ABSTRACT
The binding is provided by the social, cultural and psychological conditions that limit the exercise of independence in such a way that it never surfaces as full-blown autonomy. The individuality that underlies the foundation of autonomy requires as external features, individuality, independence and the power to act on and express that individuality. Autonomy both personal and collective, has clear precursors in forms of life that pre-date individualism. At the risk of moving too quickly, it might be claimed that autonomy requires not only independence and individuality but also politics or at least agonistic politics and negotiable structures. Such communities might have been autonomous and might have regarded themselves as autonomous but like the gods of the earliest pantheon were they not beyond all given conditions of being. But that rather godly model is frequently inapposite to human conceptions of autonomy and human models of independence.
