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.

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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 story is not only about commercial culture running roughshod over absolutely everything else. It’s rather reductive to think that as soon capitalism starts to emerge, we can’t get out of its grip at all. Instead, I see this book as having two origin stories, and they intersect at times, but one is not reducible to the other. So just as the commercial world starts to create variety and pluralism—which is a necessary precondition for the process of selection—something parallel happens almost simultaneously in the world of ideas and beliefs.

You point very rightly to the centrality of the after-effects of the Reformation. The Reformation itself did not create religious choice. Even conversion was not often thought about as a choice, in the sense that one is compelled in most conversation narratives to follow one’s beliefs.

But two things happened as a result of the Reformation that are very important to this story. One is more of an unintended consequence, which was that after more than a century of religious warfare and the permanent fracturing of Christianity, much of Europe and parts of the New World arrived at a point at which it seemed to many people that the only way to restore peace was to allow for pluralism in the realm of belief. Toleration was simply the precondition for people of varied faiths to live peacefully near one another.

But the second thing that you’re alluding to is equally important. This idea of freedom of conscience is central to most strands of Protestant Christianity. It’s why debates about baptism were so important early on. The idea is that it’s not effective to be compelled to accept religious teachings or principles. One has to embrace them of one’s own accord for them to be legitimate, and this involves not just the rights of conscience but also religious freedom, which was often called religious choice.

Here, we’re not yet at a moment of value-neutral choice. But there was a growing sense by the 18th century in Protestant strongholds that something must speak to us in our interior for us to make this choice in the exterior, namely, to embrace a faith and all that comes with it. And you can see—especially if you look to North America in the 18th and into the 19th centuries—the ways in which this idea eventually starts to fuel not just religious choice but also notions of freedom of speech and expression more broadly. Religious choice gives way to notions of intellectual pluralism and the possibility of intellectual browsing: looking at different ways of thinking about the world and making up one’s own mind.

We know people in Philadelphia around the time of the American Revolution, for example, often actually visited multiple churches on a given Sunday. People would record something like “heard a good sermon at 10 am by so-and-so; then went over to the African Methodists, after checking out the Baptists; heard another better one at 11.” That sounds strange to us now, but you can imagine a process by which people were starting to imagine the possibility of hearing conflicting ideas and choosing the ones that corresponded to an inner sense of what speaks to them or even simply what they found most pleasant to hear.

DSJ: It’s almost as if there’s a kind of cascade effect, where freedom of choice continually spills over into new areas. That brings to mind the chapter on the ballroom and new forms of romance. Even as things loosened up, there still seemed to be plenty of constraints—rules of engagement, courtship etiquette, etc. And one could argue this is all ongoing: I hear constant complaints from my friends about the marketization of romance and the dehumanization it entails.

SR: Yes, eventually we get to a point where picking or selecting involves picking other people. Not objects, not ideas—other people.

You rightly point to one of the other big themes in the book, which is not just how choice spreads into new domains, but how it brings ever more rules and new kinds of constraints with it. I might even go so far as to say that the more choices we have, the more laws we need to make it all work. Some of those rules were (and remain) limiting; they leave certain kinds of people out all the time, and they are exclusionary.

But at the same time, many of them were (and are) enabling in that they make it possible to organize something as complex as how to match people up in a world in which everyone doesn’t already know everyone else. So in the same era I’ve been talking about—the 18th century into the 19th century—individuals in the Western tradition were given increasingly more autonomy to find their own mate. This was an outgrowth of the idea of companionate marriage, which suggested that one should ultimately find somebody that one actually likes—that, in a partner, one should find a combination of someone to enjoy spending time with, someone to feel sexually attracted to, someone who wants to live similarly, etc.—all the things that we think are important in finding a mate to this day, as opposed to simply making a pact between two families to secure both of their legacies.

This happened first in places with a burgeoning middle class in Western Europe. It spread more slowly both to the top of the social hierarchy, as in the aristocracy, and to people with few resources. But by the end of the 19th century, most people in the West were contracting for themselves. The problem that emerged is: How were compatible people going to find each other? How, especially, were they going to find each other if they lived in big, anonymous places like New York City or London? If the pool is 10 eligible people in a small town, that’s quite a different project than in a place where there is an essentially endless variety of people to potentially meet.

