What do you think?
Rate this book
The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life
A sweeping history of the rise of personal choice in the modern world and how it became equated with freedom
Choice touches virtually every aspect of our lives, from what to buy and where to live to whom to love, what profession to practice, and even what to believe. But the option to choose in such matters was not something we always possessed or even aspired to. At the same time, we have been warned by everybody from marketing gurus to psychologists about the negative consequences stemming from our current obsession with choice. It turns out that not only are we not very good at realizing our personal desires, we are also overwhelmed with too many possibilities and anxious about what best to select. There are social costs too. How did all this happen? The Age of Choice tells the long history of the invention of choice as the defining feature of modern freedom.
Taking readers from the seventeenth century to today, Sophia Rosenfeld describes how the early modern world witnessed the simultaneous rise of shopping as an activity and religious freedom as a matter of being able to pick one’s convictions. Similarly, she traces the history of choice in romantic life, politics, and the ideals of human rights. Throughout, she pays particular attention to the lives of women, those often with the fewest choices, who have frequently been the drivers of this change. She concludes with an exploration of how reproductive rights have become a symbolic flashpoint in our contemporary struggles over the association of liberty with choice.
Drawing on a wealth of sources ranging from novels and restaurant menus to the latest scientific findings about choice in psychology and economics, The Age of Choice urges us to rethink the meaning of choice and its promise and limitations in modern life.
Choice touches virtually every aspect of our lives, from what to buy and where to live to whom to love, what profession to practice, and even what to believe. But the option to choose in such matters was not something we always possessed or even aspired to. At the same time, we have been warned by everybody from marketing gurus to psychologists about the negative consequences stemming from our current obsession with choice. It turns out that not only are we not very good at realizing our personal desires, we are also overwhelmed with too many possibilities and anxious about what best to select. There are social costs too. How did all this happen? The Age of Choice tells the long history of the invention of choice as the defining feature of modern freedom.
Taking readers from the seventeenth century to today, Sophia Rosenfeld describes how the early modern world witnessed the simultaneous rise of shopping as an activity and religious freedom as a matter of being able to pick one’s convictions. Similarly, she traces the history of choice in romantic life, politics, and the ideals of human rights. Throughout, she pays particular attention to the lives of women, those often with the fewest choices, who have frequently been the drivers of this change. She concludes with an exploration of how reproductive rights have become a symbolic flashpoint in our contemporary struggles over the association of liberty with choice.
Drawing on a wealth of sources ranging from novels and restaurant menus to the latest scientific findings about choice in psychology and economics, The Age of Choice urges us to rethink the meaning of choice and its promise and limitations in modern life.
480 pages, Hardcover
First published February 4, 2025
33 people are currently reading
1,237 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
February 8, 2025
Thanks to NetGalley and HighBridge Audio for the digital copy of this audiobook; I am leaving this review voluntarily.
This was an interesting look at how freedom of choice came about in the Western world, starting in the 17th century and up to today. Back then, there were few choices people could make due to their lot in life. If you were a farmer and had kids, those kids would be expected to work on the farm, no choice about it. If a princess wanted to marry for love, too bad, she had to marry someone who was politically advantageous to her father.
This book goes through everything you could think of involving choice in society and for you personally. It's hard to categorize this book, but I enjoyed listening to it. The narrator, Greg D. Barnett did a good job, but I kept thinking as I listened that this book would be better served by a female narrator.
This was an interesting look at how freedom of choice came about in the Western world, starting in the 17th century and up to today. Back then, there were few choices people could make due to their lot in life. If you were a farmer and had kids, those kids would be expected to work on the farm, no choice about it. If a princess wanted to marry for love, too bad, she had to marry someone who was politically advantageous to her father.
This book goes through everything you could think of involving choice in society and for you personally. It's hard to categorize this book, but I enjoyed listening to it. The narrator, Greg D. Barnett did a good job, but I kept thinking as I listened that this book would be better served by a female narrator.
Want to read
March 3, 2025Reviewed by Stephen Greenblatt in the New York Times Book Review, Sunday, March 2, 2025
Stephen Greenblatt is the author of “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern� and the John Cogan university professor of the humanities at Harvard.
Does Having Options Really Make Us Free?
In “The Age of Choice,� Sophia Rosenfeld questions whether choosing � what to buy, whom to vote for � is actually worth it.
