ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how both the processes of democracy and the space(s) in which it is held to operate have been transformed and pluralised. It analyses the development of resilience-thinking in relation to the political sphere and highlights how these approaches overcome the rationalist assumptions of the public/private divide, paying particular attention to the work of two key liberal political theorists, John Dewey and Friedrich Hayek. The chapter also attempts to demarcate the linear or liberal approach from that of non-linear and resilience approaches: through drawing out the centrality of the separation between the public and the private sphere in liberal modernist frameworks. In liberal modernist framework, democracy no longer operates through the constitution of a formal public sphere but rather through the facilitation of private choice-making and personal and community modes of self-government. Engagement in the collective deliberation of democratic reasoning has been understood, from the Enlightenment theorists to the present, as the highest exercise of freedom.
