Was there ever an age without choice? Ever a time when bartering and trade did not exist? When councils did not opt for peace or war, or choose the course of justice? When temptation did not allure, and the world’s Adams and Eves did not seize on its promises? Is not choice so deeply embedded in human nature as to have no history—only innate presence?
To that illusion, Sophia Rosenfeld’s The Age of Choice gives a brilliant rebuttal. Her subject is not choice itself but modern choice: the emergence of cultures in which individual preference-making is not a rare event but a constant, pervasive human activity. Modern choice is no longer embodied in the classical figure of Hercules, torn between two rival maidens, one of whom beckons toward virtue, the other to sin and disaster. Modern persons live within an immense array of choices less stark and binary than those, where individuals fashion themselves through their continuous exercise of preferences, taste, and judgments. Through choice, as we now imagine it, we make ourselves up, one by one, as the persons we hope to be. Settings for collective choice endure as well, but with diminishing presence. Most of us live the important parts of our lives not in town halls and public forums but in the aisles of supermarkets, among the friends we elect to cultivate, or in the mazes of online opinion bazaars. We have individualized choice. We have made the momentous into an everyday event. And we call this freedom.
A less gifted and provocative historian than Sophia Rosenfeld might have told this story by stringing together the key works in the canon of liberalism. From Locke and Mill to the modern triumph of neoliberalism, it is conventionally said, the modern idea of choice evolves, pulling culture and society down its course. Intellectuals are not absent from Rosenfeld’s Age of Choice. But big cultural changes, she contends, are not made by philosophers. More often the thinkers come along late to clean up and theorize what has already emerged in the realm of practice. It was the spread of “choice-based practices…at once mental and physical,” as she describes them, that propelled the modern cultures of choice. They emerged neither from human nature itself nor from the work of neoliberalism’s avatars but piecemeal in the Euro-American societies of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.
Rosenfeld opens with one of those forgotten architects of modern choice—Christopher Cock—whose heavily advertised auctions in early-eighteenth-century London set a new standard with their dazzling array of goods, extravagant catalog descriptions, and ability to attract crowds to the drama of choice. Cock and his peers invented not shops but shopping: participation in the pleasures of looking, desiring, imagining, and entertaining (in the mind’s eye, at least) newly extravagant fantasies of choice. In the typical urban shop of old, one had spoken one’s request to the shopkeeper. Now, following Cock’s model, urban shops became theaters of display, adding larger windows and more temptingly laid out items for sale. Actually purchasing was not a requirement. Amid these new shows of abundance, one’s imagination alone could take one “shopping.”
And goods were not the only things the urban elites were able to shop for. So were religious faiths. The Reformation was not launched with any aim to expand religious “choice.” Calvin’s world was even more starkly determined than the “choice” that plagued Hercules. But the unexpected proliferation of sects and printed material in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries helped pry open the older monopolies of established religions. By the 1670s, the Quaker dissenter William Penn was calling not only for toleration of the pluralistic religious landscape forming around him but also for a new “liberty of conscience.” In still more modern terms, the French Revolutionary Constitution of 1795 promised, “No man can be hindered from exercising the worship he has chosen.”
One could choose a faith; one could choose ideas from the pamphlets and books that began to roll out from the printshops. One could even think by choosing, cutting up the books on offer and copying out one’s chosen parts to enter into one’s now purchasable commonplace book. John Locke authored a commonplacing manual to help guide readers through the process. In this fashion, Jefferson remade the Bible more to his liking with scissors and paste.
If one could think by choosing, one could organize pleasure in the same way. In the salons and dance halls, line dances gave way to more fashionable couple dances and printed dance cards on which men’s offers and women’s acceptances were carefully recorded choices. In politics, public voting, either by voice or by ballots so clearly marked that one’s party choice was an open book to the crowds standing watch, was replaced in the late nineteenth century by secret balloting. Every citizen alone, socially decontextualized for the occasion, marking a preference in the privacy of a voting booth: This was a radical reimagining of collective decision-making for an “age of choice.” John Adams’s proposal for the Great Seal of the new United States, which depicted Hercules torn between the mountaintops of virtue and the seductions of vice, belonged to a discarded age.
These and other transformations in rituals of cultural and social practice, Rosenfeld suggests, occurred one by one as the products of different dynamics, timing, and contexts. But they joined in reinforcing choice as core to a full human existence—not just a frivolous add-on to the imperatives of life. They laid the ground for the more explicit identification of individual choice with “freedom” that would come later. Without that construction in the world of practice, Rosenfeld writes, “the argument would have sounded not just unnatural but, likely, nonsensical.”
