How We Choose What We Choose

Review of The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life, by Sophia Rosenfeld, Princeton University Press, 462 pp, $37.

By the 19th century, freedom to choose had become the defining characteristic of democracy, market capitalism, and individual fulfillment in the United States and Western Europe.

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In The Age of Choice, Sophia Rosenfeld (a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Democracy and Truth and Common Sense: A Political History) provides an immensely informative and engaging account of how the concept took hold, evolved, and spread throughout the world. Drawing on an extraordinary array of sources, Rosenfeld examines the emergence of choice in shopping, romantic life, politics, and human rights declarations; the different implications of choice for women and men; interpretations of choice by psychologists and economists; and the ways in which “choice architects” have capitalized on, manipulated, and constrained the practice of “autonomous” decision-making.

Rosenfeld also addresses whether everything should be subject to choice, how choosing happens, and who should be “allowed” to make choices.

Increasingly entrenched and celebrated, Rosenfeld demonstrates, freedom of choice was also contested. The Protestant Reformation, she reminds us, privileged deliberate personal selection among existing options. “No man can so far abandon the care of his own salvation,” John Locke proclaimed, “as blindly to leave it to the choice of any other, whether prince or subject, to prescribe to him what faith of worship he shall embrace.” Anabaptists insisted that baptism be delayed until adulthood, when a free and informed decision to follow Christ could be made.

Nonetheless, Rosenfeld points out, even Locke believed that individuals should not be permitted to choose Catholicism, atheism, or Godlessness. And that accepting one denomination meant living a righteous life and obeying behavioral “commandments.”

The “consumer revolution” was also accompanied by norms designed to regulate choice-making. “Taste” encouraged class-bound conformity about appropriate purchases. Shopping was deemed to stimulate unwanted impulses, especially among women, that included impulse buying and stress when presented with an excess of options. And poor people were “left behind in the new frenzy of aspirational choice.”

Structural inequality also resulted in contracts in which powerful people limited or eliminated the choices of individuals with less capital or clout. Regulating marital relations, contraception, divorce, and workplace conditions required laws that restricted the freedom to choose as well as expanding it. “Right to life” proponents, Rosenfeld indicates, argue on moral and religious grounds that abortion, like child labor, statutory rape, and suicide, should not depend on personal discretion. Antivaccination protestors display signs proclaiming, “My body, my choice.”

And Rosenfeld reveals that John Stuart Mill, the 19th-century champion of liberty, freedom, and universal suffrage, believed that the secret ballot would increase the tendency of voters to cast their ballot “to please themselves” and satisfy personal or partisan interests, likes, or dislikes, instead of advancing the public good. Unlike shopping and other forms of consumption, Rosenfeld adds, casting a ballot, in public or in a voting booth, does not preclude the possibility that one’s choice will not be rejected by the will of the majority.

In the 20th century, Rosenfeld indicates, social scientists made significant discoveries about choice-making behavior. Building on the work of Sigmund Freud, psychologists concluded that despite “deep-rooted belief” in their ability to make rational choices, human beings are governed by repressed or unconscious forces over which they have little or no control. To increase sales at a time in which production was outpacing demand, marketing psychologists designed advertising campaigns to replace “I need” with “I want” by tapping—or manufacturing—potential customers’ dissatisfactions, desires, prejudices, and preoccupations with status.

Meanwhile, economists took psychology out of the equation, expressing no interest in the motivations behind choices, or whether one was better than another. Taking for granted that choosers have free will, know their preferences, and act as atomized individuals interested only in their own welfare, these economists concerned themselves only with the value-free “material fact of choice” that fall on things “that are variable in quantity and capable of measurement.”

More recently, Rosenfeld reports, behavioralists have validated many of the claims made by psychologists. When making decisions, they found, individuals don’t consider risks or probabilities very well, are inconsistent in their preferences, allow emotions to rule their thinking, can be manipulated, and often act against their better judgment. And, so, “choice architects” have crafted initiatives to get people to act “rationally”—and for the common good—through “nudges,” like making organ donations a default decision, which an individual must opt out of rather than in to.

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All that said, Rosenfeld concludes with a ringing reminder that for those living in authoritarian societies, choice is “the way to realize their humanity.” But she also entertains the possibility that choice, which is often an illusion, characterized by indifference to collective well-being with others in control of the options and rules of engagement, “has run its course, practically and conceptually.”

Her speculations about radical reform, Rosenfeld acknowledges, are “more utopian than anything else.” Choice, she emphasizes, “Is not always the highest goal.” It needs to be “more explicitly connected to moral considerations rather than set in opposition to them or invoked as a means of evading them.” Whether choice “is about babies or baubles or beliefs, it should be a means, not an end unto itself.”