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A Critic of the World of Choice
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A Critic of the World of Choice

Our choices are fraught with illusions, manipulation, and anxiety. Has our concept of freedom “lost its way”?

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Jonathan Marks
May 27, 2025
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The Age of Choice
A History of Freedom in Modern Life
by Sophia Rosenfeld
Princeton, 480 pp., $37

EARLY IN THE AGE OF CHOICE, Sophia Rosenfeld, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, risks ridicule by sympathetically describing the plight of contemporary choosers of products, mates, or ideas. Many of us, she says, particularly if we cannot afford “consultants, advisors, experts,” or other navigators through our sea of plenty, feel overwhelmed by an “imagined responsibility for crafting our own happiness.” We feel “guilty over the last choice, anxious about the next one, and potentially overburdened, even paralyzed by such mundane questions as what to eat for lunch.” This complaint, which Rosenfeld considers common, sounds like the “woe is me” of unserious people unburdened by serious woes.

Yet Rosenfeld gives us a fresh angle on this contemporary cliché by showing how old it is. Immanuel Kant, for instance, wrote in the late eighteenth century—with no supermarkets or social media available to him in Königsberg—about the “infinite range of objects” available to the free chooser. It’s not just us very late moderns who feel overwhelmed. Indeed, in “Conjectural Beginning of Human History,” the essay Rosenfeld cites, Kant goes back further than she does to find the source of the trouble: It started, Kant says, with the first, calamitous, innocence-ending choice of Eve. The anxiety that accompanies our attempt to choose the perfect spatula is a comic recapitulation of the first sin and our summary ejection from paradise. It is an acting out of what defines us as human beings: the capacity to choose for ourselves.

Even so, Rosenfeld reminds us, choice has not always dominated our understanding of freedom. In early modern Europe, free men resisted being dominated by other individuals but welcomed “a predetermined set of beliefs and . . . social role.” Moreover, insofar as choice was important, it was “framed in the register of ‘Hercules’ Choice,’” an allegory about the binary choice between virtue and vice. Freedom consisted not in the opportunity to pick from a multitude of options but in being presented with two and rightly selecting the honorable one.

Rosenfeld’s book offers a history of our departure from this framework—the “move away from choices on the model of Hercules and toward those predicated on the satisfaction of one’s own preferences in a world rich with increased, as well as less morally freighted, options.”

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Rosenfeld offers her historical findings with a view to our moment of spatulas and lunch anxiety, the present age in which “our reigning concept of freedom has lost its way.” She agrees with “contemporary critics” that the “hegemony of choice” has drawbacks beyond the way it threatens to overwhelm the choosers. That hegemony obscures how irrational our choices often are—and how open we are to manipulations by “choice architects.” It distracts us from injustice and encourages us to think that good and bad fortune reliably result from good and bad choices. This hegemony also kills our appetite for politics, and therefore, it serves those in power.

For feminists—a focus of Rosenfeld’s—merely asserting a right to choose in the face of the conservative argument that “some things are too valuable . . . to be subject to personal choice” has not worked. Nor is it honest, since there are always “ethical stakes to our decisions” that are elided by those who argue for the ideal of “choice as such.” Rosenfeld addresses progressives especially, but her disparagement of “choice idolatry” mirrors disgust in some conservative circles with the “fetishizing of autonomy.” By unfolding an “in no way inevitable or even unidirectional” history, Rosenfeld seeks to clear the way for a “rethinking” of “our attachment to choice in its current form.”


ROSENFELD’S STORY IS SPRAWLING. In her account, the “deep if loose roots” of modern choice extend at least to the seventeenth century, and mapping them properly requires taking in developments in commerce, religion, courtship, politics, and social science. Notwithstanding this broad scale, she also offers nuance. For example, in a gloss on eighteenth-century novelists’ depictions of shopping expeditions, Rosenfeld resists the urge to read too much into the “sense of autonomy” a female character gets out of the activity. The fictional shopper isn’t “a punk, a goth,” or a representative of some other group set on fashioning an identity through consumer choices; she is, modestly, making careful judgments about quality while “choosing among the possibilities that she is offered.” The emphasis on choosing a life plan or identity emerges later in the timeline.

Nor does Rosenfeld neglect differences between the commercial dimension of our conception of choice and the religious—and specifically Protestant—dimension, which holds that real faith must be “a decision on the part of the individual, sovereign mind.” Distinguishing between these different sources heightens our sense that choice has been and can be “variably practiced and variably understood.”

