Sophia Rosenfeld is the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. In addition to The Age of Choice she is also the author of A Revolution in Language: The Problem of Signs in Late Eighteenth-Century France (2001), Common Sense: A Political History (2014), and Democracy and Truth: A Short History (2018), as well as many other academic and general audience publications in the areas of intellectual, cultural, and political history.

The Age of Choice is a captivating, wide-ranging history of the rise and consequences of individual choice in the modern world. Rosenfeld’s account follows the expanding influence of personal choice-making from seventeenth-century Europe through its sharp ascendency in the twentieth century and does so largely by explaining how the personal choice revolution played out in a number of different types of activities. These general activities are discussed in chapters on choice in things/goods, choice in beliefs/ideas, choice in partners/romance, choice in politics/voting, and, finally, most relevant to economists, choice and the behavioral sciences. Although these topics are important to the overall narrative, there are a few themes that percolate throughout the book and regularly cut across these specific chapters. The topics that seem to receive the most attention are: the role of women in the expansion of personal choice—"it is feminism where the full power of the concept of choice is most evident today, and it is women’s lives and identities that have been most … transformed globally in this concept’s wake" (p. 5); the evolution and significance of the linkage between modern choice and freedom—"the understanding that to choose by and for oneself is broadly constitutive of freedom" (p. 17); and the connection between choice and modern morality—"an increasing hegemonic vision of morality in which having a choice is itself a moral good, maybe even the moral good" (p. 340).

The Age of Choice has been well-received and reviewed in a wide range of different publications; it has also been discussed in various podcasts, videos, and other media. Given all this, and given the JHET audience, I will provide an overview of the book’s main argument and then examine Rosenfeld’s characterization of the work of certain economists and their involvement in the historical development of modern choice. Rosenfeld is not an economist and there does not seem to be any indication that economists are part of her intended audience, and yet economics—including parts of the history of economic thought—plays an extremely important role in her overall story. “It wasn’t artists … who ultimately sealed the deal on choice in the twentieth century. It was economists” (p. 306).

Of course human beings have always made choices, but Rosenfeld argues persuasively that somewhere around the middle of the seventeenth century in Europe the character of human choice began to change in ways that slowly but systematically led to a fundamental transformation of the nature and significance of choice in most parts of the world. While choice had traditionally been tightly constrained by well-established conventions, entitlements, and obligations, modern choice developed into the type of choice-making behavior that would later be associated with the agent in neoclassical economics: an agent with well-defined stable preferences who makes choices to achieve the greatest individual preference satisfaction.

Modern choice is thus much more than mere choice. It is the defining characteristic of cultures where individual preference satisfaction–based choice is the pervasive feature of human activity; choice changed from being simply one of the things that humans do, to defining who they are: “We are the sum of our choices” (p. 2).

Rosenfeld explores this transformation of choice-making through the lens of a vast array of specific activities—from the calico craze in seventeenth-century Europe (pp. 34–38), to the social significance of dance cards (pp. 144–153) and ballroom dancing (pp. 162–175) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to voting in general (the actions of “autonomous choosers in the realm of public affairs,” p. 202, and the history of the secret ballot, pp. 206–223), to the context and diversity of religious choice (pp. 89–113), and to the debates over and legislation of abortion during the last fifty or so years:

While the majority of the book is a history of the nature and development of modern personal choice, toward the end Rosenfeld begins to discuss some of the many ramifications, and particularly tensions, associated with the modern individual choice-based form of life. She addresses many issues, but one particularly emphasized is women’s authority over childbirth, abortion, and related concerns. Rosenfeld characterizes women’s late twentieth-century adoption of modern choice values and morality—using the term “choice feminism” (p. 19)—as the “fetish of a new, geopolitical conception of freedom-as-choice and choice-as-freedom,” which was extended “to a very particular kind of gendered labor: birthing babies” (p. 33). The idea of freedom of choice in childbirth “was an idea that fit well, potentially, within a politically democratic and economically capitalist world that had already made a habit, science, and finally, virtue of self-interested choice” (p. 337). Of course the counterargument to this moral reading of choice is that “the ’right to life’ (on the part of a potential or ’unborn’ child) necessarily trumps any ’right to choose’ (on the part of a potential mother). Individual choice—the core of a woman’s independence—may matter a lot in some contexts, but it is not always the most important value at hand” (p. 349).

