Dealer’s Choice: What Freedom Is—and Isn’t

Henry Cowles describes how every choice he makes is now haunted by Sophia Rosenfeld’s “The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life.”

By Henry M. CowlesFebruary 4, 2025

• Science & Technology

• History

I USED TO HANG out at the library. Granted, I still do. But now I get paid to read, whereas back in the 1990s I was reading for free. The Duluth Public Library was my haunt of choice, though to say it was a choice might not be right—then again, it might be. There weren’t a lot of libraries in Duluth, but there were a few. And I could’ve chosen the mall instead. Or could I have? It depends on how you define “choice.” But we’ll come back to that.

The library’s main branch was low-slung and dark blue, an homage to the oar ships docked a few blocks away. Designed by the modernist architect Gunnar Birkerts (the father of Sven—we’ll come back to him too), it replaced the city’s neoclassical Carnegie library in 1980. Almost from the day it opened, the library was controversial, if not downright unpopular. It was ugly. It was cold. You couldn’t see the lake from its porthole-like windows. Skateboarders took over its concrete courtyard, as skateboarders tend to do. Duluthians wanted—and still want—to tear it down.

But I loved that library. I loved snaking up and down the rows, crouching or standing on tiptoe to scan each shelf. I loved sitting cross-legged on the floor, pulling down tons of books at once and speed-reading them. But most of all, I loved the fact that my parents felt the library was safe enough to drop me off alone at an age when the mall was still off-limits or uninteresting. (The fact that I can’t remember which it was is, of course, part of the point.)

The library opened up worlds, as libraries always have. After I got the first Redwall book as a gift, there were a half dozen more waiting for me on the shelf. The same happened with Elfquest, Goosebumps, and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. And then there was Choose Your Own Adventure, a series on a whole different level. For those who weren’t nerds in the nineties: in CYOA, readers made choices for the characters and lived (or died) with the consequences. The ending you got depended on the choices you made—unless you “cheated,” reverse-engineering from the good ending or skipping back and forth at random. For what it’s worth: I was, and am, an unapologetic cheater.

By the time I found it, the CYOA series was well over a hundred books long. It had its own pair of rotating racks at the library, and while I don’t remember ever checking one out, I “read” most of them in the nineties. Nobody knew then that the series was in trouble, soon to be undermined by the rise of computer games and the decline in public libraries. Or at least, nobody told me. Those new choices—Age of Empires, the mall—were over the far horizon, in the land of adolescence. For the time being, Choose Your Own Adventure felt like the only choice I had.

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Like libraries, and everything else, choice has a history. Everything we do—what we read and eat, where and with whom we hang out—involves a choice, albeit one hemmed in by structures as varied as personal taste, peer pressure, economic status, and systems of oppression. We choose, in other words, but from a limited set of options—options that are set for us, invariably, by others. For some, those limits are loud, explicit, unjust; for others, they are quieter. But they are there.

Choice is thus a vanishing point, the place—or act—where our identities as individuals rub against our shared environment and the choices of others. Everything from our morning routines to our Netflix queues is part of an alchemy that makes us unique and ties us together. Aspiration and trauma, beliefs we know we hold and those we hold without knowing it, are all of them partly internal and partly external, deeply private and all too public. Ask yourself why you chose fries over salad or The Brutalist over Gladiator II and you’ll see what I mean: even our minor choices are a mix of what we hold dear, where we grew up, how we happen to be feeling, and a million other forces.

This makes choice, or the act of choosing, an ideal subject for the cultural historian, the kind of scholar who prowls around right on that boundary between visible and invisible, agency and structure. Lucky for us, one such scholar, Sophia Rosenfeld, has taken up choice as her topic, and the result is The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life (2025). Book reviewers often say a particular work should be “required reading,” as if all of us were still subject to syllabi. But you have a choice, dear reader. Are you suspicious of the spread of the language of “choice” from one end of the political spectrum to the other? Are you dissatisfied with the choices on offer? Do you yearn to choose otherwise, or to refuse to choose? Then choose Rosenfeld!

She doesn’t discuss the Choose Your Own Adventure series, or much about the nineties. And with good reason: Her history of choice, though relevant to the present, centers on five specific practices that long predate kids choosing their own adventures. (Though, I should note, the institution of the public library does play a role.) Moving from the advent of “shopping” in the 18th century to the rise of “marketing” in the 20th, Rosenfeld shows how the choices that so many of us take for granted had to be contested, if not outright invented, before we could ever do so.

