The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life, by Sophia Rosenfeld, Princeton University Press, 480 pp, £30, ISBN: ‎9780 691164717.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein declared: ‘I don’t care what I eat, so long as it is always the same.’

Most of us are not so ascetic. We can appreciate the value of avoiding trivial decisions to concentrate on deeper matters. Yet when it comes to food, the pleasure of choosing where and what to eat has become a key element of the urbanite’s lifestyle. In fact, we increasingly think of the world as a mega-menu. The idea of choice even shapes our conception of what makes us human. Sophia Rosenfeld quotes the American legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin, who said dignity means ‘being recognised as the kind of creature who is capable of making choices’.

Rosenfeld describes herself as ‘a historian of the taken-for-granted’. She seeks to explain how we have come to believe that freedom means the right to make choices in all aspects, regardless of whether they are ethical or rewarding.

The book is organised into five chapters that look at the development of choice-based practices since the middle of the eighteenth century. These chapters cover shopping, religion and values, marriage, voting and political choice, and the development of choice-based social sciences, notably economics, which has emerged as ‘the ultimate science of choice’.

The book has been widely reviewed and acclaimed. Perhaps its most impressive feature is the coverage of what the author calls ‘choice rhetoric’. This brings us back to Wittgenstein, who was a philosopher of language. The Age of Choice is richly interlaced with fascinating quotations and pictures on the theme. The discipline of history has been influenced by Wittgenstein’s insight: ‘The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.’ The reader is immersed in the ‘language’ of choice by way of Rosenfeld’s integration of hundreds of historical sources.

Intellectual historians have mapped out the history of many key words in modern Western thought and culture: liberty, equality, democracy, revolution, etc. But there is no previous inquiry into the historical semantics of choice, at least not on the scale of Rosenfeld’s wide-ranging book. ‘A picture held us captive,’ wrote Wittgenstein. ‘And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.’ Indeed, ‘choice rhetoric’ is so repetitive that we would fail to observe it, if we did not have this historian to highlight it.

For example, a 1715 French guidebook for visitors in Paris stated, with reference to a clothing store: ‘There are clothes for all sexes, all sizes, all sorts of ranks, and one only has to choose [choisir].’ From the late 1800s to the present, ‘take your choice’ appears in many advertisements. Why is this phrase recurrent and significant? A seller’s invitation to choose suggests confidence in the quality of the wares. It also flatters the buyer’s rational capacity to discern what is of superior quality.

John Locke, in his Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) wrote: ‘No man can so far abandon the care of his own salvation as blindly to leave it to the choice of any other, whether prince or subject, to prescribe to him what faith or worship he shall embrace.’ In On Liberty (1859), John Stuart Mill wrote that a man must ‘choose his plan of life … for himself’ rather than simply follow convention. To choose one’s religion or ‘plan of life’ is not just a way of arriving at a particular worldview; choice becomes a hallmark of what is chosen: a seal of authenticity. The act of choosing counts as much as the result. As Walt Whitman wrote in his poem ‘Election Day, November 1884’: ‘The heart of it not in the chosen – the act itself the main, the quadrennial choosing.’

Margaret Sanger, the American activist for birth control, wrote in 1919: ‘No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.’ In 1971 one of the most high-profile French feminist organisations – Simone de Beauvoir served as its first president – named itself Association Choisir. In a landmark American decision concerning gay marriage, the Massachusetts supreme court upheld ‘the right to marry a person of one’s choice’ (Goodridge v Department of Public Health, 2003). The political rhetoric around choice is predominantly but not exclusively progressive. ‘Who wasn’t horrified,’ writes Rosenfeld, ‘to see antivaccine and antimasking protestors during the outbreak of Covid-19 rallying around the phrase, “My body, My Choice”’.

Modern social science is purported to be comprehensive and objective. But Rosenfeld suggests that some of the academic disciplines have narrowed the scope of their inquiry to homo economicus, or the image of humans as rational choosers – maximisers of ‘utility’. For Vilfredo Pareto, political economy ‘concerns itself with choices, which fall on things that are variable in quantity and capable of measurement’ (Manual of Political Economy, 1906). Rosenfeld shows that it is not only economics that makes an idol of choice. A leading guide to the practice of history declares: ‘History is the study of people and the choices they make’ (The Princeton Guide to Historical Research). The ‘freedom to make life choices’ is one of six factors used by the World Happiness Report.

These are just some of the many sources disclosed in the book, a sampling of Rosenfeld’s evidence that ‘choice’ is one of the most important themes of modernity.

The Age of Choice is not only a richly documented book but also a critically minded one. At one point, Rosenfeld refers to ‘the current hegemony of freedom of choice’. The word ‘hegemony’ suggests that a particular ideology is supplanting other valuable ways of thinking – that we are victims of the choice mentality. Critical detachment is a strength of the book, but this also leads me to a reservation. Rosenfeld’s critical observations are disparate in nature and are not synthesised; and they tend to be speculative, that is, not enriched with historical models.

One line of criticism that I discern in the book could be called economic. The culture of choice, Rosenfeld suggests, is compromised by its connections to consumerism and neoliberalism. Over the past 250 or so years, the overall direction of influence has been from the commercial sphere to the political and intellectual ones. The spread of shopping and restaurant menus came first, in the eighteenth century. The ballot box and multiple-choice exams followed.

