Abstract
This essay argues that Mary Shelley's novel reveals an overlooked concern about the form of democracy emergent in the early nineteenth century: the anxiety that the equality required for a truly democratic political order is inevitably indistinguishable from a dehumanizing logic of populationist equivalence. Such a logic, the novel suggests, risks making human life and animal life indistinguishable. I argue that the novel mobilizes a rigorous political pessimism to reject both Thomas Paine's claim that life alone is enough for politics and William Godwin's claim that culture can step in to ensure that human life can still be distinguished from animal life, even under conditions of radical equality.
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