The restaurant as we know it was invented in Paris around the late 1700s. Foreign visitors called the city’s restaurants the “most peculiar” and “most remarkable” things. At a traditional inn or tavern, you ate what was served, at a communal table, around set mealtimes. But now, at a restaurant, you got to sit at your own table, at any old time, and order what you wanted to eat. The ability to choose your food also required another newfangled technology: a menu, to organize and inform you of your options.

Judging by reports from the time, the whole experience, especially of menus, could be bewildering. In 1803, for example, the English journalist Francis Blagdon published a travelogue about Paris, and he had to pause to explain what a menu even was. Imagine “a printed sheet of double folio, of the size of an English newspaper,” Blagdon told his readers. He then reproduced in full the menu of the fashionable Parisian restaurant run by Antoine Beauvilliers. It took up nine pages of Blagdon’s book, and he grumped that it was hard to tell what each dish was based on its “pompous, big-sounding name.” “It will require half an hour at least,” Blagdon advised, to pore over “this important catalogue.”

Most people today, of course, don’t take half an hour to read a menu in excruciating detail. (Though they might complain about needing a QR code just to find it.) But Blagdon’s mix of wonder and annoyance at menus in 1803 suggests that, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, people had to learn—or, rather, they had to be trained by enterprising restaurateurs—how to choose what they wanted from a menu of possibilities.

For the historian Sophia Rosenfeld, that small act of choosing—and that now utterly mundane technology for choosing, the menu—mark a surprisingly important moment in the evolution of modern ideas about freedom. We have embraced “the logic of the menu,” Rosenfeld writes in her perceptive and nimble new book, The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life. We expect to make choices about everything. We still fight intense cultural and political battles about what choices will be available and who gets to choose. The left tends to emphasize individual choice on social issues, as with the pro-choice movement, while the right tends to portray unregulated economic choice within free markets as the essence of liberty. But across those divides, Rosenfeld says, we largely agree that “having choices and making choices” are what count “as being, indeed feeling, free.”

It was not always so. Rosenfeld tracks an expanding ideology of what she calls “freedom-as-choice” from the late 1600s to today. And she argues that if we recognize that our contemporary “choice idolatry” is just one recent way to understand what it means to be free, we might be able to begin imagining new, less “limited” and “hollow” ideas of freedom.

Rosenfeld has a knack for zooming in on seemingly ordinary objects, interpreting them in unexpected ways, and using them to reframe our picture of the modern world. Words like “daring” and “audacious” rightly come up when other historians describe her work. In The Age of Choice, she assembles an eclectic mix of everyday objects like menus alongside social practices like ballroom dancing, political debates about issues like voting rights, and high philosophy, reading those varied texts to piece together the story of the ideology of choice.

Focusing on the Atlantic world, Rosenfeld examines the idea and the act of choosing in five arenas: choice in goods (think menus), choice in ideas (freedom of speech and religion), choice in romantic partners (rather than arranged marriages), choice in politics (especially voting by secret ballot), and the sciences of choice (picture the advertising gurus on Mad Men). As these different forms of choice expanded over the last four centuries, Rosenfeld contends, society has increasingly taken it for granted that choice is the path—and the only path—to freedom.

Commerce and consumer culture have deeply shaped these notions of freedom and choice, as much as or more than political argument has. Like eating at restaurants, the practice of shopping in stores emerged in the 1700s. Modern........

© New Republic