ABSTRACT
Despite its everyday connotations, the republican idea of independence is not a celebration of individualism or self-reliance but embodies an acknowledgement of the importance of personal and social relationships. It reflects connectedness rather than separateness. Properly understood, independence helps address a fundamental problem that preoccupies theorists of relational autonomy, namely how to reconcile individual human agency with the inevitable and necessary influence of other people. I derive my account from the work of Mary Wollstonecraft and Catharine Macaulay, whose contributions have remained largely overlooked by neo-republican theorists.
This chapter has three purposes. It first sets out the relational character of independence. Second, it outlines a republican approach to the problem of structural social threats to agency. Finally, it aspires to establish the basis for a fruitful dialogue between republicans and relational autonomy theorists on the requirements and dynamics of individual agency and freedom in oppressive social situations. I identify three distinctive features of the internal logic of independence that give it a relational character: Persons are always located within a community; the notion of arbitrariness plays a mediating role between the individual and collective perspectives; and the dependence of one class of persons jeopardizes the independence of the whole community.
