Princeton
Review by Walter Cummins
In The Age of Choice, Sophia Rosenfeld, an academic historian, joins the perspectives of psychology and sociology to her historical presentation of developments in recent centuries that led to the current questioning of the relationship of choice to freedom, asking, “… if choice as we know it is really what freedom should be all about.” Most people tend to consider the two as synonymous or, at least, the unencumbered opportunity to choose among many options as a necessity for achieving freedom.
Although capital H history has a goal of showing “the particularity and contingency of choices people made in the past,” —what Rosenfeld calls “choice in action”—she is not content to consider that her purpose for this book. By taking this information as evidence and going beyond the usual use of history, we may be able to lead to “new kinds of politics and subjectivities.” That is, we may be able to rethink to premises that make greater choice a desired end in itself and, perhaps, find a way to distinguish between positive and negative realms of opportunities for choosing.
Today people and many of our businesses, organizations, and even political charters, such as “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” have a faith that the ability to make choices underlies “human autonomy, dignity, and even happiness and fulfillment.” Those who assume this believe that we build our identities by making choices; that is, who we are is the outcome of those choices.
Rosenfeld explains that the recent conception of choice differs greatly from that of past centuries when it meant living in “a set of already widely agreed-upon rules and obligations.” That is, people when they picked did so within the range of options appropriate for their social standing. Knights essentially lived in a very different life from peasants in what they wore or ate or played. And the range of options for each was restricted by a predetermined set of obligations and limitations that precluded an unfettered choice.
Although we live with a very different set of assumptions about choice, Rosenfeld asserts that they emerged gradually in a path that was not unidirectional or inevitable. Actually, it was gradually and fitfully. Much more than from an agenda of planned ideas, this major shift emerged from the mundane activities that occupied people in their spare time. In these ways of passing free hours they became familiar with making choices. And these became what Rosenfeld calls “doxic,” unconsciously taken for granted. The notion of the ability to choose spread from unexpected beginnings.
Yet choice options, she argues, must be “bounded choices”: “What needs recognition is that, paradoxically, freedom of choice has always required, and still requires, rules, regulations, even restrictions of multiple kinds in order to prevent it from threatening individual well-being or the stability of the social order as a whole.”
Additional limits to choice are suffered by certain people because of race, poverty, health, and other matters of social standing. The role of women, half the population, is significant as they gained more and more rights, such as voting, control of their finances, and choice to pick a spouse. Still others are in question.
The place given choice in economic and political paradigms, Rosenfeld asserts, is flawed. The ability to choose does not assure a good outcome. Because of false assumptions, lack of knowledge, confusion, and of external manipulation, people often make bad choices that result in economic and psychic costs. A source of stress is the abundance of options that leads to psychological pressures and makes what many consider freedom a burden.
An additional complication involves the question of what issues should be matters of individual choice, such as vaccinations for school attendance, dress codes for work, helmets for bicycle riding, and—perhaps most significant—the ability for a woman to choose an abortion. That matter Rosenfeld considers in depth in her concluding sections.
But first she writes as a focused historian in telling us how we got here in expectations about choice by showing how examples of small social changes led to unplanned and unintended consequences.
The first of these chapters focuses on changes in the manner of shopping and choosing, beginning with information about Christopher Cock’s early 18th-century auctions in London, for which he assembled used goods from fine houses and advertised the events with printed lists of offerings. He gave buyers an opportunity to wander among the displayed belongings and create wants; in fact, for a growing number of belongings that became musts for a well-furnished home. In some cases, the method resulted in crazes for new products, like printed calico.
So much to choose from—for example, clothing—increased the desire to buy, with the growth of shops with display windows and the resulting window shopping to make choices as a recreational activity with merchants attracting buyers and buyers choosing. Women assumed a much greater role as shoppers: “… the culture of consumption invented in the eighteenth century thoroughly involved men and women alike, just as it did multiple social strata.” Many novels by women writers featured scenes of their heroines shopping and, in some cases, facing a psychic toll. Later on artists began to criticize the emphasis on shopping and choosing, but the power of choosing was established.
To explain the expanding opportunity of people to decide which ideas they embraced, Rosenfeld concentrated on the commonplace book. These contained copied or pasted words and art that captured what owners chose as representing their own values. These books embodied a growing freedom of expression and belief, influencing the subjects of published books, including those on theories of religion.
Expanded choice led to new opportunities, along with restraints, for women. To illustrate, Rosenfeld concentrates on the institution of marriage, starting with an explanation of dance cards men used to request to dance with a women, facing complex rules regarding the asking and the number of dances open, which “testifies to something else: a growing need for increased rules and order in the selection-making process, that is, for both formal and customary forms of restraint.”
“Choice in the domain of sexuality has, from the beginning, been just as much a political question as either a legal or a customary one,” Rosenfeld wrote. This connection is seen in the drama of women’s right to vote. Rosenfeld begin her discussion of voting with the accident of a secret ballot experiment in one small British town, Pontefract. Until then, voting had been an open event, with men announcing their choice publicly. The fact that the experiment went so well, with none of the predicted complications, changed voting in much of the world: “… voting in secret was redefined as a purely personal affair, a matter of inclination, much like selecting a bride …,” which in effect spread to women’s suffrage, a much more complex and controversial process.
Her detailed coverage of these processes demonstrates that the expanded options for choice is not automatically a growth of freedom. In some cases it’s the opposite: “Indeed, in practice, some people gaining in independent choices has as often worked to limit them for others as to expand them across the board …”
A fundamental question for Rosenfeld asks whether humans really have rational free will for making choices or whether, as Freud argues, we are often guided by deeper impulses that override our conscious thinking. A parallel question is how much we can be manipulated by persuasive strategies that control mental forces we are not even aware exist. An additional complication to choice, even if we are fully aware and in control, is illustrated by a dilemma Rosenfeld discusses at length—abortion. Should individuals be permitted to have a choice in the matter in light of conflicting moral and religious viewpoints?
While most people of our time would, on the face of it, agree with a statement that choice and freedom should be human goals, Rosenfeld in this book shows why making a personal decision is much more complicated than we may think.
