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The Hidden History of Free Choice

A conversation with Sophia Rosenfeld, about her recent book, on the roots of the concept of choice.

From voting for politicians to picking a partner or spouse, choice dominates almost every sphere of modern life. However, when did choice become central to our understanding of freedom? Moreover, how do we evaluate the nature of this freedom given, in our digital age, the endless options it now entails? In her recent book, The Age of Choice, the historian Sophia Rosenfeld traces the proliferation of choice back to the 17th century—with the emergence of shopping as an activity and the rise of religious freedom—and forward to our current debates around abortion to show how we arrived at our current obsession with choice. In doing so, she offers not only a history of the role of choice in consumer culture, romantic and sexual life, ideas and beliefs, and politics, but also a meditation on the future of a core value of liberalism in a moment of political uncertainty.

The Nation spoke with Sophia Rosenfeld about the history of choice in connection with the rise of capitalism and religious freedom, and how modern understandings of choice have shaped romantic relationships, voting for political candidates, the Pro-Choice movements, among other topics.

—Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins: I want to start by asking a general framing question. The book is about the rise of personal choice in the modern period, which focuses on shopping, religion, romance and sentimental life, as well as politics. But I wonder if we can place that in the context of what came before, so as to make the intervention more clear. A lot of historians are resistant to broad periodization, but it certainly seems the case that choice was viewed more negatively in the past. So what is a premodern conception of choice? How do you make these distinctions?

Sophia Rosenfeld: On the question of periodization—I don’t think there’s a precise moment when people stop making choices one way and suddenly start making them a new way. This is a story that sprawls across many centuries because these are not the kinds of changes that can be dated, per se.

But I do think there is a trajectory to the history of choice. Of course, people have always had to make decisions about their lives in various ways. But today we make many more choices and have given the idea of “choice” considerably more importance in the way we think about and shape our lives than people did in the distant past. And the nature of choosing has changed as well.

To give you an example, let me go back to an allegory that was very popular in the early modern period. From the Renaissance through the 18th century, everywhere you looked in European culture, you’d find this allegory referred to as the Choice of Hercules.

So you could say: People were already talking about choice in the 16th century, the 17th century. True. But the choice before Hercules was very specific. Hercules was always pictured trying to decide: Do I do the right thing or the wrong thing? Do I go with virtue or with vice? And it was clear that, in the end, Hercules only had one real choice; he had to take the choice that was in accordance with social mores, Christian teachings, and the general ethical norms of the time.

Then, in the course of the 18th century, something else emerged that looks very different in terms of the way that choice is structured. In the newer version, it is often a woman at the center—which is already interesting—who is trying to decide between two options. She might be deciding between two men; she might be deciding between two ribbons or two hats. But there’s no value in particular attached to one of these options as objectively better than the other. The difference between them is a matter of predilection, taste, what we would call personal preference. And in some ways, this is the modern mode of choice: When we go to lunch somewhere, we look at a sandwich board, and we almost automatically think, Do I prefer the turkey sandwich or the cheese sandwich?

There’s not necessarily a better or worse choice between those two options. Generally speaking, you choose the one that you think you’re going to enjoy more. And this newer form of choice starts to emerge on top of the older image of choice and civic virtue associated with Hercules. Eventually, the new version proliferates in a variety of different domains across time and space. Sometimes it’s viewed positively, sometimes negatively, but it’s the form of choice we’re most familiar with today.

This newer form of choice also comes to be associated with the idea of freedom. The idea is that freedom of choice and freedom itself are essentially isomorphic—choice gets us what we want, and choice is what allows us to be the autonomous people we are. That’s because our actions are determined by our internal and distinctive preferences and values, not just what’s socially or politically acceptable. That’s the big story.

DSJ: I want to return to the first chapter, which is about shopping. It starts off with this auctioneer, Christopher Cock, and some of the new techniques that he implemented: catalogs and other ways to get buyers to choose his products. How does this play out in terms of a new mode of consumer preference?

SR: Here again you might say: People have always bought things. People went to marketplaces in the ancient world, and they continue all over the world to buy things they haven’t grown or produced themselves. So what’s new?

But “shopping”—and people are often surprised to hear this—is a neologism of the 18th century. It didn’t exist before because the experience that we associate with shopping was itself novel then. In the late 18th century, the word in English was often picked up in other languages precisely for that fact.

What does “shopping” refer to in 18th-century texts? It refers to what we still do when we go to a store or online: browsing, looking at the multiple possibilities, deciding which one best corresponds to a combination of needs, tastes, and preferences before actually buying.

This rather obscure London auctioneer called Christopher Cock—he was famous enough that [William] Hogarth satirized him in his time, but he’s certainly a forgotten figure today—is accessible to us because he left behind all of these catalogs for his auctions. And it turns out he was a sales wizard who invented techniques that paved the way for the modern activity of shopping.

One was encouraging people to come look at all the goods for sale before they bought anything. He invited men and women of all classes to peruse his displays of desirable objects as an activity unto itself. Then he dramatically staged the choice process that followed, where attendees bid on the things they saw that most appealed. By the mid-18th century, shops in London were doing something similar. They began displaying goods—particularly fabrics—so that you, the customer, would have a moment of browsing and comparing, before making a purchase. To us this sounds obvious, but it was new at the time.

The display of the fabrics created a distinctive experience, in which you didn’t simply buy what was needed or what corresponded to your stature or economic position, though those determinants continued to matter too. If you bought the red versus the blue cotton, especially if they were available at the same price, it was because you had a personal preference for one over the other.

These goods were also often referred to as choice. They were choice goods in that somebody had preselected them for you as high quality and desirable. But they were also goods open to choice in that you had to take personal action in the face of them: deciding in the interior of your mind what you liked, what you desired, and actualizing these decisions by finally making the purchase.

So in the 18th century we see the invention of both the practice and the slogan, not to mention some of the techniques that are still used by Amazon in modified forms today. We still put things in baskets and then proceed to checkout as if we were participating in an early modern shopping ritual.

DSJ: There’s one way to read the first chapter, which is to say: Well, this is just a product of the emergence of capitalism. These conditions only exist because we’re seeing the advent of the modern capitalist world. But then you move onto religion. It made me think of Luther’s statement before the papal bull, where he says: To go against God is to go against conscience. True religion consists ultimately of conscience—in other words, freedom of choice to believe what you want. So you could say that when we talk about choice, we’re actually talking about Protestantism. How do you connect these two narratives? Do they congeal?

SR: That’s a really important question—and a big one. I’d like to think that this........

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