With a conception of autonomy outlined, it will be helpful to consider alternative approaches to the concept that also see it in its role as a fundamental political idea. In particular, it may be illuminating to see another way in which the traditional hyper-individualism of autonomy-based principles have been rejected and replaced. Critical examination of this alternative will help us, in addition, to consider the issue of recognition of persons' social identities in the models of citizens' perspectives and interests in autonomy-based principles of democratic justice. In the end, we will see how the concept of autonomy developed in the previous chapter, along with the model of (socio-historical) self spelled out earlier, will allow us to accommodate the most pressing concerns in these areas but avoid some prickly implications as well.

RELATIONAL SELVES AND RELATIONAL AUTONOMY

Feminists have been especially vocal in the claim that the idea of autonomy central to liberal politics must be reconfigured or abandoned so as to be more sensitive to relations of care, interdependence, and mutual support that define our lives and which have traditionally marked the realm of the feminine. The resistance to conceptions of justice based on the independent individual with no ties to family, children, and significant others reflects this suspicion of autonomy as an ideal geared toward the life experience, for the most part, of privileged males.