Scholars have long attempted to place autonomy in context, demonstrating that the autonomous person has been produced in particular sociohistorical (Mauss, 1985; Taylor, 1989; Cushman, 1990) and cultural (Weber, 1958; Doi, 1973; Gaines, 1982; Bellah et al., 1985; Dumont, 1986; Kurtz, 1992) environments. Some theorists have also found him to be, to some degree, a gender specific type (Chodorow, 1979; Gilligan, 1982). Still other scholars go so far as to assert that the autonomous person may not even exist, that he is a modern European invention in an even more radical sense — that of being fabricated, a lie, an illusion (Gergen, 1991, 1994).