Rosenfeld discusses in detail many of the tensions surrounding the rights and obligations of childbirth that have played out, and continue to play out, in politics, legal decisions, and individual lives (pp. 347–356). Although freedom of choice in childbirth receives a significant amount of attention, Rosenfeld also discusses a number of other tensions associated with our modern personal choice–based culture.

In the Epilogue Rosenfeld raises questions about whether these tensions threaten the long-run sustainability of modern choice:

She responds to these concerns by asking the question: What can historians “add to this discussion, aside from telling us the story of how we got here and … how difficult it remains to pull these strands apart?” (p. 356). Although she does not take a definitive position on the matter, she does discuss some of the different approaches that historians might pursue. I will just note the one that I suspect would garner the most support from economists: the “keep it, warts and all” response.

I will not attempt to offer any broad evaluative commentary on Rosenfeld’s sweeping history of modern choice—both to keep this review at a reasonable length and also because much of the book’s wide-ranging subject matter is well outside my areas of expertise. What I will say about my overall judgment of the book is that it is an extremely fascinating story—original, well-researched, and well-written—and one that I would encourage other historians of economics to read. I would also say that while I had never thought about the relationship between individual choice and the modern world in the way that Rosenfeld explains it, I often find myself thinking about it in this way now.

All this said, I do have a few critical remarks about how economics and the history of economic thought are presented in The Age of Choice. Given the constraints of a book review, I focus only on a few topics that are of particular interest to me, although other historians of economics may have other concerns. The Age of Choice is not a history of economics book, but economics is one of its main characters—and to some degree plays the role of a villain—which increases the obligation of tending to the economic details.

The first example is John Stuart Mill often with Harriet Taylor (pp. 137–143, 190–193, 226–229, 308–310), two individuals who are certainly relevant to The Age of Choice, given their association with hedonistic utilitarianism, On Liberty (1859), and the relationship between women’s rights and choice-making. While different scholars may have different assessments, I find what Rosenfeld says about utilitarianism, liberty, women’s choice, and other not-narrowly-economics topics relatively unproblematic. However, at least one more narrowly-economics topic, the way Rosenfeld discusses Mill’s famous definition of political economy (written in 1830, first published in 1836, and reprinted in the 1874 collection Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy) is more controversial. Rosenfeld quotes Mill that the definition of political economy “does not treat of the whole of man’s nature as modified by the social state, nor of the whole conduct of man in society. It is concerned with him solely as a being who desires to possess wealth, and who is capable of judging of the comparative efficacy of means for obtaining that end” (p. 309).

As Rosenfeld explains, this single-goal view of economic behavior is the “idea of homo economicus—a model man or ideal type with which one can effectively theorize” that “goes back to John Stuart Mill” (p. 308). This single-minded pursuit of wealth is of course consistent with the single-minded pursuit of individual utility; in Mill’s case the hedonistic utility of Jeremy Bentham’s sovereign masters of pleasure and pain. Thus the reader gets the idea that Mill defined economics—political economy, in his day—as an inquiry restricted to individuals pursuing wealth and driven by hedonistic utility.

In fact the self-interested pursuit of wealth is exactly how Mill defined political economy in the 1830s, but the reason he defined it that way was neither that Mill thought individual economic agents really did act only in their narrow self-interest, nor that they should/ought to act only that way. Mill’s definition is neither about what is, nor what ought to be; it is about what is necessary for economics to be a science. As Mill said only a few pages later than Rosenfeld’s quoted passage: “Not that any political economist was ever so absurd as to suppose that mankind are really thus constituted, but because this is the mode in which science must necessarily proceed” (Mill [1874] Reference Mill1974, p. 139; emphasis added).

Of course Mill’s notion of what was necessary for science is quite different from later epistemic conceptions of economic science, science in general, and the philosophy of science. Just as all of the wide-ranging topics that Rosenfeld discusses were products of historical context, the reigning conception of what was necessary for scientific knowledge in economics and other fields also changed with historical context. The point is that Mill’s narrow definition of political economy is context-dependent and even in the 1830s it did not imply that Mill thought that individuals really acted only in a self-interested way or that they ought to act in such a way. Mill was defining political economy through a particular epistemic lens, which tells us almost nothing about the definition of economics or any particular characteristics of homo economicus associated with later vintages.