During the French Revolution, the revolutionaries tried to come up with all sorts of ways to solve the matching problem. Maybe want ads in newspapers? Maybe marriage bureaus? There’s lots of discussion of potential solutions, but one of the major sources for meeting people becomes places where people could hear music and dance, essentially balls.

So I got interested in how you picked people to dance with in these settings, whether you were in a commercial ballroom where entrance depended on paying for tickets or a private home to which you had been invited. It turned out that there was an incredibly elaborate, class-based and gender-specific etiquette around this business either way. Who asks whom to dance? How many minutes can you spend with that person? Do you ask from the right side or the left side? Can the woman make a choice or just say yes or no? Does she give you her hand or just her arm?

If you’ve read any Jane Austen novels, you’ll know a little about this in Regency England, including that men could ask and women could, in fact, only say yes or no—and no only if they planned to sit out that dance entirely. But there were variants everywhere in the West by the late 19th century, from Santiago to St. Petersburg. I think the rules are quite interesting because they made it possible for people to do this daring thing—make bodily contact with a stranger in a world where that was unlikely to happen in any other place or time. The whole business enabled flirtation and more, but of course, it also created enormous potential for missteps of different kinds.. And all of this is particularly interesting because it was being worked out at the same time that the problem of how to pick representatives in the political sphere was also being imagined. I am interested in drawing attention to these odd family resemblances.

DSJ: I want to follow up on the question of politics. You write about the invention of the ballot box, which “transformed voting from a public act for which one was accountable to one’s fellow citizens to an essentially private act of preference expressions.” What is your assessment of this innovation and its legacy? Does this involve a minimalist conception of politics?

SR: Politics is at the heart of the book because we tend to think: there’s the age of revolutions in the late 18th century; people’s choice starts to rule; and at least in the US, we’ve had a democracy ever since. But I see politics being transformed in the 19th century just as much as in the 18th century.

Here’s why: Whether we are talking about the American or the French Revolution, there was not much discussion of how to vote in the 18th or early 19th century. There was a lot of discussion about elections mattering, certainly, but more in symbolic ways than as a mechanism for realizing voters’ specific, quantifiable choices. Politics was, on both sides of the Atlantic, imagined in a more maximalist way—to use your language here—which was to say:

It was assumed “the people” would collectively decide what was in their best interest. It might not be clear how they would do that—by what precise mechanisms—but the goal was generally a collective decision about the public good.

Now, initially this decision was only made by a small number of people. White men of property over a certain age were the only people voting almost anywhere. But their possession of the vote was assumed to be a kind of a trust, where they would, as independent people, have the power to decide on behalf of their dependents—which meant everybody else in their households, not just their children, but also servants, the enslaved, anyone in their employ, as well as all female members of the family.

We focus a lot on how voting rights have expanded over time to encompass all the people who were once left out. But we don’t talk much about how voting changed and how the conception of politics changed in response—which, as you say, involved the invention of a more minimalist conception of politics alongside the development of universal suffrage. As more people gained the vote, they were asked to make a different kind of determination. Before, if the question was, theoretically, “What do we all collectively believe is in our best interest?,” now enfranchised people were being asked “What do you, personally, want? What are your preferences in the political realm?” Then all those individual determinations were to be aggregated at the end.

That also meant a change in form. With the expansion of suffrage came something else: the secret ballot. The universality of the secret ballot is a very late development. People were still voting viva voce, or out loud, in Kentucky as late as the 1890s. But by the start of the 20th century, the secret ballot was well on its way to being the gold standard for a free and fair election internationally. Why was this change so important? You might say it just protected people from being pressured by their bosses or their landlords or their fellow employees to vote a certain way. But it also transformed the meaning of voting.

And that transformation was towards a kind of privatization and individuation of political decision-making and a more minimal conception of politics. Politics became a matter of adding up individual choices made in private and on private grounds. Even someone like John Stuart Mill, who was a great fan of fostering choice in so many different domains, was very opposed to the secret ballot. You might ask, Why?