An illustration of a grid of lips in different shades of lipstick. Each pair of lips has a different phrase under it, playing off the color. The phrases are “Republic Ruby,� “Marriage Mauve,� “Catholic Coral,� “Ballot Blue,� “Pro-Life Peach,� “Liberty Lime,� “Autonomy Ash� and “Protestant Plum.�
Credit...Linda Huang
For centuries the right to choose for oneself in virtually all the key aspects of life would have seemed either absurd or wicked. “What death is worse for the soul,� wrote St. Augustine, “than the freedom to err?� After all, death came into the world when the original humans, exercising their freedom to err, reached out and made their first catastrophic choice.
In the wake of the expulsion from Eden, life was organized to reduce to a minimum the scope of decision-making. Anyone who was not perniciously rebelling against the order of things had to accept what the authorities in the family, the state and the church saw fit to impose. The notion that you should have some say in constituting those authorities � by giving or withholding your consent to this or that leader or by deciding for yourself how to worship God (let alone by considering whether to believe in God at all) � was fiercely denounced. And though obedience was expected of all, it was particularly insisted upon for women, for it was Eve who was the first and most disastrous chooser.
In “The Age of Choice,� the historian Sophia Rosenfeld offers a rich, compelling account of how the experience of choosing ceased to be the object of suspicion and condemnation and became instead the hallmark, at least in liberal, democratic societies, of any life worth living.
The transformation, she acknowledges, did not happen overnight, and its roots are too tangled to allow her to construct a single, straightforward narrative. But, locating crucial initial impulses in the 18th century, she first focuses attention on a London auctioneer named Christopher Cock. Cock cleverly came up with sales techniques that engaged potential purchasers “in a form of carefully choreographed choice-making behavior.� Renting a large space, he artfully arranged the goods he was auctioning off and invited the public to stroll about and decide what they might want to acquire. In effect, he invented shopping. And shopping, Rosenfeld suggests, is at once the supreme model and the most powerful motor force for a society centered on choice rather than compulsion.
The discovery of choice, wrote Immanuel Kant, at once awakened in whole nations the freedom to fashion their own futures and aroused ceaseless anxiety. By comparison, a shopper’s decision as whether to buy a purple or yellow calico seems too trivial to notice. But Rosenfeld convincingly argues that the republican agitator and the bargain hunter are bound up in the same story and that a surprisingly crucial role in this story is played by women. During the 18th century, shopping, and hence the whole culture of consumption engaged in fueling it, was, she writes, “increasingly coded as feminine.�
Here, and throughout her book, the historian draws some of her most powerful evidence from fiction, and her analyses in turn illuminate that fiction. The novels of Jane Austen, with their multiple shopping expeditions, take on a different character. “I work with so fine a brush,� Austen wrote, “as produces little effect after much labor,� but generations of readers have thought otherwise, and Rosenfeld helps to explain why. As “The Age of Choice� abundantly shows, the internal drama over what to buy has surprisingly deep roots. Emma Woodhouse’s ditsy friend Harriet Smith, “still hanging over muslins and changing her mind,� turns out to be participating, on a very small scale, in the same vast forces that animated the revolutionary Milton and the republican Locke.
From shopping Rosenfeld’s book moves on to the possibility of choosing what to believe, and the story becomes more complicated. It was Protestantism, she suggests, that made it possible to pull away from the enforcement of the uniformity of belief and toward the toleration of individual decisions in matters of faith. Of course, the founders of Protestantism were hardly apostles of tolerance. The last thing that Luther and Calvin would have wanted was what the economist Paul Seabright has termed “the divine economy,� a marketplace of competing beliefs any one of which � or none � potential believers may feel free to choose.
Still, the Reformers� refusal to submit to the authority of the pope ultimately licensed the claim to individual autonomy in religious belief. “The care, therefore, of every man’s soul,� Locke wrote in his “Letter Concerning Toleration,� “belongs unto himself.� The principle applied to every woman’s soul as well. Hence in the 16th century the Protestant Anne Askew defied the Catholic authorities (including her enraged husband), just as a few decades later the Catholic Elizabeth Cary comparably defied the irate Protestants (and yet another enraged husband) arrayed against her.
