The 20th century only further solidified the idea of choice as the paramount freedom, which also meant shedding some of the guardrails of earlier eras. Many economists came to perceive an individual as the sum of their preferences, a choosing machine, Homo economicus, acting rationally and always maximizing the collective good through their own self-interest. The celebration of market-based individualism hit a peak when Milton Friedman’s neoliberalism triumphed in the 1980s. Friedman once wrote that “the freedom of people to control their own lives in accordance with their own values is the surest way to achieve the full potential of a great society.”
At the same time, paradoxically, the 20th century provided much reason for skepticism about how much control humans really have over their choices. Freud revealed the subterranean sources of our desires; advertisers manipulate our taste for breakfast cereals as well as presidents. In this century, at least to a behavioral psychologist such as the late Daniel Kahneman, even the question of free will seems unsettled. This insecurity is particularly glaring in a world of proliferating algorithms that serve us more of what they predict we will want and AIs that offer to do the thinking for us.
If choice is the “useless and exhausted idiom” that Rosenfeld suggests it might be by the end of her history, then maybe the concept is worth abandoning altogether. Doing so, she writes, would be akin to asking “if we are done with capitalism and democracy and their special offspring, human rights”—if we are ready, that is, to throw out the dominant principle of the contemporary world.
I don’t think we are. But if choice has indeed become an end unto itself, absent a set of principles for actually making choices, then something has gone awry.
Abortion rights is a telling test case. In the late 1960s, feminists began using the slogan “My Body, My Choice” to argue for the legalization of abortion in order to make it seem to be a self-evident right: Americans would never stand in the way of freedom, and to be free was to have choices. But what is clearer now, after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade, is that the pro-choice argument was fragile. It gave conservatives the chance to challenge the consumerist-sounding appeal to “choice” with the more moral-sounding appeal of “life.” But even more damning are critiques of this framing from the left. The decision to rely on “choice,” Rosenfeld writes, made access to abortion “solely a civil right, a right to fulfill individual desires without government interference, not a social or economic right framed in response to essential needs or a matter of social justice.” She explains that this made abortion seem like “something for sale exclusively to those who had the resources—financial, familial, and psychological—to select it in a reproductive marketplace.”