Valeriia Shaliakhina reviews Sophia Rosenfeld’s The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life (Princeton University Press, 2025)
Consumer culture, democratic elections, the feminist struggle, and the language of human rights all echo a familiar narrative: the more options we have, the freer we are. We choose what to buy, read, watch, believe in, study, wear, and even who we want to become. In her book The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life, Sophia Rosenfeld asks how this claim became so persuasive that it is now taken for granted.
Sophia Rosenfeld is Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania and a leading historian who studies European and American intellectual and cultural history. Her previous books, including Common Sense: A Political History and Democracy and Truth: A Short History, explore how seemingly self-evident ideas gain authority in modern democratic life. The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life, she expands these thoughs by pinpointing the concept of freedom and its increasingly close connection to the act of choice.
Her answer is that this equation did not arise suddenly from neoliberalism, feminism, or democratic revolutions alone. It was constructed gradually through practices, techniques, and rules that taught people to perceive choice as autonomy. On one hand, this development has significantly expanded individual expression, but it has also narrowed the political vocabulary through which modern society conceives of freedom. This argument is particularly relevant today, as digital platforms curate the options available to us while concealing the mechanism behind them.
The book explores how choice based on personal preferences has become a fundamental feature of modern capitalism, democracy, human rights, and feminism. It traces how, from the 17th century, everyday practices shaped the conception of freedom as an act of choosing from a predefined “menu.” This mechanism simultaneously expanded modern autonomy and defined its limits. Rosenfeld’s option is to cover five areas: goods, ideas, romantic relationships, politics, and the humanities. To support her argument, she illustrates these transformations through practical decision-making tools, such as auction catalogs, ballots, and opinion polls, which simultaneously enabled and constrained individual choice.
The first chapter begins with Christopher Coke, an 18th-century London auctioneer. Coke offered goods in individual lots, advertised them in printed catalogs, invited people to view them, and conducted auctions as a staged performance. Rosenfeld views this as an early form of shopping. This practice was not only about buying what you need, but about looking, comparing, desiring, and choosing. This episode is not only product display, present virtually throughout all human history. As imported goods depended on colonial trade, Rosenfeld links this practice to imperialism and slavery. For example, the phrase “a wide selection” appeared in advertisements for enslaved people. Another implication of this case is its gendered undertones. Women were encouraged to make choices as consumers, yet the female shopper was often portrayed as capricious, fickle, and therefore unfit for greater freedom.
Objects are only one level of personal preferences indicator. The second chapter shifts the focus to the selection of ideas. Rosenfeld traces this development back to the time of the Protestant Reformation, when debates over conscience gradually established that true faith cannot simply be imposed by force. With the rise of literacy and the spread of printed materials, readers began to engage more actively in intellectual choices. A broader palette of options became available through printing houses. At the same time, more people copied, cut out, and rearranged texts. This way, they created collections that reflected their own interests and beliefs. In this chapter, Rosenfeld also examines women who used these practices to shape their own intellectual worlds.
These everyday acts of choice paved the way for a broader liberal debate. John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor argued that choice served not only to express individuality but also to create it. If women were to develop as autonomous individuals, they needed the same freedom as men. Women should be able to make decisions regarding education, work, marriage, and politics. Therefore, freedom came to mean exercising one’s own judgment, but simply adhering to customs. However, as Rosenfeld points out, expanding the scope of choice did not eliminate restrictions. This required new rules and institutions that could make this freedom possible.
“The nineteenth century’s main answer was, paradoxically, that for the idea of freedom of choice to be actualized and rendered mainstream, more, not fewer, constraints were needed. As the liberal theorist (and later, Mill translator) Charles Dupont-White noted bluntly just before the revolutions of 1848, “There is no liberty without regulation.” (138)
Chapters three and four turn to the selection of partners. Rosenfeld brings the example of dance cards, which made courtship seem like a personal choice. In turn, the problem is more nuanced. This complex etiquette could also show that romantic choice was interdependent, class-based, gendered, and strictly controlled. Such restrictions did not merely hinder autonomy; they made a new and potentially disruptive practice socially managed. Secret balloting served a similar function in politics. Rosenfeld’s vivid account of the remarkably quiet 1872 election in Pontefract illustrates how voting evolved from a loud public expression of political views into a private choice made by each individual. More broadly, ballots, voting booths, party rules, and the expansion of suffrage ultimately made individual political choice the natural foundation of democracy. Granting women the right to vote was of decisive importance. Once the right to vote became the foundation upon which other choices were based, exclusion from it seemed like a denial of one’s very identity.