After commerce and religion, the other principal topics that Rosenfeld analyzes are “selecting a partner� and “voting by ballot.� Her point with all of them is that the arrangements that characterize our modern “age of choice� did not seem self-evident in the past and cannot be taken for granted now. They were areas of moral contention, political conflict and frequently uncomfortable compromise. In every case the object of especially intense dispute was a woman’s freedom to decide for herself.
For the most part such disputes were settled by establishing what Rosenfeld calls varieties of “bounded choice.� The example on which she focuses most tellingly are the dance cards that governed the choices of partners on the 19th-century ballroom floor. “If marriage remained a metonym for the social order writ large,� Rosenfeld observes, “then the ball became a metonym for courtship and marriage.� Yes, men and women had choices, but their choices, like the dances themselves, were carefully choreographed.
A final chapter in “The Age of Choice� concerns the specialists � psychologists, marketers, pollsters and the like � who emerged to understand, measure, anticipate and influence the myriad choices that constitute modern life. Innovations that initially sound like an unfettered triumph of Enlightenment freedom become increasingly compromised. In a somber epilogue, Rosenfeld calls into question the decision made by abortion rights groups to call their cause “pro-choice.� The rhetoric of choice seems to her too weak to secure the justice and equality essential to women. “Let’s start wondering,� she writes at the close, “if choice as we know it is really what freedom should be all about.� Perhaps; but which of our hard-won choices would we want to give up first?
THE AGE OF CHOICE: A History of Freedom in Modern Life | By Sophia Rosenfeld | Princeton University Press | 462 pp. | $37
Stephen Greenblatt is the author of “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern� and the John Cogan university professor of the humanities at Harvard.
Does Having Options Really Make Us Free?
In “The Age of Choice,� Sophia Rosenfeld questions whether choosing � what to buy, whom to vote for � is actually worth it.
An illustration of a grid of lips in different shades of lipstick. Each pair of lips has a different phrase under it, playing off the color. The phrases are “Republic Ruby,� “Marriage Mauve,� “Catholic Coral,� “Ballot Blue,� “Pro-Life Peach,� “Liberty Lime,� “Autonomy Ash� and “Protestant Plum.�
Credit...Linda Huang
For centuries the right to choose for oneself in virtually all the key aspects of life would have seemed either absurd or wicked. “What death is worse for the soul,� wrote St. Augustine, “than the freedom to err?� After all, death came into the world when the original humans, exercising their freedom to err, reached out and made their first catastrophic choice.
In the wake of the expulsion from Eden, life was organized to reduce to a minimum the scope of decision-making. Anyone who was not perniciously rebelling against the order of things had to accept what the authorities in the family, the state and the church saw fit to impose. The notion that you should have some say in constituting those authorities � by giving or withholding your consent to this or that leader or by deciding for yourself how to worship God (let alone by considering whether to believe in God at all) � was fiercely denounced. And though obedience was expected of all, it was particularly insisted upon for women, for it was Eve who was the first and most disastrous chooser.
In “The Age of Choice,� the historian Sophia Rosenfeld offers a rich, compelling account of how the experience of choosing ceased to be the object of suspicion and condemnation and became instead the hallmark, at least in liberal, democratic societies, of any life worth living.
The transformation, she acknowledges, did not happen overnight, and its roots are too tangled to allow her to construct a single, straightforward narrative. But, locating crucial initial impulses in the 18th century, she first focuses attention on a London auctioneer named Christopher Cock. Cock cleverly came up with sales techniques that engaged potential purchasers “in a form of carefully choreographed choice-making behavior.� Renting a large space, he artfully arranged the goods he was auctioning off and invited the public to stroll about and decide what they might want to acquire. In effect, he invented shopping. And shopping, Rosenfeld suggests, is at once the supreme model and the most powerful motor force for a society centered on choice rather than compulsion.
The discovery of choice, wrote Immanuel Kant, at once awakened in whole nations the freedom to fashion their own futures and aroused ceaseless anxiety. By comparison, a shopper’s decision as whether to buy a purple or yellow calico seems too trivial to notice. But Rosenfeld convincingly argues that the republican agitator and the bargain hunter are bound up in the same story and that a surprisingly crucial role in this story is played by women. During the 18th century, shopping, and hence the whole culture of consumption engaged in fueling it, was, she writes, “increasingly coded as feminine.�
Here, and throughout her book, the historian draws some of her most powerful evidence from fiction, and her analyses in turn illuminate that fiction. The novels of Jane Austen, with their multiple shopping expeditions, take on a different character. “I work with so fine a brush,� Austen wrote, “as produces little effect after much labor,� but generations of readers have thought otherwise, and Rosenfeld helps to explain why. As “The Age of Choice� abundantly shows, the internal drama over what to buy has surprisingly deep roots. Emma Woodhouse’s ditsy friend Harriet Smith, “still hanging over muslins and changing her mind,� turns out to be participating, on a very small scale, in the same vast forces that animated the revolutionary Milton and the republican Locke.
