My Freedom, My Choice | David A. Bell

In the 2024 general election, 5,814 Britons cast their votes for the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, whose current “Manicfesto” includes a call to establish a “Court of Human Lefts” and a proposal to end identity theft by renaming everyone in the country Chris. Some of these voters probably thought they were expressing serious disapproval of the establishment parties. Others may have just wanted to do something silly. But no one challenged their right to “vote for insanity,” as the party put it. It was their choice. And as the historian Sophia Rosenfeld puts it in the introduction to The Age of Choice, “Both having choices and making choices are largely what count these days as being, indeed feeling, free.”

William Wordsworth, a poet who suffered from a severe silliness deficit, would have disagreed. In 1802, with his country standing alone against Bonaparte, he offered a rather different vision of freedom:

It is not to be thought of that the Flood
Of British freedom, which, to the open sea
Of the world’s praise, from dark antiquity
Hath flowed…
That this most famous Stream in bogs and sands
Should perish; and to evil and to good
Be lost for ever….
We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold
Which Milton held.

Freedom, for Wordsworth, had a lofty, inescapably moral content, connected to essential issues of evil and good and grounded in Christian faith. It imposed heavy obligations on those fortunate enough to enjoy it. It was not the ability to choose whatever one wanted but the ability to act without restraint for the general good.

The difference between these two visions of freedom tells an important story, but one that remained largely hidden until the publication of The Age of Choice. The book is a “history of freedom” that has chapters on, among other things, shopping, dance cards, and market research, and that quotes novels as often as political documents. Unlike most conventional studies of the subject, it casts women as central figures: having a range of choices mattered most to those members of society who had the fewest. Women, Rosenfeld argues, drove the shift that established the equation between freedom and choice, and they drew condemnation in the process. By taking this approach, Rosenfeld presents that equation, which is now mostly taken for granted in the Western world, as a contingent product of a complex historical evolution: “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.”

This “battle” represents the real stakes of Rosenfeld’s ambitious investigation. She wants not simply to illuminate the history of the equation between freedom and choice but to use that history to offer arguments about the nature of freedom today and women’s relation to it. More specifically, she wants to question whether the association of freedom with value-neutral choice-making has been a good thing—for people in general and for women in particular. In the process, she somewhat overstates the extent to which choice has in fact eclipsed other visions of freedom in modern times. But the overstatement serves a useful purpose. Most histories of freedom (for instance, Annelien de Dijn’s excellent recent work)^* remain within the familiar territory of high politics and canonical political theory. By moving beyond this territory, Rosenfeld forces us to consider both the history and the nature of freedom from a new perspective. She also exposes a fundamental dilemma of modern life to which, despite some irenic if thoughtful suggestions at the end of the book, there may be no solution.

Rosenfeld’s clear model and inspiration is Hannah Arendt, who similarly grounded normative arguments in historical inquiry—notably in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and On Revolution (1963). Arendt came to history from philosophy and was even bolder and more provocative than Rosenfeld in her pronouncements: for instance, her insistence in On Revolution that an excessive concern with social problems leads revolutions into uncontrollable violence, as in the French Reign of Terror. Rosenfeld moves from history to philosophy, and even while defending a polemical thesis she is cautious and measured in the way she develops it—and arguably more persuasive.

Deploying unconventional historical material to make a philosophical argument represents a natural evolution for Rosenfeld. Her first book, A Revolution in Language: The Problem of Signs in Late Eighteenth-Century France (2001), also examined a creatively eclectic range of subjects, including the histories of linguistics, ballet, sign language, and the study of hieroglyphics. The point in each case was to examine how Enlightenment thinkers tried to conceive of a perfectly transparent, unambiguous form of communication in which each sign (whether spoken, written, drawn, gestured, or even danced) expressed precisely one object or idea. This belief in a perfect language helped radical French revolutionaries convinced of their own linguistic correctness to treat opinions different from theirs as nothing but misunderstandings (perhaps maliciously intended) and therefore illegitimate.

