By the time you read this essay, no matter the hour of the day, you will likely have already made some kind of choice: coffee with skimmed milk, whole milk, cream, or black? Sugar or no sugar? Tea instead? Personalised, preference-based choice is, at present, a deeply familiar aspect of life in much of the world, though perhaps most markedly so in the United States, where I live and work. It is also something people don’t generally spend a lot of time discussing, in part because it feels so ordinary. People around the globe shop for everything from housing to vacations to, yes, caffeinated drinks. They pick what they want to read, what they want to listen to, and what they want to believe. They vote for favourite candidates for office. They select friends and lovers, fields to study, professions and jobs, places to live, even insurance plans to hedge their bets when something they cannot choose occurs.
Perusing a menu of options to decide what best matches individual desires and values – which is what we generally mean today by making a choice – is a key feature of modern democratic and consumer culture alike. It is also an exalted one. People may disagree about what the possibilities should be, but rarely about the principle of maximising arenas for choice-making or the options themselves. For many of the world’s citizens, this is simply what freedom feels like.
Yet, as you may have also felt at various moments, abundant choice isn’t always so straightforward. Behavioural economists point out that most people are actually pretty bad at making decisions of this kind (which explains the appeal of return departments and divorces for when things don’t go as hoped). Philosophers and political theorists say it promotes selfish individualism and discourages collective action around issues that affect us all. And sociologists add that societies that prize choice too much tend to blame those with only poor or limited options for their own misfortunes. So much for choice as consistently synonymous with freedom.
What is strange, though, is that few of these critics ever really question either the centrality or the value of choice-making in contemporary life. On the contrary, they tend to make their case as if people everywhere had always spent their days doing things that feel commonplace in capitalist democracies and, indeed, hankering for more such chances. But for the historian, it is obvious that this entire phenomenon is culturally specific. There are people around the globe even today who actively resist this framing of freedom. What may be more surprising is that granting this special status to choice-making is also a relatively recent development even in Western Europe and the United States, not to mention the rest of the world.
So how did we get to this point? How did choice become a proxy for freedom in so many domains in modern life? As we discover more and more about our troubles navigating it, we might also wonder if there are other, better ways to be free.
Though the explosion of choice has largely been a 20th-century phenomenon, the full story is a long one, going all the way back to the 17th and 18th centuries. Personal choice, as both experience and term of art, got its start in two quite distinct early modern spaces.
One is the realm of the shop. Fuelled by the building of colonial and interior trade networks, new goods started to enter cities and towns as early as the 17th century, first in Western Europe, then in the New World, and gradually in their hinterlands too. Particularly significant among those goods were patterned and brightly coloured textiles called calicoes, originally from South Asia, whose price point made it possible for ordinary people to have the novel experience of selecting from among different designs for clothing or home furnishings. Checks? Flowers? Stripes? Purple or green? The decision could, distinctively, be based on nothing more than personal preference. For at the same time, a leisure-time activity blossomed, first at auctions in temporary locations and then increasingly in fixed destinations called shops, in which consumers were invited to peruse a display of the options for sale before ever opening their purses.
Even people with limited means started to engage in such new activities as trying out different preachers
The English-language neologism ‘shopping’, as opposed to provisioning, took off in the second half of the 18th century precisely to describe this newfangled business. We now also call it consumer choice. The customer learned from all of this browsing and weighing the possibilities to ‘make a choice’ – which is to say, an aesthetic as well as a practical determination en route to purchasing – from what were often already described as a set of ‘choice’, or pre-selected, goods ripe for picking.
The post-Reformation fracturing of Christianity, combined with the Protestant tradition of ‘freedom of conscience’ or ‘religious choice’, gradually produced a sense of ideas and beliefs as being similarly up for selection in a pluralist world. With the double emergence of Enlightenment notions of tolerance in Europe and of the Great Awakening religious revival in the British colonies, even people with limited means started, on both sides of the Atlantic, to engage in such new activities as trying out different preachers and churches where congregations had become voluntary communities, attending varieties of public lectures, and picking books from lending libraries and sales catalogues. These, too, were learned recreations, ones that soon revolved around secular as well as sacred notions. Consider Jane Austen’s fictional heroine in Mansfield Park (1814) who, when she gets up the nerve to subscribe to a lending library, is, in Austen’s lightly satirical telling, ‘amazed at her own doings in every way, to be a renter, a chuser [sic] of books!’ From such actions, the stage was set for intellectual choice as well.
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