In the 20th century, experts naturalized the idea that human beings make constant choices. The final chapter expands on this point: researchers measured personal preferences through surveys, psychologists and economists developed models that explained how people make decisions. In turn, this led to the widespread adoption of the concept of “homo economicus” which refers to the image of a rational person guided by self-interest.
Choice, in the framework of these disciplines, became a central analytical tool. People became individuals with stable preferences who must bear responsibility for the consequences of their own decisions. Other fields, according to Rosenfeld, continued this rhetoric. She traced this logic across the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in Betty Friedan’s feminism. Ultimately, it found its way into abortion policy, where American advocates adopted the “right to choose” as a deliberately broad, seemingly neutral justification for reproductive autonomy. Yet, the formal right to choose is hollow without access to medical care, sufficient income, childcare, safety, and social influence. It can also mask an unequal distribution of responsibility for the consequences. As Rosenfeld puts it: “choice, whether about babies or baubles or beliefs, should be a means, not an end unto itself”. (357)
The book’s greatest achievement lies in its methodological approach. Rosenfeld writes intellectual history through auction catalogs, store windows, dance cards, ballot boxes, surveys, novels, and works of art. These primary sources show how ideas gained traction through everyday practices and material objects, rather than solely through the works of famous thinkers. Choice has opened up paths beyond inherited roles. However, it has also framed structural inequality in terms of personal responsibility and made the creators of the “menu” extremely difficult to identify.
The scope of Rosenfeld’s argument sometimes leads her to present this conception of freedom as if it had almost completely supplanted other contemporary understandings of freedom. However, labor, anti-colonial, human rights, and democratic movements have continued to speak of freedom as the absence of domination, collective self-governance, real opportunities for action, and moral responsibility. The evidence presented in the book convincingly shows that the conception of freedom as choice has become extremely influential, but it does not prove equally convincingly that it has become the sole widely accepted conception of modern freedom. Therefore, the book is at its strongest as a study of the origins of one of the leading ways of conceiving freedom, rather than as an exhaustive history of freedom itself.
Rosenfeld does not call for abandoning choice. Under authoritarian rule, the very possibility of choosing can protect human dignity and become a form of resistance. The problem arises when choice begins to be viewed as the ultimate goal. Ultimately, Rosenfeld invites us to consider: Can people not only choose from existing options, but also create them? Are collective decisions possible without compromise? And can work give people greater autonomy and a sense of security?
As a historian of the taken-for-granted, I remain convinced that exposing the constructed nature of that which seems most natural to us in the present is at least a first step in the battle against complacency or the failure to even ask. I thus leave you, as a reader, with no survey, no standardized quiz, no kind of menu at all, only the invitation to make choice a problem to be wrestled with before it is a default solution (360)
The Age of Choice is a learned, lucid, and unusually imaginative history of an idea hiding in plain sight. Its importance lies neither in condemning choice nor in romanticizing more constrained lives. Instead, Rosenfeld demonstrates that freedom has not always been understood as the ability to choose. People have gradually learned to link these concepts through certain institutions, technologies, and everyday practices, many of which have perpetuated inequality and gender differences. The book will be particularly valuable for historians of ideas, scholars of democracy, feminism, and human rights, and readers concerned with algorithmic power will find the book especially valuable. After reading it, the urgent question is no longer simply how much choice people possess, but who made the menu, who can realistically choose from it, and what forms of freedom remain unlisted.
Valeriia Shaliakhina is an Assistant Editor in the Democracy and Culture section.