Rosenfeld distinguishes her account from pure intellectual histories by laying a heavy emphasis on, and offering close readings of, “mundane social practices,” through which ideas become second nature. For example, one part of the story of choice in the romantic context is the ball, whose rituals Rosenfeld explains with reference to nineteenth-century dance manuals and novels. As choice in marriage begins to expand, so also do “informal laws,” enforced by public opinion and hosts, to regulate “how men and women were going to engage in the world of choice” when “such powerful emotions as love and desire” were in play.

Rosenfeld considers the cotillion (she prefers the French spelling “cotillon”), a “series of dance games” played late at night and offering “temporary freedom from the normal constraints . . . on making and expressing sentimental and erotic choice.” Some variations licensed what would otherwise amount to a breach of etiquette, as with a woman choosing her male dance partner. In one version, the unpicked men must then dance with each other. But even these games of choice, which broke some normal rules governing relations between the sexes, had “ever more elaborate rules” to manage the rule breaking, a “stylized, repetitive choreography, with limited room for improvisation”—and therefore, she points out, limited risk to the women participants. Elsewhere, Rosenfeld uses the metaphor of choreography to convey the idea that choice, in practice, involves the setting, mastery, and internalization of rules devised to both facilitate it and keep it under control.

Rosenfeld’s point is not to argue simplistically that superficial choices hide deeper control, though she mentions critics, from Marx on, who adopted something like that view. The advancing modern world of choice had right-wing critics, too, and, in any case, it caused considerable anxiety across the board. (Medical authorities warned that couples’ dances like the waltz could be hazardous to a woman’s health, particularly “if the wrong partner were enlisted.”) But, Rosenfeld explains, the main response to “the growing power of choice . . . was not to reject it but to figure out how to make it work.” What emerged in courtship and other fields was “bounded choice,” a system of rules in which there were many impediments to choosing but in which choice remained possible. One reason John Stuart Mill’s 1859 work On Liberty found such a ready audience for its radical claim that human dignity consisted in choosing one’s own plan of life is that it proposed an extension of, rather than an abrupt and massive break from, what Western culture had been doing—in shops, at balls, and in other domains—for some time.


AS ROSENFELD’S HISTORY DRAWS nearer to the present, however, her nuanced approach falters. During the twentieth century, she argues, partly under the influence of modern social scientists, choice understood simply as “freedom from others’ desires and demands” becomes a barely questioned premise in the democratic West. As evidence for this claim, Rosenfeld points to the human rights doctrine that developed after World War II. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the United Nations voted up in 1948, is, in Rosenfeld’s account, the work of a committee focused “resolutely on individuals, abstracted from any context and untethered from collectivities of any kind, from family to nation to cultural group.” The “fulfillment of basic needs” is largely abandoned in favor of “the opportunity to pursue those needs . . . as one sees fit.”

This is a strange way to characterize the Universal Declaration, which anticipates a world in which “human beings shall enjoy . . . freedom from fear and want.” It is surprising that Rosenfeld sees inattentiveness to basic needs in a document that proclaims a right to “social security,” to “just and favorable conditions of work” for “just and favorable remuneration,” to “a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family,” and to “periodic holidays with pay.” It is surprising that she sees indifference to collectivities of any kind, including the family, in a document that declares the family “the natural and fundamental group unit of society.”

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Rosenfeld’s exaggeration of what she calls the hegemony of choice matters because it encourages us to think that our present troubles are the result of excessive attachment to choice. That in turn renders more plausible Rosenfeld’s concluding suggestion that we should consider “new kinds of politics and subjectivities,” or a “new conception of autonomy,” or, as she says early in the book, “other modes for envisioning our future, beyond choice.” Like the “postliberal” conservative philosopher Patrick Deneen, who declared liberalism a failure in 2018, Rosenfeld worries that the logic of choice has exhausted itself. Today, that threatens to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But perhaps it’s we who are exhausted. In his “Conjectural Beginning,” the essay mentioned above, Kant warned against our yearning for a “golden age” of “universal human equality and perpetual peace.” That yearning “proves that thoughtful persons weary of civilized life,” understood as a “gradual development”—despite the evils that accompany freedom—“from the worse to the better.”

In fairness to Rosenfeld, the moral rethinking she encourages us to undertake involves, she writes, reflecting primarily on “philosophical rather than political questions,” which are “more utopian than anything else.” And she is right that the ideas of freedom that prevail now are not the only imaginable ones.

Even so, utopian impatience with choice is probably not what our dystopian, authoritarian moment calls for.

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A guest post by
Jonathan Marks
Jonathan Marks, a professor of politics at Ursinus College, is the author of ‘Let’s Be Reasonable: A Conservative Case for Liberal Education.’ Twitter: @marksjo1.
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