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.