The paper designed to evaluate independent living for handicapped persons as a social movement, analyze the movement's expression in disability services, and consider the movement's implications for disability research. An initial section recounts the movement's constituency, origins, legislative history, and its relationship to such social movements as civil rights, consumerism, self-help, demedicalization, and deinstitutionalization. Three major assumptions (consumer sovereignty, self reliance, and political and economic rights) of the movement are seen to be central to the movement's ideology regarding free market theory, and the political theory of democratic pluralism. Specific disability services (such as advocacy, attendant care, and peer counseling services) are pointed out as illustrative of the movement's philosophy. The final section proposes an analytic paradigm for independent living which sees that the problem does not reside in the individual but often in the dependency inducing features of the rehabilitation paradigm. Future considerations regarding the role of able bodied persons and pending legislation are addressed. (CL)