In her new book The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in the Modern World (hereinafter Choice), historian Sophia Rosenfeld has added an engaging new book to her body of work tracing “ideas and assumptions” in liberal democracies.” As is her usual approach, Rosenfeld devotes her skills to recovering popular thought that shapes cultures, rather than to the ideas of major thinkers in the canon of liberal thought. In her brief summary of the primary points in The Age of Choice, she calls herself “a historian of the taken-for-granted.” Here, the taken-for-granted phenomenon is the modern tendency to treat “choice” as a guiding light in our individual and collective lives.
Her scholar’s duty persuades Rosenfeld to provide evaluative commentary on the cultural habits she has served up for inspection. Elsewhere, Rosenfeld—perhaps responding to the choice-glutted, time-starved world her readers inhabit—has offered five key insights from the book. In the list, she opens the door to our seeing downsides to “our reliance and faith in choice.” The door to some evaluation of choice is presented by her foregrounding of women as drivers of “the equation between freedom and choice.” More on that opening follows below.
Rosenfeld’s key skill lies in her ability to bring to the surface trends and ideas embedded in our cultural and democratic practices over time—what she calls a doxa, a sociologist’s coinage referring to “the set of largely taken for granted assumptions that undergird all explicit fights in a given era.” (P. 2.). Although the practices and common views she traces may display a link to big thinkers’ ideas in a period under study, her work is rooted in a perceptive and diligent examination of popular thinking and acts. In Democracy and Truth: A Short History (2018) (hereinafter, Truth), she used this skill to show the underlying complications in our standard, “taken-for-granted” story about the workings of democracy. In the case of Truth, she focused her attention on “the long standing conflict in democracy between different sources of truth and different methods of getting there…” The election in 2016 of a purveyor of lies brought her attention to the present as a starting point. What seemed new, she showed, was in fact situated in a history of contestation over the control of truth in a democracy. Further, as Rosenfeld explains in a forum on Truth, as I will emphasize about Choice, “the book was intended to inspire debate, not to be the last word on the subject… as a thought piece, rooted in historical claims…”
Rosenfeld delivers a historical perspective rather than strong claims about the cultural tendencies she reveals. She does not avoid moral analysis of where we are and the benefits and costs, but she is not mainly set on a course of alarmist moral argument. The payoff of the book is her historical lesson highlighting how choice has grown from modest beginnings to “seem such a natural, unexceptional part of life” rather than “a historically specific behavior.” (P. 6.) Both the forms that “choice” has taken and its treatment as “a hallmark of freedom from consumer capitalism to human rights and feminism are historical developments,” she shows. (P. 6.)
It would be easier for adherents of other disciplines or perspectives to succumb to the temptation of attributing an exaggerated thesis to Professor Rosenfeld’s book. And, to be sure, she provides plenty of grist for the mills of cultural critics, whose views are worthy of a hearing. Nonetheless, Rosenfeld’s undertaking as a historian of choice/freedom is more about the journey than the destination. She seeks to find a tactic to chart how choosing came to be bonded to the idea of freedom—that is, to trace the history of “historically specific but social widespread mental habits” that underlie “political norms” in liberal democracies. (P. 6.) (referring to Hannah Arendt’s great insight).
Rosenfeld charts choosing’s history with control, mastery, and phrasing that carries memorable punch. In pursuing her engagement with our once-emergent and now-ubiquitous shared embrace of choice-infused cultural lives, she collects and memorably describes examples of choosing, great and small. Her subjects, each of them (as her chapter titles suggest) illustrating a different arena for choice, include shopping for goods, making choices about what to believe, voting—even selecting a romantic partner. This culminates in an epilogue exploring “The Past and Future of a Right to Choose.” (Upon seeing those words, can one possibly avoid thinking of Dobbs?)
Rosenfeld’s chapter on “The Sciences of Choice” is especially interesting, given work in this area by law professors as well as scholars in psychology, economics, and other disciplines. Professor Rosenfeld has two sneaky quasi-subtitles at the very beginning of the first paragraph: Capitalism. Democracy. In that connection she gives us a phrase to remember: “choice architects.” (P. 260.) Some may recall that it was first coined by Richard Thaler and the legal academy’s Cass Sunstein. The phrase, without more, hints at a reservation about equating choice with freedom. We spend much of our lives in structures that may be a preview of a light-filled paradise to come—or a bleak hell of forbidding dark. The architecture for our physical lives is not the most inspiring picture of choice as freedom for all.
