Explaining moral evil in a world of autonomous actors while still maintaining faith in Providence was no easy task, and Ms. Neiman eloquently outlines the attempts.

The success of small regional units coexisting as autonomous actors in loose geographical and cultural unity, as in Italy or Greece, often prevented their amalgamation into larger national units.

Promise theory is a model of voluntary cooperation between individual, autonomous actors or agents who publish their intentions to one another in the form of promises.

Another criticism states that in reality state officials are not the autonomous actors and they in fact are just being driven by the dominant class, challenging the state-autonomy approach.

Like Marx, Miliband understood that states and governments are never autonomous actors; their options are shaped, and often foreclosed, by the distribution of power and resources.

That includes even traditionally autonomous actors like U.S. attorneys.

Her argument is influenced by the Marxist notion of the class struggle, but she differs from Marx as she sees the state as an autonomous actor within society.

Generally, institutions are recognized as autonomous actors with varying degrees of interdependence with, and legislated commitments to the external stakeholders, local and national government.

As autonomous actors we create and modify the social world, bringing about events and states of affairs which would not otherwise have occurred.

That is, even after individuation takes place, the world does not become passive background or stage on which newly autonomous actors relate to each other.