The scope for individualization differs significantly when institutional resources such as human rights, education and the welfare State can be harnessed to address the risks of individual biographies, as opposed to modem “atomization”, when such resources do not exist (Beck and Beck-Gemsheim, 2003). But it also raises the need to challenge the dichotomy between the active role of the caregiver and the passive one of the care receiver (Williams, 2002, in Roberts and Mort, 2009). It implies both a public dimension —which has to do with active participation in organizing society'— and a personal one, expressed in terms of the ability to formulate and implement one’s own life plans and to make decisions based on one’s own preferences. In both cases, autonomy is based on self-determination and the freedom to decide for oneself, even though the help and support of others may be necessary to achieve it.