently false.