n. The power or right of self-government, whether in a community which elects its own magistrates and makes its own laws, or in an individual who acts according to his own will.n. A self-governing community.n. An autonomous condition; the condition of being subject only to its own laws; especially, in biology, organic independence.n. In the philos. of Kant, the doctrine that the moral law is one which reason imposes upon itself a priori, that is, independently of sense and sense-experience, and is therefore absolute and immutable: opposed to heteronomy (which see).