Republican liberty and resilience

Abstract

The object of this paper is to focus attention on the ‘resilience’ property of republican liberty – a property that, at least in some formulations, is among those features that distinguishes republican liberty from its more familiar ‘liberal’ counterpart. Our analysis proceeds by way of an analogy with the idea of risk aversion. After setting the stage with a brief description of what we are taking republican liberty to be (in Section I), we turn to the question of how to conceptualise resilience and how the notion might most plausibly be formulated (Section II). Examining alternative possible formulations serves to suggest an analogy between resilience and ‘risk aversion’. In Section III, we exploit that analogy to develop some implications that resilience carries for institutional design. Section IV offers a brief summary.