Like these earlier books—as well as Democracy and Truth (2018), a shorter, thoughtful meditation that also dealt with populism—The Age of Choice starts in the eighteenth century, a time when “freedom” still principally signified freedom from domination by others and few people saw much reason for “maximizing choice-making opportunities.” But in this period a consumer revolution began in Europe and North America, with a rapidly expanding range of goods becoming available to those able to afford them, including coffee, tea, sugar, spices, colorful textiles, printed engravings, books, and ceramics—all made possible by increasingly global trade and the wealth generated by chattel slavery in the Americas. Fashion in clothing and home furnishings, previously the concern of wealthy aristocrats, became a matter of daily life for much more of the population. Shops began to display items for sale in specially designed cases and in windows. Cities widened sidewalks and installed street lighting, making the shops more accessible.
In short, “shopping” was born. Guidebooks that promised to help shoppers make the most intelligent, thrifty, and tasteful purchases were rushed into print. Shopping was also quickly branded as feminine and condemned as a frivolous distraction from more serious pursuits. Moralists like Bernard Mandeville warned that “in the choice of things we are more often directed by the Caprice of Fashions, and the Custom of the Age, than we are by solid Reason, or our own Understanding.” Even so, shopping was also idealized as the exercise of personal, subjective preference. And it featured prominently—and not coincidentally—in the period’s most important literary genre: the novel. As Rosenfeld writes, realist novels are “the choice-genre par excellence.” Their plots tend to hinge on fateful life choices, and their attention to character underscores the social and psychological factors that shape those choices.
In the following chapters, Rosenfeld shows how this concept of free choice became associated with freedom in general. One early section deals with the vogue for “commonplacing” in the decades around 1800, when men and women cut out texts that spoke deeply to them and pasted them into scrapbooks: the intellectual equivalent of shopping for an individual wardrobe. She also pays attention to what she calls an ideology of choice, whose roots extended back to the Reformation and the Protestant idea that “conscience is ultimately subjective, meaning that each person…has to be free to follow its dictates.”