From shopping Rosenfeld’s book moves on to the possibility of choosing what to believe, and the story becomes more complicated. It was Protestantism, she suggests, that made it possible to pull away from the enforcement of the uniformity of belief and toward the toleration of individual decisions in matters of faith. Of course, the founders of Protestantism were hardly apostles of tolerance. The last thing that Luther and Calvin would have wanted was what the economist Paul Seabright has termed “the divine economy,� a marketplace of competing beliefs any one of which � or none � potential believers may feel free to choose.
Still, the Reformers� refusal to submit to the authority of the pope ultimately licensed the claim to individual autonomy in religious belief. “The care, therefore, of every man’s soul,� Locke wrote in his “Letter Concerning Toleration,� “belongs unto himself.� The principle applied to every woman’s soul as well. Hence in the 16th century the Protestant Anne Askew defied the Catholic authorities (including her enraged husband), just as a few decades later the Catholic Elizabeth Cary comparably defied the irate Protestants (and yet another enraged husband) arrayed against her.
After commerce and religion, the other principal topics that Rosenfeld analyzes are “selecting a partner� and “voting by ballot.� Her point with all of them is that the arrangements that characterize our modern “age of choice� did not seem self-evident in the past and cannot be taken for granted now. They were areas of moral contention, political conflict and frequently uncomfortable compromise. In every case the object of especially intense dispute was a woman’s freedom to decide for herself.
For the most part such disputes were settled by establishing what Rosenfeld calls varieties of “bounded choice.� The example on which she focuses most tellingly are the dance cards that governed the choices of partners on the 19th-century ballroom floor. “If marriage remained a metonym for the social order writ large,� Rosenfeld observes, “then the ball became a metonym for courtship and marriage.� Yes, men and women had choices, but their choices, like the dances themselves, were carefully choreographed.
A final chapter in “The Age of Choice� concerns the specialists � psychologists, marketers, pollsters and the like � who emerged to understand, measure, anticipate and influence the myriad choices that constitute modern life. Innovations that initially sound like an unfettered triumph of Enlightenment freedom become increasingly compromised. In a somber epilogue, Rosenfeld calls into question the decision made by abortion rights groups to call their cause “pro-choice.� The rhetoric of choice seems to her too weak to secure the justice and equality essential to women. “Let’s start wondering,� she writes at the close, “if choice as we know it is really what freedom should be all about.� Perhaps; but which of our hard-won choices would we want to give up first?
THE AGE OF CHOICE: A History of Freedom in Modern Life | By Sophia Rosenfeld | Princeton University Press | 462 pp. | $37
February 10, 2025
Thanks to NetGalley and HighBridge Audio for the Audio ARC!
This book made me think about choice in a completely new way, which is definitely praise. I've always taken for granted that choice is only (and can only be!) a good thing. There are some interesting discussions in this book about when and where that may not be quite true! I enjoyed the historical context the author provides, and enjoyed the book as a whole.
This book made me think about choice in a completely new way, which is definitely praise. I've always taken for granted that choice is only (and can only be!) a good thing. There are some interesting discussions in this book about when and where that may not be quite true! I enjoyed the historical context the author provides, and enjoyed the book as a whole.
March 1, 2025
There are a few of key points in this book that seem obvious when you think about them, but that have many implications in different areas of life that the book explores:
1. The idea of choice is deeply embedded in our concept of freedom. After all, what is freedom other than a freedom to choose? Yes, it is deeper than that - we talk about having freedom from things like hunger, war, oppression and poverty, and freedom to aspire to things, but most freedoms are about choices in all walks of life - political positions, romantic partners, purchases, where we live, work and go to school, etc.
2. Choice is often constrained or illusory. You can choose to eat or not eat, but you won't last long with a choice not to eat. Poor and oppressed people of course can't make choices that are theoretically available to everyone, but in reality are only available to people who have a certain level of resources. Sometimes we have choices that are real, but where only one choice will lead to a good result, as in a Super Mario game where you can head off the path, but soon find that there is nothing to do there and that you are not progressing.