That edifice of modern choice was constructed half of facts but also, she shows, half of fictions. Behind each of the new rituals of choice, she explains, lay elaborate structures of constraints. From Mr. Cock forward, architects of choice organized and regulated these practices with a meticulous hand, harnessing their potentially anarchic energy. The menus from which one chose were almost never themselves the subjects of consumer choice. The engines of persuasion were never idle, just as they are constantly at work in a contemporary supermarket aisle, where fantasies of abundance are always carefully engineered. Choosers never acted alone, disengaged from the contexts around them. The citizens who entered the new secret voting booths tacitly brought with them a host of others: the peer pressures of their workmates, the political loyalties of their classes and religions, the slogans of the campaigns. Even the elites, whose range of choice was always far wider than anyone else’s, were, in the very act of choosing, subject to others’ actions. The women waiting on the ballroom halls’ sidelines while men eyed the dance partners on offer, and while parents watched closely over the status, assets, and appropriateness of any matches that might blossom into romance, were hardly autonomous actors. Choice is not free. It is expensive, inequitably distributed, and always constrained; it can be agonizing, paralyzing, guilt-ridden. It cannot be exercised without butting up against the choices of others. And freedom is only a sliver of its potential if it is just a synonym for choice.
These constraints and contradictions played out most strongly, Rosenfeld emphasizes, in the lives of women. They were the first to be identified as “shoppers,” and to be criticized for their inconstant, faddish preferences. Elite women held out their dance cards for men to sign, but arguably they had more freedom in the less carefully engineered dances that preceded waltzing’s rituals. They were the last to be let into politics, where they had long been assumed to make frivolous, self-centered selections. When women gained the vote, promising to bring a collective force of higher morality to bear on politics, men were openly relieved that women’s enfranchisement did not greatly change the electoral results. In all these ways, women are never out of Rosenfeld’s range of vision. Ultimately, she comes down hard on the strategic decision of second-wave feminists to invest their cause in choice itself. Perhaps there was no way to avoid the bitter fights that abortion opened up in a culture where religion still played a powerful role in shaping what legitimately lay within and beyond the realm of choice. But the slogan of “choice,” Rosenfeld shows, ultimately mobilized feminists’ opponents as much as it did feminists themselves. My choice over where my tax dollars are spent, my choice over what vaccines are injected in my body, over whose medical “expertise” I trust, over the gun I choose to carry to keep my body safe. Choice is not an end in itself. It is a means toward something else, or, if not, it is an empty slogan.
And yet, when the experts moved into the world of choice-based practices in the twentieth century, they stripped away most of these qualifications. The marketing experts and advertisers came first. Pollsters and public opinion makers followed. But the most lasting act of reconceptualizing choice was the work of postwar economists seeking to understand the dynamics of a mass consumer economy. That they should have focused on purchasing was no surprise. Less predictable was that the leading thinkers of economics should have explained not just consumer demand but all human action around the axis of preference satisfaction. According to the stripped-down models of human behavior they constructed, one bought time in the same way one bought radios or automobiles, by rationally calculating utilities: an evening’s pleasure at the movies vis-à-vis the satisfaction of more hours at the kitchen stove or office desk. Whether half-consciously or not, one ranked one’s preferences, tangible or intangible, and then, one by one, made a choice. The Homo economicus at the theoretical core of modern economics was rendered as individualized, detached from society, unswayed by the moral choices of Hercules except insofar as one had a “taste” for virtue or a “preference” for vice. Abstraction made the rational-choice actor predictable and manipulable. But it hollowed out the real-life tensions of choice and minimized the restraints on its exercise.
And in the hands of some of the most prominent neoclassical economists, it hollowed out the meaning of freedom as well. The equation of freedom with choice helped pave the way for increasingly privatized and individualized meanings of freedom and, at its worst, for more and more incoherent notions of freedom. The mash-up of libertarian and authoritarian impulses now set loose at the White House is a testimony to the loosening of “choice” from the social and economic realities Rosenfeld analyzes so carefully.
A world without choice is a tyranny; it subdues the self and strangles society. But, Rosenfeld asks, “Is choice as we know it really what freedom is all about?” Or, turning to a normative key rarely as explicit and probing in historical accounts as it is here, could we find a more realistic, expansive understanding of freedom than the dominant story that choice’s victory has given us? In her small gem of an earlier book, Common Sense: A Political History, Rosenfeld described herself as a historian of the “taken-for-granted,” and she shows that gift again here. The history of choice sprawls more widely than even this capacious book can cover. But Rosenfeld is an exceptionally acute guide to its terrain, its contradictions, its practices, and its blind spots. This is not just another book about thinkers. It is something more ambitious: a history book to think with.