Abstract

The rhetorical figure of the criminal held, and continues to hold, a privileged position within theoretical articulations of liberal democracy. That the centrality of this figure was, and remains, necessary for our understanding and internalization of the norms and values of liberal democracy makes us, as subjects of democratic self-rule, oddly dependent upon this figure; thereby limiting and defining who can be a subject of democracy, who is subject to the criminal justice system, what forms of speech and action are or are not considered legitimately political, and how we perceive crime as a social or political issue. ;By historicizing the criminal figure in the canonical texts of modern political thought and challenging the role played in this process by the sciences of man I hope to illuminate how liberal democracy became dependent upon the demands of the criminal justice system and how reliance upon that system has foreclosed upon the possibility of pluralistic democracy. Through exposing the significant history of the criminal threat as a rhetorical trope I illuminate the racial and cultural injustices structurally inherent to monistic democracy, challenge the application of medical language to political issues, and open up the discourses of sociology, criminology and policing to democratic and pluralistic considerations