Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A policy of national self-sufficiency and nonreliance on imports or economic aid.
  • noun A self-sufficient region or country.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun economic independence as a national policy.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun National economic self-sufficiency.
  • noun The state of personal self-sufficiency.
  • noun An enclosed ecosystem.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun economic independence as a national policy

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Greek autarkeia, self-sufficiency, from autarkēs, self-sufficient : auto-, auto- + arkein, to suffice.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Ancient Greek αὐτάρκεια (autarkia, "self sufficiency").

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Examples

  • I take "autarky" in the sense that one must be able to produce enough to pay for what one consumes, which condemns the American economy as it presently is.

    Archive 2008-06-01 papabear 2008

  • Dr. Woods describes a distributivism which advocates that “people withdraw from the division of labor of a market society and retreat instead into a kind of autarky … The emphasis here is on having as many people as possible be owners of their own land and of whatever means of production they employ”8.

    The Distributivism of Hilaire Belloc 2007

  • George Will on ABC's This Week observed, All modern tyrannies have depended on intellectual autarky, being able to seal of the consciousness of their people from the outside world. . .

    Will Obama now reverse course on Iran? Jennifer Rubin 2011

  • The North Korean people are isolated from the contemporary global community, and they will not soon be rid of juche ideology and the folly of autarky.

    Bernard Rowan: North Korea's Distant Sun Bernard Rowan 2011

  • All this blather about “foreign oil” reeks of the assumption of the superiority of autarky over comparative advantage.

    The Volokh Conspiracy » Debating Green Jobs 2010

  • The North Korean people are isolated from the contemporary global community, and they will not soon be rid of juche ideology and the folly of autarky.

    Bernard Rowan: North Korea's Distant Sun Bernard Rowan 2011

  • This kind of economic autarky found its counterpart on the political front in the principle of "self-determination."

    The Demise of Third Worldism Fabio Rafael Fiallo 2011

  • Pursuit of autarky (which we can narrow to “energy independence”) is foolish and impoverishes anyone who tries it.

    The Volokh Conspiracy » Debating Green Jobs 2010

  • The point of Turning Oil in Salt is not to exit world oil markets (a ruse they deride as autarky) but to develop a dynamic market of many oil alternatives -- both alcohol fuels and electricity -- so that we may import oil for the mix if we want but stay resilient to the shocks that oil markets provide.

    Anne Butterfield: Make Oil Obsolete by Turning It into Salt 2010

  • The point of Turning Oil in Salt is not to exit world oil markets (a ruse they deride as autarky) but to develop a dynamic market of many oil alternatives -- both alcohol fuels and electricity -- so that we may import oil for the mix if we want but stay resilient to the shocks that oil markets provide.

    Anne Butterfield: Make Oil Obsolete by Turning It into Salt 2010

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  • "India was emerging at that time from a long spell of economic autarky and stagnation, in which one had to reserve long-distance telephone calls as if they were tables at a posh restaurant, days in advance."

    The New York Times, December 25, 2007

    December 26, 2007