Understanding Human Need 2e. Dean, Hartley

(Donati, 2013): that is to say the generative dynamics of action and interaction to be found in every field of social relations; and the sense that human beings do not necessarily shape, but are shaped by, their relationships with one another and with the associations and institutions that they collectively create.

      Sarah White (2017), for example, argues for a concept of relational well-being premised on a relational ontology and an acceptance that relationality is fundamentally constitutive of subjectivity. The autonomous individual of economic liberalism, she argues is a ‘cultural myth’. But

      The person as a simple component of the collective is similarly a fantasy. Instead … one of the puzzles that all human societies have to grapple with is the relationship between individual and collective, the self and other(s). … Within all societies there is variability … complexity, inconsistency and contradiction. Within all persons, there is conflict and ambivalence between belonging and autonomy. And collectivities are neither the simple sum of individuals, nor some super-individual in themselves, but develop emergent properties according to the relations that compose them. (p 129)