3. We didn't always think that ordinary people should be able to make choices about important things in their lives. At least until the eighteenth century, it was assumed that most people would go through life doing what they were told and going down the path of the religion, social position, and place of residence that they were born into. Choices that they had were limited. Will you marry the girl down the street or the one on the next block? Will you have porridge or gruel for lunch? It was only with the rise of indivdualism that this changed.
4. In the modern world, the ideal of choice and freedom to choose is one of the few things that still spreads across the political spectrum from reproductive freedom to freedom to own a gun. This is all goes back to the individualism spawned by the tradition of classic liberalism in the nineteenth century. It has brought us many good things, but it has also brought us greed, inequality, selfishness and environmental destruction. Maybe we need to rethink the idea of choice, though I hesitate to suggest that for fear that it will be rethought in a direction that I don't like.
I will be thinking about the implications of these ideas for a while.
1. The idea of choice is deeply embedded in our concept of freedom. After all, what is freedom other than a freedom to choose? Yes, it is deeper than that - we talk about having freedom from things like hunger, war, oppression and poverty, and freedom to aspire to things, but most freedoms are about choices in all walks of life - political positions, romantic partners, purchases, where we live, work and go to school, etc.
2. Choice is often constrained or illusory. You can choose to eat or not eat, but you won't last long with a choice not to eat. Poor and oppressed people of course can't make choices that are theoretically available to everyone, but in reality are only available to people who have a certain level of resources. Sometimes we have choices that are real, but where only one choice will lead to a good result, as in a Super Mario game where you can head off the path, but soon find that there is nothing to do there and that you are not progressing.
3. We didn't always think that ordinary people should be able to make choices about important things in their lives. At least until the eighteenth century, it was assumed that most people would go through life doing what they were told and going down the path of the religion, social position, and place of residence that they were born into. Choices that they had were limited. Will you marry the girl down the street or the one on the next block? Will you have porridge or gruel for lunch? It was only with the rise of indivdualism that this changed.
4. In the modern world, the ideal of choice and freedom to choose is one of the few things that still spreads across the political spectrum from reproductive freedom to freedom to own a gun. This is all goes back to the individualism spawned by the tradition of classic liberalism in the nineteenth century. It has brought us many good things, but it has also brought us greed, inequality, selfishness and environmental destruction. Maybe we need to rethink the idea of choice, though I hesitate to suggest that for fear that it will be rethought in a direction that I don't like.
I will be thinking about the implications of these ideas for a while.
March 4, 2025
I downloaded the audiobook the day after I saw the author interviewed at the Free Library of Philadelphia. Listening to her in person, I was fascinated by her comments, and wanted the interview to go on well beyond the allotted hour. Unfortunately, the book proved to be less engaging than the interview, and while I finished it, I can't say I really enjoyed it. For one thing, I'm disappointed that the reader of this female-authored book is male. For another, the writing was a bit dry, and pedantic.
One thing I did find very interesting was Rosenfeld's discussion of "commonplace books," a completely unfamiliar concept to me. A commonplace book is a notebook used to collect information, such as quotes, ideas, or passages from books. It's a way to organize and preserve knowledge, and can be a lifelong project, a combination of journal and scrapbook. Apparently they were quite popular in the nineteenth century, and are still kept by some people today, to record ideas they want to remember.
One thing I did find very interesting was Rosenfeld's discussion of "commonplace books," a completely unfamiliar concept to me. A commonplace book is a notebook used to collect information, such as quotes, ideas, or passages from books. It's a way to organize and preserve knowledge, and can be a lifelong project, a combination of journal and scrapbook. Apparently they were quite popular in the nineteenth century, and are still kept by some people today, to record ideas they want to remember.
February 26, 2025
Very thorough analysis of choice. A much more storied past than I would have thought. Choice is something we take for granted in modern society and something we are even overloaded with. Considering it as a social and economic development that was shaped by and helped to shape our modern society was fascinating.
Thank you to NetGalley & Highbridge Audio for this ARC audiobook, all views are my own.
Thank you to NetGalley & Highbridge Audio for this ARC audiobook, all views are my own.
April 14, 2025
much to think about
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
Can't find what you're looking for?
Get help and learn more about the design.