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Critics of liberalism and even some liberal theorists themselves have criticized a liberal emphasis on autonomy, because they associate autonomy with self sufficiency. That association reinforces the worst aspects of atomistic individualism: social isolation, insulation from the views of others, and a rejection of society's values and interests. But the association of autonomy with self-sufficiency is uncalled for; those who see that association are mistaken, for self-sufficiency represents not a fulfillment of autonomy but the abandonment of it. Autonomy, it is argued, has a social nature: It not only develops through sociality, but it also requires sociality for its exercise. In short, to be autonomous one must know one is autonomous; to know one is autonomous requires giving an account to others of the reasons for a decision or action. The social nature of autonomy may incline theorists to see persons as communitarian or socially situated selves. But communitarians such as Charles Taylor find the self defined in part by communal boundaries and thus see them as context-dependent. Autonomy is bounded by language, not community. It is both context-free and context-related, but not context-dependent. Liberal theorists who champion autonomy should therefore abandon any notions of selves as social atoms or isolates and build liberalism on the implications of autonomy's social nature. Part of those implications is that social institutions that foster and exercise autonomy must involve dialogue or communicative exchange. The most important and effective institutions of that kind are those of direct democracy.

In most countries in Latin America, rural areas remain as populated as, or more populated than, in 1950. People continue to live in rural areas despite the declining economic viability of agriculture and the availability of work elsewhere. Through an application of the production of nature argument, enriched by explicit attention to the production of culture and the agency of nature, I attempt to resolve that apparent paradox. In a case study illustrating the argument, agriculture has declined in importance over several decades, while craft production and temporary, cyclical emigration has increased. Remaining agricultural activities and craft production utilize natural stocks and processes through the application of family labour, with minimal recourse to a money economy. Cyclical emigration and remittances from relatives also support the economic maintenance of rural lives. Together, these activities permit the social reproduction of households that send members to find work elsewhere. At the scale of North America, therefore, Mexican nature subsidizes the cheap reproduction of labourers working in cities and commercial agriculture in both Mexico and the United States. At the scale of the village, nature enables people to cobble together livelihoods that support households and villages. But more fundamentally, people produce culture through everyday activities of production and consumption; and so nature provides the necessary context for the productive activities that define and give meaning to what households and village communities are, and what it means to be an individual member.

Abstract
Although community is a core sociological concept, its meaning is often left vague. In this article it is pointed out that it is a social form that has deep connections with human social nature. Human social life and human social history can be seen as unflagging struggles between two contradictory behavioral modes: reciprocity and status competition. Relative to hunter-gatherer societies, present society is a social environment that strongly seduces to engage in status competition. But at the same time evidence increases that communal living is strongly associated with well being and health. A large part of human behavior and of societal processes are individual and collective expressions of on the one hand succumbing to the seductions of status competition and one the other hand attempts to build and maintain community. In this article some contemporary examples of community maintaining, enrichment and building are discussed. The article concludes with a specification of structural conditions for community living and a short overview of ways in which the Internet affects these conditions.

The true integration of interpersonal, social psychology, and cognitive-behavioral approaches is the most important theoretical issue in the field of the psychology of depression, and yet it has not been well addressed in any forum. The Interpersonal, Cognitive, and Social Nature of Depression was written to provide cutting-edge research and theoretical perspectives on this issue. Its goal is to concretize and celebrate an integrative approach to the understanding of depression, and to foster its sequelae, by bringing together primary figures from interpersonal, cognitive, and behavioral viewp