The age of choice A history of freedom in modern life

Sophia A. Rosenfeld

Book - 2025

"Today choice is often taken to be a synonym for freedom. In much of the world, but especially in the United States, having both more occasions to make choices and more options to choose from are familiar political, personal, and economic goals. We are urged to consider our preferences and then to select from menus of options covering almost every element of our lives, including what to buy, where to live, whom to love, what profession to practice, and even what to believe. We like to think that when we determine our preferences among them, we are engaged in the business of self-realization. And yet, everybody from marketing gurus to psychologists to philosophers has also been warning us about the many negative consequences stemming fr...om our obsession with individualized choice-making. Not only are we not very good at realizing our personal desires, but we are also overwhelmed with too many possibilities, anxious about what best to pick and seemingly unable to muster the same enthusiasm for collective decision making as we do for choices about ourselves. Further, our relentless focus on the responsibility for making good ones has stigmatized those without many options, mainly the poor. How did this happen? Drawing on sources as varied as novels, questionnaires, and restaurant menus, The Choice is Yours tells the long history of the invention of choice as the modern form of freedom. Sophia Rosenfeld pays particular attention to women and the halting emergence of feminism in order to demonstrate how choice was, from the start, stigmatized and turned into a horizon for liberty. Thus, this is also a story about constraints, from formal laws to social customs, that have always worked to limit choice-who gets to do it, when and how they do so, what the choices are-in ways that are often invisible and yet central to the role that choice plays in the modern world. Rosenfeld begins in the early modern Western world, with the contemporaneous invention of shopping as an activity focused on the selection of goods and of religious freedom, in addition to freedom of expression as a matter of being able to pick one's convictions. Moving into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, she explores choice in romantic life, choice in politics, and sciences of choice. She takes up the work of contemporary psychologists, economists, and other theorists and offers a new perspective on how to think about choice now-based on a new reading of the past. An epilogue centers on the rise of reproductive choice and its consequences since the 1970s. Ultimately, The Choice is Yours is an argument for the necessity of rethinking the meaning of choice today, including its promise and its limitations, within the contours of modern liberalism"--

Saved in:
1 being processed
Coming Soon
Subjects
Published
Princeton : Princeton University Press 2025
Language
English
Main Author
Sophia A. Rosenfeld (Author)
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
9780691164717
Contents unavailable.
Review by Library Journal Review

When and why did choice come to be treated as a proxy for freedom, and how has it changed lives in the process? In 18th-century England, novels talked of a new activity: shopping. When shops appeared, they offered wares that enticed but weren't essential; auction catalogues and restaurant menus offered a profusion of options. Rosenfeld (history, Univ. of Pennsylvania; Democracy and Truth) argues that these changes were rooted in personal and social habits as much as in government action. Before the 18th century, freedom had mostly been seen as freedom from something--an onerous obligation--not freedom to have the opportunity to choose among competing goods. The Reformation highlighted the role of choice in embracing faith. For a few years, the French Revolution even made marriage a civil contract. Like other contracts, if not adhered to, it could be broken, as in a divorce. Across the 19th century, elections were increasingly conducted by ballot; no longer public affirmations but choices made on one's own. As arenas for choice expanded, so did restrictions to keep choice in bounds, even in such activities as the elaborate etiquette of ballroom dances. VERDICT This first-rate study of choice and freedom will appeal to most history lovers.--David Keymer

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.