The second line of criticism can be called psychological. The proliferation of choices in modern life tends to create anxiety under the pressure of having to guarantee one’s own welfare. In fairness to Rosenfeld, she does provide historical illustrations of this anxiety, notably as reflected in novels of the eighteenth century. But this theme evaporates as the book proceeds to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The third line of criticism could be called epistemic. Think of Plato’s allegory of the cave as suggesting that we often mistake a partial glimpse of reality for the whole thing. That is an epistemic failure. Rosenfeld suggests that choice rhetoric cannot account for the complexity of real-life moral dilemmas. Her voice is especially compelling when she discusses abortion. Framing abortion as a matter of choice sidesteps the fact that abortion is saturated with ethical considerations. It takes two people to create pregnancy, and there is a third party in the form of the fetus, a potential life. Rosenfeld writes: ‘… choice itself needs, within the framework of pluralism, to be more explicitly linked to basic moral considerations rather than set in opposition to them or evoked as a means of evading them. To say abortion should be a choice is, in a sense, to kick the can down the road, not to make the question any easier … Choice, whether about babies or baubles or beliefs, should be a means, not an end unto itself.’

This is consistent with Rosenfeld’s claim that modern choice-based feminism is ‘a peculiar kind of feminism’ and too closely tied to homo economicus. Other modes of feminism are possible, she suggests.

That is a courageous comment for a historian with feminist credentials. My objection is not so much that the diverse bones of criticism would ideally be articulated all at once and in a meaningful order but that so little historical flesh is put on them. For example, to tell readers that abortion is a genuine moral problem without mentioning religious framings of the issue shortchanges the moral resources that are already available. More broadly, The Age of Choice says little about the ethical and philosophical antecedents of modernity. Tradition is left out of the story.

Rosenfeld seems to believe that the problems associated with putting choice on a pedestal will find solutions only in future speculations. This is evident from the language she employs when highlighting the need for critical perspectives on choice. She writes: ‘… maybe we could also begin to think about certain kinds of group choice in ways that don’t entail simple aggregation of individual selections until a winner can take all but instead require all those affected by certain decisions to manufacture solutions through compromise … What, finally, if indecision were acknowledged as a strength, a liminal position that has the upside of requiring one to consult others, to ponder again, and to accept the difficulties of being human and acting in the world?’ Terms such as ‘maybe we could’ and ‘what if’ are prospective, not retrospective; they draw our attention away from the past. As for ‘we’, I am not sure who the author has in mind. Is the reader supposed to invent a new cultural code to replace the hegemony of choice? Or does ‘we’ refer to professional philosophers?

Either way, the underlying assumption is that since choice has become the highest goal only in modern times, any alternatives to choice must be hammered out in the future. Rethinking choice thus becomes a postmodern endeavor rather than an effort to sustain premodern insights. I think this is a fallacy, that the solutions to a problem can be forged only after the problem has become full blown. This underestimates the foresight of past minds. Ancient philosophers and prophets did not need to witness the exaltation of consumer capitalism to recognise the temptation to treat unrestricted choosing as the highest form of freedom. Reflecting on the limitations of an open-ended world of choice is what the great world religions and the classics of ancient literature are largely about.

It would, perhaps, be asking too much to demand that The Age of Choice provide in-depth accounts of premodern as well as modern ideas on decision-making. But there is one facet of the ancient world that persists in the modern and can provide a wellspring of insight on choice. I am thinking of oaths. An oath is a choice but it is also a commitment that forecloses future choices. An oath is not merely the expression of a preference but a determination, which is irrevocable, that one will be a particular kind of person and not another kind of person. Thus an ‘oath’ as opposed to a ‘choice’ dramatises decisions that are fateful and sometimes tragic.

The Hebrew Psalms frequently praise those who swear oaths and keep their promises. Psalm 15 asks: who is permitted to dwell in God’s tent? And answers: the person ‘who keeps an oath even when it hurts’. For Saint Paul, justification through faith means a once-for-all surrender to God and an abandoning of future self-reliance.

The Iliad, the Odyssey, the plays of Sophocles and the dialogues of Plato repeatedly dramatise choices that swerve individuals to futures from which there is no return. Such as Antigone’s decision to collect the body of her brother from the field of battle, even though she may suffer the penalty of death for doing so (the choice between loyalty to family versus duty to the state). At the end of the Republic the souls choose how they will be reincarnated. Plato’s point is not to celebrate the freedom to choose. The choice exists so that individuals will reveal their true character for good or ill.

Marriages today still involve an exchange of promises. American lawyers swear an oath to the constitution. Elected officials and soldiers do the same. The relationship of the oath, an ancient concept, to modern consumerist choice would ideally figure more prominently in The Age of Choice. In-depth consideration of oaths is omitted in the book, I suspect, because oaths are a relic of a more religious era, and thus not consistent with the author’s secular plea for a new philosophy. As Jeffrey C Alexander writes, ‘there is a religious quality to the ritual of oath-taking; whether secular or laced with divine metaphysics, these rites always speak of faith’ (‘Office Obligation as Civil Virtue: The Crisis of American Democracy’).

In recent decades Ireland has experienced a profound transformation from a society shaped by religious and communal authority towards one defined by individual autonomy. The shift is reflected in legal changes: the decriminalising of homosexuality in 1993; the introduction of divorce in 1996; the extension of marriage equality in 2015; and the repeal of the constitutional ban on abortion in 2018. These legal reforms mark a larger cultural reorientation in which questions of morality have increasingly come to be understood through the language of unregulated personal decision-making. The Age of Choice is profoundly useful for understanding the wide scope of this language. Because British colonial rule and church authority relied on oaths of allegiance, Ireland today may be uniquely resistant to imagining freedom outside the framework of market-driven choice. Rosenfeld’s book serves as an excellent catalyst for rethinking this paradigm.