Well, he thought that if we started approaching politics the same way we approached shopping—in the mode of individualized, personal choice rooted in preference—democracy itself would lose its most important quality: the people speaking in one collective voice about what was in their best interest.

It’s hard not to think that he was on to something. There are many good reasons why the one standard in human rights principles around voting is the necessity of secrecy at the moment of choice. And we still engage in this weird compromise now where we go to a public place and then go behind a little curtain and do this little private act in this otherwise public sphere. It’s kind of a mash-up of the two possibilities. But that private act was what Mill thought might doom us and turn us away from a kind of politics that was in the public interest.. One might be quick today to dismiss out of hand the idea that we ought to vote publicly. But it’s still worth thinking about some of what we lost in the privatization of voting. This is also a key piece of the big story that interests me. The adoption of the secret ballot between the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th is when politics starts to fall into line with a lot of other spheres in terms of being structured around preference-based and value-neutral choice. Only the workplace remains immune.

DSJ: The epilogue of the book discusses Roe v. Wade and the role that choice rhetoric has played in the abortion debate. It seems to me that you have a nuanced perspective on this, with sympathies for both conservative and certain leftist critiques of the limitations of framing abortion in terms of choice. What do you find compelling about those criticisms? Do you see the recent overturning of Roe as connected to the framing of abortion rights in terms of choice alone?

SR: This is also a big question and a really important one. I use Roe v. Wade in part to talk about how to think about choice more broadly today. But you’re absolutely right that women play a big role in the book from the start. That’s not because it’s a book about women so much as because women’s relationship to choice gives us an especially good way to see the strengths and limitations of calling for choice as the great form of modern freedom.

Going back to our earlier conversation about shopping, you could say women, as the quintessential early shoppers, are the first modern choosers, but they’re also long tainted by that association. They’re not making the important moral choices of Hercules. That’s also why Mill, like a lot of 19th-century critics, says it would feminize politics to vote in a way that was all about privately recording one’s personal preferences.

So women are in this odd situation of being at the forefront of modern notions of choice, but also always needing to demand that the same choices be available to them that men across class seem increasingly to be getting. That brings us to women’s suffrage; why women should or shouldn’t have the vote is a question largely about choice and who gets to have it and in what arenas. Should women have a choice in marriage?Should they have a choice whether to have children? These too are perennial questions. Many histories of abortion take Roe v. Wade as a turning point, the moment when the modern abortion movement really begins. But I see it in many ways as the culmination of a story in which women had been repeatedly asking for an expansion of choice along the same lines as human rights.

Betty Friedan and others had already framed expanded choice as central to the second wave of women’s liberation. And in the aftermath of Roe v. Wade (1973), which itself was largely argued on grounds of privacy, nascent feminist organizations like Planned Parenthood and NOW had a choice to make themselves: How were they going to mainstream this idea? It had been decided by the Supreme Court that abortion would, legally, become one of the options available to women in the US who found themselves pregnant and did not want to be. Yet it was not something that had widespread popular buy-in at this point. What were they going to do? Supporters went through a variety of different possible framing devices: population control; equality for women; healthcare, which, for instance, the British took up instead.

In the end, the major feminist groups settled on choice. There was a consensus among mainstream feminist organizations like NOW in the mid-1970s that choice was the most palatable framing—the one most likely to go down well with a broad public. It was already associated with women and their demands around feminism. But more to the point, it seemed like something nobody, male or female, would object to. In part that’s because it had such a strong American ring to it, especially in the aftermath of World War II. The idea was that no one was telling you that you have to have an abortion. No one was telling you that it would be the right choice for you. All that was being asked is that women get to pick what matches their own values and preferences, just as they would in many other spheres.

In other words, the right to choice was thought to be a conciliatory gesture, a way to say: We’re not really advocating for abortion. We’re only advocating for women to have the autonomy to make up their own minds.