Rosenfeld’s second book, Common Sense: A Political History (2011), aimed to expose the constructed nature of another concept largely taken for granted: common sense. She argued that only in the eighteenth century did philosophers and theologians develop rigorous arguments to show that all people—even those with no formal education—had the mental capacity to exercise sound judgment. What they lacked in learning, they made up for in “common sense.” Without such confidence in common people, Rosenfeld maintained, social elites would never have conceded them the vote. But should we treat common sense as an unalloyed good? Well before Donald Trump claimed to be leading a “revolution of common sense,” Rosenfeld provocatively asked whether, in the modern age, the quality might be overrated and serve to disguise regressive and repressive populist agendas.

Like these earlier books—as well as Democracy and Truth (2018), a shorter, thoughtful meditation that also dealt with populism—The Age of Choice starts in the eighteenth century, a time when “freedom” still principally signified freedom from domination by others and few people saw much reason for “maximizing choice-making opportunities.” But in this period a consumer revolution began in Europe and North America, with a rapidly expanding range of goods becoming available to those able to afford them, including coffee, tea, sugar, spices, colorful textiles, printed engravings, books, and ceramics—all made possible by increasingly global trade and the wealth generated by chattel slavery in the Americas. Fashion in clothing and home furnishings, previously the concern of wealthy aristocrats, became a matter of daily life for much more of the population. Shops began to display items for sale in specially designed cases and in windows. Cities widened sidewalks and installed street lighting, making the shops more accessible.

In short, “shopping” was born. Guidebooks that promised to help shoppers make the most intelligent, thrifty, and tasteful purchases were rushed into print. Shopping was also quickly branded as feminine and condemned as a frivolous distraction from more serious pursuits. Moralists like Bernard Mandeville warned that “in the choice of things we are more often directed by the Caprice of Fashions, and the Custom of the Age, than we are by solid Reason, or our own Understanding.” Even so, shopping was also idealized as the exercise of personal, subjective preference. And it featured prominently—and not coincidentally—in the period’s most important literary genre: the novel. As Rosenfeld writes, realist novels are “the choice-genre par excellence.” Their plots tend to hinge on fateful life choices, and their attention to character underscores the social and psychological factors that shape those choices.

In the following chapters, Rosenfeld shows how this concept of free choice became associated with freedom in general. One early section deals with the vogue for “commonplacing” in the decades around 1800, when men and women cut out texts that spoke deeply to them and pasted them into scrapbooks: the intellectual equivalent of shopping for an individual wardrobe. She also pays attention to what she calls an ideology of choice, whose roots extended back to the Reformation and the Protestant idea that “conscience is ultimately subjective, meaning that each person…has to be free to follow its dictates.”

Only in the nineteenth century, though, did philosophically minded writers start actively to applaud the exercise of personal choice. This important step Rosenfeld associates with battles for women’s rights. Early feminists, especially John Stuart Mill and his companion Harriet Taylor, linked the “subjection of women” to the denial of choice—not just in the political realm but in social and economic ones as well. It was on this foundation that Mill based his more general theory of liberty as something that (in Rosenfeld’s words) “inheres…in the very act of selecting among options…beholden only to an internalized sense of what constitutes the good and right and personally fitting.”

The more that freedom of choice came to be celebrated, the more it generated anxiety. How could society hold together if millions of individuals went about making whatever choices they pleased? Rosenfeld recounts that even as opportunities for choosing expanded, so did webs of official and unofficial rules and regulations designed to hem the choices in. One of her most fascinating chapters concerns something that became far more of a choice as men and women circulated with greater freedom in cities and as the power of parents over their children weakened: marriage. Starting in the late eighteenth century, formal occasions for dancing, such as balls, emerged as highly regulated spaces in which men and women of the middle and upper classes could meet, flirt with, and eventually choose one another. Intricate rules developed around such issues as how a woman should fill up her dance card, while manuals for proper dance floor behavior offered a plethora of instructions for aspiring young ball-goers:

No man can occupy any woman for more than two or three dances in an evening…. The cavalier must escort the lady after each dance to her seat, her left hand in his right, without delay or small talk.

