The paper explores the deployment of the measure of the state of exception in the actual performing of the liberal-democratic form of governing. Introduced as formal suspension of the rule of the law in cases of emergency, exceptionalisms have gradually designated situations of blurred overtaking of the normal legal order by state authorities while governing; the result is an overstretching of state’s executive powers at the expense of citizens’ participation and collective decision-making constitutive for the democratic practice. Critical approaches ultimately identify the state’s authoritarian character under exception with the adoption of a police function and of all-encompassing forms of biopolitical governmentality; these outcomes threaten the democratic foundation of state life and cause individuals, citizens and communities to surrender their democratic principles. However, the use of exceptionalism may not be antithetical to democracy when conceived as subjects’ self-responsibility to adopt forms of reciprocal assistance throughout all levels of the community. Moving from Scarry’s theory of individuals’ thinking in emergency, the paper argues that forms of exception are reconcilable with the maintenance of genuine democratic values: this is enabled by a normative approach that starts from subjects’ self-reflexivity on their ontological embeddedness in the society.