It is the power of her book, of her chosen case studies and of the brilliant way in which she peels each open, that almost every choice I now make calls to mind one of her arguments or examples. When I order a drink or skim a book or find myself down a YouTube rabbit hole on the best habits to adopt in 2025, I ask myself: Did I choose this? Who did? Why?

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Take parties. I finished Age of Choice just before the holidays, a season that brings a range of people together—family, friends, even strangers—at gatherings that run the gamut from public to private and from boisterous to quiet. What was different about this year, for me, was Rosenfeld: I couldn’t help but see every interaction or avoidance, every offer of another drink or decision about when to leave, as a choice. Of course, they weren’t choices from unlimited options: I didn’t swear at my host or drink from the bottle or light a fire in the bathroom. We do live in society!

But those limits are part of Rosenfeld’s point: even if there is no menu (or QR code) from which to select an option, the act of choosing implies one. Someone, somewhere, has made at least some of the choices for you, either in the form of the bottles you see behind the bar or the norms you seamlessly imbibed as a child about swearing or lighting fires. At parties and elsewhere, when we realize it and (especially) when we don’t, we are constantly choosing—and thereby assenting to choice.

The parties Rosenfeld discusses—19th-century balls—are foreign to us today, though not as foreign as you might think. As a literary set piece, balls’ dominance in the 19th century is only matched by their complete absence since. Almost none of us has been to a ball—unless you count prom, which you shouldn’t for reasons we’ll get to. Matched only by the battlefield, ballrooms were the ultimate stages for the play of anxiety and ambition, seduction and sabotage. (Not for nothing do the ball scenes in War and Peace feel more militaristic than the battles with which they alternate.)

Every part of a ball, from where you sat to whether and what you drank to how you chose a dancing partner, was “regulated by an elaborate armature of informal laws.” Shelf after shelf of guidebooks advised readers not only on the dances one might encounter—so as to avoid confusion, and to prevent bumping into one another or placing one’s hand in the wrong spot—but also on how one should enter the room, to whom one should talk and for how long, and what to do when someone asks one for a dance.

This system of rules, equal parts explicit guideline and tacit knowledge, is what differentiates the prom from the balls on which they are based. At the prom, no one knows what to do, where to stand, or how to dance. It’s a simulacrum, a costume party, playacting at an adulthood that no one alive has experienced. Sure, you might get some (unwelcome) advice as you rush out the door, but the system that propped up the ballroom and provides Rosenfeld with her evidence is gone.

Key to that system, we learn, was a novel technology: the dance card, a material artifact lost so thoroughly that we use the metaphor (“my dance card is full”) without realizing that women who attended balls were required to use physical cards to track their promised dances. Men, following a precise protocol, could ask for a dance—and, if space was available on the card, their request would be granted. Because women’s ability to refuse was thus restricted, Rosenfeld sees the dance card less as an emancipatory technology and more as “the practical transformation of freedom, especially in the affective and romantic sphere, into something like bounded choice.”

In some ways, we’re living—and loving—in the world the dance card created; in other ways, we’re on another planet. Anyone on Tinder or Bumble knows what it’s like to rely on technologies to make what game theorists call “interdependent choice”; they also know that, at least for now, there’s no way a man can see your date schedule and, finding a slot, insert himself. In that sense, the legacies of the dance card are clearer at parties like those I attended over the holidays. It’s not that we carry physical cards (at least not at the parties I go to), but we do carry around, or are carried by, a complex set of explicit and implicit rules for how to be charming and how not to be rude.

Circling the room, on the hunt for interesting conversations or devising escapes from boring ones, I couldn’t get Rosenfeld’s ballroom out of my head. You can’t excuse yourself to refill your glass and be spotted without it; you can’t hop from one conversation to another without an opening. No one tells us these rules, but we know them all the same. And we certainly don’t choose them, or at least I can’t remember making a choice. We carry our dance cards with us, in our heads; they are a hidden code, one Rosenfeld can help you see, like Neo at the end of The Matrix. Except unlike in The Matrix, no one person—or machine—wrote this code. Who did, and why, is the big question.