Such rituals, arbitrary as they might seem, helped accustom people to the new universe of choice-making and, in doing so, legitimated it.

If there is a crucial moment in Rosenfeld’s story, it is 1872, not typically regarded as a great turning point in Western history. That year something remarkable happened in the town of Pontefract in West Yorkshire: an election for Parliament took place by secret ballot. Observers deemed the experiment a success, and within decades most of the Western world adopted this method of voting. Previously elections in the West had largely involved public meetings—often highly raucous ones—in which everyone could see how everyone else voted. Such settings made it difficult to conceive of the act as anything other than an expression of communal as opposed to individual preference. But once voting became secret, it became far easier to imagine it as an expression of purely personal choice, in accordance with an individual’s deepest beliefs and values. Another change encouraged this shift: the development of voting booths—tellingly known in French and German as “isolation spaces”—in which closed voters could, before marking their ballots, commune solemnly with their consciences. (In theory, at least—a classic New Yorker cartoon from 1938 by George Price showed a closed voting booth with a coin flipping into the air over it.) The conflation of freedom with choice—with individual preference—had reached the center of Western political life. As Rosenfeld says in her conclusion, “Choice went from being a benefit of freedom to freedom’s very essence.”

It is with statements like this, and her repeated insistence that modern choice-making is seen as “largely value-neutral,” even in “national political life,” that Rosenfeld slips into overstatement. Especially during wars and revolutions, defenses of freedom in modern times can still sound very close to the older notion of being free from restraint and able to act for the common good. Franklin Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” speech, for instance, stressed the relationship of freedom to the “moral order” and never used the word “choice” (although he did discuss the “freedom of every person to worship God in his own way”). In one sense, Rosenfeld is telling a story about the ways in which personal experience and private life—as opposed to communal experience and public life—increasingly became recognized as the principal source of political values. The personal, so to speak, became the political. But the shift was never complete. Does the fact that an individual’s electoral choice is considered personal and sacrosanct make it “value-neutral”? I can respect a person’s right to vote for someone I abhor (or for the Monster Raving Loonies) without respecting the vote itself. Choice may seem like “freedom’s very essence” in some circumstances but not in all. Still, the overstatement serves a purpose—especially for what it reveals about the recent past.

In the twentieth century, Rosenfeld argues, making choices became the focus of even more attention than before. Market researchers took the lead in developing a “science of choice” to determine why consumers chose what they did—the better to manipulate them, of course. Pollsters invented ever more sophisticated methods of gauging public opinion. Economists constructed elaborate models of individual behavior premised on the assumption that the ordinary person—Homo economicus—made rational choices. In much of the Western world, human fulfillment and human liberation themselves came to be associated with the ability to choose. As illustration, Rosenfeld examines two very different and very influential texts: the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (prepared in a commission chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt) and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963). Both, she argues, “can be read as manifestos in favor of the modern understanding of choice.” The declaration did not include the right to education, employment, or sustenance, but it did proclaim the right to pursue these needs and to make choices about them. Friedan, meanwhile, criticized the web of trivial choices in which American housewives found themselves ensnared. (What brand of dishwasher soap should they buy?) But she did not reject choice itself—to the contrary. Women’s freedom, she argued, consisted above all in being able to choose freely the sort of life they wanted to lead.

As we are all aware, the vast expansion of choice in the modern world does not always lead us to feel free and fulfilled. Choice has metastasized and turned oppressive. The oppression can take relatively trivial forms: for instance, the paralysis induced in a giant supermarket by the sight of over 40,000 separate products on sale, including hundreds of different varieties of shampoo, soap, yogurt, breakfast cereal, and mustard. And this range of choice, of course, is nothing compared with what is available online. Amazon stocks 12.2 million individual products of its own and sells over 340 million more. Sometimes, Rosenfeld notes, “the contemporary obligation of continuous personal choice-making in daily life…has turned into a source of exhaustion, distress, even loneliness and alienation.” The excess of choices can also do direct material harm, for example when the large and confusing range of available loan products allowed unscrupulous real estate agents to trick millions of unsophisticated home buyers into mortgages that led them straight into bankruptcy during the financial crisis of 2008.