What Rosenfeld says with a fleeting but telling phrase gives ample opening for those who want to attribute a thesis to her and potentially to adopt it or critique it. In her historian’s examination of the sciences of choice, she points out the effect of income disparity on the shaping of available choices: “Moreover, money continues to hinder choice making for the poor of all races—and maybe even more than in the past, as wealth becomes ever more the key modern facilitator of choice in multiple domains.” (P. 261.) This observation opens up the possibility of significant critique of wealth as a driver in the enhancement or restriction of choices. She concludes this observation with the following summation of its significance: “Choice has rarely been a synonym for equality.” (P. 261.)
The direction she takes with the observation is not to assume a role as a deep critic of capitalism or of democracy, but to maintain her work as a chronicler of the evolving environment in which choices present themselves over the long period of their reign in our shared world.
As the rules and procedures around the business of selection got more formal and standardized, the external moral strictures on the choices themselves started to fall away. They became more and more personal, driven by one’s own predilections, or so at least it seemed. But simultaneously, this very particular kind of decision making, and its increasingly valued neutral and individualized but highly managed form, became an anchor concept within two ascendant and equally abstract systems for organizing human lives: market-based consumer culture and democratic governance. (P. 260.)
If you do cultural criticism of any kind and you can’t make something of that and get going, then you should go back to a new choice for your life plan. (Note, however, that I maintain that you must be careful not to attribute anything to Professor Rosenfeld that is really only yours as a moral or political concern, not hers.)
Rosenfeld muses about her role as a historian, noting the view that “the work of the historian is primarily descriptive,” but engages in a bit of “tiptoeing toward the normative,” which she calls the “lifeblood of most other disciplines.” (P. 356.) While keeping true to her historian’s role, she provides some aid to “critics of choice feminism,” who are seemingly among those who view the “global proliferation” of choice as “usually an illusion and a dangerous one at that.” (P. 358.) Writing in the New York Review of Books, David Bell, who calls his fellow historian Rosenfeld brilliant, sees her putting a thumb on the scale against choice feminism. In that connection, especially given the failure of choice rhetoric to save Roe v. Wade, Bell suggests that Rosenfeld has turned philosopher in her suggestion that “choice itself needs …to be more explicitly linked to basic moral considerations.” In fact, he gives her credit for being willing to venture into polemic while also gaining credibility by being cautious and measured—and, as a result, “arguably more persuasive” than historian/philosopher Hannah Arendt.
It is little surprise than even a historian believes morality should matter to choosers. Practicality also has its place in the historian’s tool box. Rosenfeld provides a sympathetic note for the exhausted consumer confronted with the “contemporary obligation of continuous personal choice making in daily life—whether about sneakers or healthcare…” (P. 359.) Still, she warns against indulging too heavily in anti-choice thinking, given the “severe strain” that liberal democracy faces. (P. 357.)
On a personal note, this consumer is lost in the proliferation of choices for selecting and consuming what is known as content, but once was news and movies. The replacement of three networks with massive variety, the velocity and volume of which has been increased by Substack auteurs, has assigned us all the editorial and curatorial functions once nicely discharged by fewer and well-trained people.
As a historian who captures and organizes aspects of our history in connection with various of our abstractions in liberal democracy, above all Professor Rosenfeld invites us to think. We should and must, but let us be careful that our thoughts are claimed as ours, however inspired by her invitation. Professor Rosenfeld’s acute analysis and description of aspects of our history must remain exclusively hers, untainted by an attempt to recast them into a strong claim for today’s politics or for our preferred cultural critique.
Having done her work to make us understand that choice is not a permanent given in how people think about freedom, it only makes sense for Rosenfeld to raise issues and to point to other ways of imagining both our private lives and our shared collective lives. But one could easily overstate a grand thesis about the good or bad of choice as being her message. Her first work as a historian of abstraction and things overlooked is to make us understand that choice has a history. (P. 6.) Having done that and having highlighted where it does its work in our lives, her method of acute observation discloses paths to reflection of freedom as mainly about choice—be grateful we have it, but also step back to consider what we gain and what we might lose.
The great value of The Age of Choice is to prompt thinking; to prevent mistaken interpretations of the past that impose something that was not present in cultures that did not wed freedom to choice; and to suggest how the benefits of choice might be affected by other cultural progressions.
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