In many ways, that’s a very appealing perspective to this day. I certainly don’t want to be understood as saying choice is bad, that people should just be coerced more often. Choice has been an important aspiration for liberation movements from abolitionism through feminism. But that said, there were also some important critiques of this decision to frame abortion rights around the idea of choice that are still worth taking seriously.

Almost immediately after this ruling on abortion came the right-to-life argument—which turned the question of choice back into a moral evaluation. Life, opponents of abortion argued, had more moral weight than any one woman’s choice. One argument would be that “the right to life” is best understood as simply a kind of Trojan horse for an anti-feminist position. But part of its long-term success stems from the fact that it reintroduced in important ways the necessity of thinking about the moral stakes in any choice on offer as opposed to making choice itself always the greatest value. And from the left, especially from Black feminists, came an argument that proved equally significant, which was to say: What is a choice if one doesn’t have the money to pay for this? If doctors aren’t available, if I don’t get time off work to do this, but if there’s also no support for raising children if I decide differently, isn’t choice an empty idea? In the same way, say these critics, modern human rights doctrines require that all of us have choices in all these areas of life, from marriage to employment to place of residence to political representatives, but if there’s no guarantee of ways to realize those choices, they remain only an abstraction.

Both of those critiques have been important in challenging choice-based liberalism. Indeed, we might take them seriously today, thinking not just about abortion rights. We might ask more broadly: when is choice still serving as a foundation for liberation? And when is an emphasis on choice a way of punishing people who don’t have any good ones or a way of avoiding the moral stakes inherent in many of the important questions that face us? Take the environment, for instance. Without major economic intervention by the state and without a shared commitment to a single goal, lots of personal, small-scale decisions rooted in household preferences aren’t going to save the planet.

In other words, there are important critiques of our obsession with choice as freedom to be made in this moment, and I try to draw those out. Historians often act as if they’re simply providing background for other people, whether they are political theorists or philosophers or pundits or citizens, to make normative arguments. But I think it’s OK for historians to sometimes be more vigorous in making arguments themselves about how to think, especially about the kinds of things that we tend to take for granted, like the idea that choice equals freedom. We can ask: What does the historical record show us? But we should also be able to take the next step and ask: What does the historical record show us that might give us tools for how to think about the values that we hold dear today?

DSJ: One thing that comes to mind about choice is that in some ways it’s a floating signifier. It can be appropriated by both the left and the right. What does this book tell us about Trump 2.0?

SR: This is a question many people have been asking me lately. They often want to know: Is this a book that you wrote while thinking about a different era? Are you talking about something that’s almost defunct?

One of the things that’s held steady since the Second World War is the idea that there’s a deep relationship between capitalism, on the one hand, and democracy and human rights, on the other. That synergy is often associated with this idea of individualized, personal choice. In these last four months, I think we’ve seen a presidency in the US that’s taking us towards the breaking apart of that synergy.

By which I mean, almost immediately Trump announced that there’s going to be greater freedom of choice when it comes to all things that function in marketplaces: light bulbs and appliances and automobiles and, in addition, schools. Even with tariffs, he says there might be fewer things on the shelf temporarily, but they are supposed to bring us plenty, even abundance in the long run. Consumer choice is still appealed to as a high value.

At the same time, though, the other side of this—the growing power of the executive, the creeping authoritarianism of the first year of the second Trump presidency—suggests to me that the notion of citizenship is going in a different direction. We’re moving towards a vision of the citizen who will not be able to pick from such a wide array of menus. Voting is going to be constricted in various ways. So is our intellectual freedom. The expansion of options and opportunities for choice in the political sphere is being tamped down even as choice in consumption continues.

I don’t think that means that this book has suddenly become irrelevant. Quite the contrary—it seems likely that the age of choice will continue, but it will look different. I’ve been referring to Trump alone, but one could look at illiberal democracies around the world and see something similar happening. All over the globe the trend seems to be an explosion of consumer choice, with AI likely to drive this still further, but with some of the key liberal democratic elements that have been in place since the middle of the 20th century declining at the same time. I hope that this is a book that will continue to be relevant in helping people think through how the different pieces of our lives fit together and also where to go from here.