Moving on historically, another example that stands out is Vilfredo Pareto (pp. 307, 311–313, 319, and 323). Rosenfeld’s main discussion of Pareto emphasizes two quite different points. One draws attention to some of Pareto’s disparaging remarks about women and the other emphasizes his role in the turn of the twentieth-century transition from hedonistic utility theory to later preference-based choice theory. The remarks about women seem to be much more a reflection of Pareto’s context and general demeanor than any revealing insight into the connection between women as choice-makers and the development of early choice/price theory economics. As Bruna Ingrao and Giorgio Israel noted: “Nobody embarking upon Pareto’s major works can fail to observe—and find irksome—his mixture of intellectual arrogance and biting irony … his work affords us a glimpse of a haughty and often contemptuous man” (Ingrao and Israel Reference Ingrao and Israel1990, p. 121).

That said, Pareto did play an important role in the so-called ordinal revolution of the early twentieth century and his work certainly did involve preferences and individual choice. The problem is that it is difficult to identify Pareto’s exact contribution to the transformation because of the ambiguity in his various works. Pareto was a trailblazer and “perhaps the most prolific economist who has ever lived” (Chipman Reference Chipman1976, p. 66), but he was seldom clear or consistent (either between volumes or even within a particular volume). One relevant confusion was the mixture of hedonistic-cardinal utility, ordinal utility, and behavioral-experimental conceptions of preferences that often criss-crossed in his various works. There were many different ideas about individual choice swirling around in the minds of economists at the turn of the twentieth century—all seeking to replace the foundations of classical economics like the labor theory of value; Pareto’s were just one example. A particular case is Pareto’s disagreement with Benedetto Croce, which Rosenfeld discusses on pp. 311–312. Croce’s position is clear, but Pareto often mixed cardinal, ordinal, and behavioral ideas in his discussion (see, for example, Weber Reference Weber2001, or Moscati Reference Moscati2007). The point is that while Pareto was an important figure in the development of neoclassical theory, one should not take any particular part of Pareto’s writings as neoclassical gospel. It took mathematical economists most of the middle of the twentieth century to sort through, tidy up, and systematize his writings in order to integrate them into what was eventually considered to be a coherent microeconomic theory.

In addition, given that The Age of Choice mentions Milton and Rose Friedman’s Free to Choose only once (p. 339), it seems strange to try to connect the extensive social transformation of individual choice during the twentieth century with austere mathematical consumer choice theory—a body of literature that was highly idealized and incomprehensible to almost everyone other than a small set of economists and their students. Free to Choose and similar works by the Friedmans and others were written for the non-academic audience and argued explicitly that free individual choice both defined freedom and carried its own moral force; it was “the surest way to achieve the full potential of a great society” (p. 339). If mainstream economics “sealed the deal on choice” in modern society, the transmission mechanism was undoubtedly more through non-technical popular literature on the blessings of individual choice and free markets than through mathematical high theory.

These are only a few examples of how various parts of Rosenfeld’s discussion of economics might be challenged by a more careful examination of the relevant economics literature. One additional topic that could be discussed in this way is behavioral economics and the associated behavioral welfare economics (particularly libertarian paternalism); it is a nice example of how Rosenfeld’s characterization of the literature diverges in substantive ways not only from how economic theorists, policy practitioners, and historians of economics typically treat the subject but also how it is treated in the extensive philosophy of economics literature. Of course I recognize that The Age of Choice is not intended to be a book on the history of economics and it is not really fair for a reviewer to criticize a book because of something it was not meant to be. Still, it seems that in this case the elephant in the story needs more careful attention. The bottom line is that The Age of Choice is an extremely important book and it is generally a very persuasive book. I believe it would serve historians of economics well to read it. But that said, if historians of economics are to be entirely comfortable with Rosenfeld’s account, I suspect that the discussion of individual economists and economics theory would need to be much more detailed and carefully presented.