Sophia Rosenfeld, The Age of Choice ***

The Age of Choice argues that contemporary Western societies define freedom as the individual's opportunity to make choices about pretty much every aspect of our lives.

We like to think that when we are expressing our personal preferences, we are engaged in the business of self-realization as distinctive and independent people. Both having choices and making choices are largely what count these days as being, indeed feeling, free.

Until relatively recently, to be free in the Western world actually had almost nothing to do with having the capacity to make unconstrained decisions at every turn about how to forge a life path or worldview out of the possibilities available. What made a nobleman in early modern Europe free was quite the opposite: the knowledge that, as a result of his status, he was not dependent on or dominated by anyone else. 

Rosenfeld is an historian, so most of the book is about how choice came to be a proxy for freedom. She believes that the best way to approach the question is to see how the idea grows out of the way people acting live. "To understand how this came about, we need to turn our gaze... less to philosophy or political theory than to mundane social practices." She examines the history of shopping, commonplace books, dance cards, and voting ballots.

My takeaway was that our understanding of freedom-as-choice follows from (or comports with) our attachment to capitalism, democracy, and individualism.

While the history was interesting, I admit that I would have preferred a philosophical approach, with more attention paid to the social consequences of alternative definitions of freedom. Rosenfeld does, in the final chapter, discuss critiques and limitations of the choice model. (Just how free are our choices really? What values are important enough not to leave to choice? How can we address communal goods in an inherently individualistic system?) I wish there had been more of it.