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The Age of Choice is about all of us—about those who feel like empowered choosers and those who don’t, those who can buy whatever they want at the store or order whatever they want from any menu and those who can’t afford much or can’t dine out at all. At root, Rosenfeld’s history is about how that universalism was achieved, an evolution that often felt progressive but, in the end, was also a story of narrowing, or watering down. If you feel freedom should mean something more than (limited) choice, or even if you just want to know who set the menu and what other options were left off it, then you’ll share Rosenfeld’s suspicion that we’ve lost as much as we’ve gained.

And your suspicions will grow when you learn how this narrowing was achieved. Rosenfeld shows, again and again, that the technologies of limited choice were geared toward a very particular population: women. And this was no accident. The redefinition of freedom as choice, and the limits placed on those choices in turn, could only take hold if those being invited to choose were used to no choice at all. As concrete practices took hold from the department store and the public library to the ballroom and the voting booth, we can track the acceptance of what Cass R. Sunstein and Richard H. Thaler dubbed “choice architecture”—or, more famously, “nudging.”

We are all nudged now. Indeed: we nudge one another! My wife nudges me toward a dish she would rather share with me at a restaurant than the grosser one I want; I nudge my two-year-old up to his bath by offering him the choice of bath with bubbles or bath without. At work, I am nudged (oh so gently) toward advising particular students or administering certain aspects of my department; at the same time, I am trying to nudge the nudgers toward leaving me alone. Many of these efforts are subtle, even subconscious; when they aren’t, they’re based on the decades of research with which Rosenfeld concludes The Age of Choice.

From rational choice theory to behavioral economics, the social sciences gradually assumed authority over how we choose and how we might be made to choose differently (without realizing we are being made to do so). Science is a subtle knife, or at least it can be. And on its basis, choice has managed to spread as if its celebration were independent of politics. Think of the sites in which choice is most fraught: from vaccine skepticism and “school choice” to reproductive justice and HealthCare.gov, we are inundated with choice—or at least its invocation. There’s no good definition of “neoliberalism,” but if you want to see it in action, then just track how “choice” is used and by whom. It’s everywhere and nowhere, as Rosenfeld has helped me see.

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Choice isn’t bad. It’s vital, a small way we can assert ourselves or align with others. But it also isn’t everything. To adapt a phrase from historians of technology: Choice is neither good nor bad, nor neutral. It all depends on what the options are, where the choice exists on the spectrum from forced to free, whether one can reject the choice or choose something no one imagined. Freedom can’t simply be taking a multiple-choice exam or building your own salad at Sweetgreen. Or can it?

During the early, lockdown phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us took comfort in nostalgia—in rewatching Disney movies, or trying to bake desserts we remembered from childhood. In my case, I found and read a few Choose Your Own Adventure books online. I regret to report: they’re bad. The same goes for a lot of the material to which I returned in those months. Things that were so central to who we became, to how we navigated tough times, are never as good as when we first found them or needed them most. I wouldn’t choose a lot of it now, that’s for sure.

But that’s also not the point. Because, as I suggested, I’m not sure I ever chose it. Why did I find myself at the library, in those rows, browsing those books? When I try to explain it now, it had a lot more to do with hidden forces—my class background, my learned habits, my subconscious need to be left alone and to find my own way—than with any moment of rational deliberation. The same is true today: what I eat, wear, and listen to are as much about access and algorithms as about taste. And of course, as Pierre Bourdieu taught us, even taste isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Rosenfeld’s Age of Choice has convinced me: we are surrounded by choices, but we don’t make them however we please. We are, as William James famously said, “bundles of habits.” We react to what we’re given, adapt to what we find, and eat what we like—all while trying to convince ourselves that we do so freely, at least most of the time. Far from being synonyms, freedom and choice might be more like opposites, or at least two terms that exist in uncomfortable tension with one another.

Is there a way, I wonder, to do in reality what so many of us did in Choose Your Own Adventure: to skip to the end and work backwards, or flip between chapters for fun, or build a narrative no one could have anticipated? In other words, is there a way to cheat our way out of the options before us, to push past the limits of “choice architecture” or learn to say no to nudging? I’m not sure what the results would be, and I can imagine some bad ones. But there’s something about the possibility that feels more like sitting cross-legged on the floor of the Duluth Public Library and less like choosing between various milks—whole, oat, bird—for the latte that’s part of my morning routine.