Rosenfeld might have ended her book with this familiar capitalist story of choice and its discontents. But her fundamental concern is politics, and so she focuses her extensive epilogue on the issue for which “choice” became a battle cry in contemporary America. As she argues, it is no coincidence that feminist political action in America over the past half-century came to focus so strongly on abortion and “a woman’s right to choose.” So much of the trajectory of feminism, especially in the United States, pointed straight in this direction, toward a woman’s choosing what to do with her body—and with her life. Beyond the enormous consequences for women of having that choice taken away, nothing seemed to symbolize better the political aspirations of generations of feminists, from Taylor and Mill to Friedan and countless others.

Here Rosenfeld is sharply and provocatively critical. She points out, drawing on radical and Black feminist thought, that the elevation of “my body, my choice” into the leading cause for feminists reflected most closely the concerns of relatively well-off, mostly white women who took a range of choices in life for granted. “Real choice” about childbearing, by contrast, “would require access to decent wages, to childcare, to health care, to education,” and to protection from violence and discrimination. Highlighting “choice” also risked making an issue as important as reproduction sound dangerously trivial, like shopping—a point made by critics on the right and left alike. Drawing on the legal theorist Robin West, Rosenfeld suggests that the feminist fetishization of individual preferences could be seen as leading to “a world washed clean of moral concerns, replaced with nothing more than prices and cash.” Antiabortion forces made precisely this attack, and they also found it very easy to condemn “choice” by asking: What about the unborn child’s choices? What about the father’s? Writing in the disastrous aftermath of the Supreme Court’s repeal of Roe v. Wade, Rosenfeld calls the decision to emphasize choice “surprisingly unsuccessful.”

But, she adds, this failure might finally prompt a reevaluation of the equation between choice and freedom: “Choice, whether about babies or baubles or beliefs, should be a means, not an end unto itself.” (The italics here are hers, and very deliberate: the historian speaking as a political philosopher.) What matters above all is how choices are formulated and what choices are made available. Rosenfeld’s writing here remains largely abstract, although she cites proposals for a universal basic income as one possibility for constructing a different range of choices. But her fundamental point is that the questions at stake are ultimately moral ones and that “choice itself needs…to be more explicitly linked to basic moral considerations.”

The problem, though, is that precious little agreement exists in our society as to what these “basic moral considerations” actually consist of, and democracy is a terrible means of deciding on them. In the history of the United States, democratic majorities have supported slavery, racial discrimination, exterminatory policies toward indigenous peoples, persecution of political and sexual minorities, and many other things that are today widely considered immoral. When Rosenfeld speaks of moral “ends” in the abortion debate, she means the achievement of a more secure material life and a more fulfilling spiritual life for women. An abortion opponent, however, would say that the primary end must be the life of the unborn child. Which view—which moral code—should prevail? Rosenfeld doesn’t address the question, and not simply because of the abstract turn her writing has taken at this point. It is precisely the impossibility, in our secular and spiritually fragmented age, of coming to agreement on divisive moral issues of this sort that makes us fall back, by default, on the ideal of “largely value-neutral” choice—which means falling back on democracy: the worst way of deciding moral issues except, perhaps, for all the others.

In sum, despite what Rosenfeld seems to be urging in her epilogue, there may really be no way to turn back to older visions of freedom, in which what mattered was less the choices one made than the moral ends for which one made them. There may be no going back to Wordsworth and his world. For how would a new moral order emerge, and who would get to impose it? The most insistent voices calling for such an order in the United States today are not the radical feminist theorists Rosenfeld draws on but reactionary Catholic thinkers like Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule, whose dreams are of the united Christian West of the Middle Ages. No thanks. I’d prefer the Monster Raving Loonies. The Age of Choice wants to suggest a way forward out of our present dilemmas. What it has accomplished is to show, with brilliance and originality, just how deep those dilemmas are.