What does it mean to be free? This question underlies longstanding debates about the nature of freedom and autonomy. In Western liberal traditions, autonomy is often understood as self-rule, the capacity to act without external coercion. This framework, however, tends to emphasize external impediments to freedom while neglecting internal constraints, such as undue desires, selfish motives, and egoistic views that inhibit an individual’s ability to exercise true autonomy.
This paper explores how a non-Western philosophy of the self—specifically, the Swaminarayan Hindu tradition—challenges and expands existing secular liberal conceptions of personal autonomy. Drawing on Hindu sacred texts, such as the Bhagavad Gītā and the Vacanāmṛta, and my multisited ethnographic fieldwork among Swaminarayan communities in India and the United States, I argue that autonomy is best understood as a synthesis of external freedom—freedom from social, cultural, political, and economic constraints—and internal self-formation, which involves ethical self-cultivation and spiritual discipline. Drawing on this study, I propose a theoretical model of autonomy that foregrounds the dynamic interplay between, and integration of, external and internal dimensions of freedom. It at once critiques and expands secular liberal understandings of autonomy by emphasizing the co-constitutive relationship between structural constraints and inner self-mastery.