On Choice

I have found few books more captivating, persuasive, and revelatory than Sophia Rosenfeld’s The Age of Choice. It will be impossible to summarize this book in the few short sentences I devote to titles here. And reviews from the TLS or the NYT make it clear just how far reaching and important the arguments are. At a fundamental level she interrogates why frameworks of choice came to define ideas of freedom in Europe and America, and how little those frameworks actually deliver. The book’s topics range from the history of shopping in the 1720s to Marcel Duchamp, and that is just in the first chapter alone. And that is because, as she powerfully puts it, “every big story has more than one beginning” (87). But throughout she unpacks “the tensions and contradictions around the equation of choice with freedom” (14).

With so much to love and learn from this book, it’s hard to focus on a few standout contributions. Still, one does call out to me. And that is the author’s use of novels to think with ideas of freedom and the problems of choice. To be sure there are plenty of political tracts cites, and due attention to figures like John Locke. But for Rosenfeld, it is culture and novels that are the true key to the puzzle. That is because they narrate choices, and in particular women’s choices, to a mass audience. They show just what can be gained when people choose well for themselves, and what is to be lost when we reduce human life to a set of choices. As as aside, I would love to know how the author came upon this insight and the importance of novels to a political history of freedom, as it strikes me as incredibly, well, novel. But that is just one of many questions I have to turn over thanks to this marvelous book.