What The Hell America!

Consider the first and most straightforward topic covered in the book: shopping. Shopping is an activity that turns choice into something like an end in itself. It used to be that a person would go to the market in search of a particular item they knew they needed, and then make a selection with the help of a store merchant. With the advent of shopping, people began to enter the market without a plan to buy any particular thing from any particular seller — we began to engage in the activity of choosing (or even just contemplating making certain choices) for the sake of choosing. But now, the activity has seemingly reached a nonsocial extreme: we most often shop alone, on the internet, without any interaction with any merchant whatsoever.

Rosenfeld documents this shift over time, noting how various innovations in the realm of shopping have transformed the nature of market activity. For instance, the notion of a fixed price for a product was something that occurred at a distinct moment — sometime in the late nineteenth century — and was met with a fair amount of resistance, given that it “took out the personal dimension, including the help with choice when there were many variables to consider in determining what made one object more desirable than another.”

While this concern about the personal dimension of shopping might today seem a bit quaint, it resonates with the preoccupations of many political thinkers in the modern era. For instance, when Adam Smith articulated his defense of free markets in The Wealth of Nations, he imagined the market as a space in which individuals met as equals in the hopes of settling on a mutually beneficial agreement. This would require imagining what the other person needs, attending to their interests, and seeking to satisfy them so as to cultivate a respectful and caring relationship. These were the conditions under which market choices occurred, and they were said to aim toward equality, empathy, and sociality. (In fact, according to the political philosopher Elizabeth Anderson, this is why support for capitalism was originally thought of as a left-wing position.)

In the 250 years since, choice in a market context has become unrecognizably different. Merchants who do not know their customers sell things to customers who do not know them, and the seller is generally indifferent as to whether the customer needs or even wants what’s being sold. Customer satisfaction generates “brand loyalty” rather than fellow feeling. Sellers and consumers are incentivized to approach market interactions in a way that’s narrowly individualistic and self-centered.

But The Age of Choice is interested in much more than just our economic lives. The book details how this dynamic extends far beyond our identities as market actors.

The nineteenth-century ballroom, according to Rosenfeld, marked an important turning point in the history of choice as it pertains to romantic partners. Courtship had historically involved a closely choreographed process, guided by family and community. But at the ball, men could approach women and ask for a place on their dance card, opening up a new world for the young and romantically inclined:

[D]ance cards . . . place us firmly in a world rife with new opportunities and occasions for picking among multiple options for both sexes. Nineteenth-century people of various classes in Europe and throughout the Americas not only encountered ever more special spaces and aids for doing so; as the century wore on, the principle of the menu of options also became increasingly entrenched as a central organizing schema that made many aspects of life loosely homologous.

It cannot be doubted that this explosion of options was freeing in many respects. But as any reader of Jane Austen knows, the norms surrounding Victorian-era courtship were anything but laissez-faire. Formal rules and informal customs came to regulate every aspect of relations with the opposite sex — before, during, and after the ball — with women’s behavior in particular being scrutinized at every turn.

It may be tempting to see the evolution of coupling from the time of the Brontë sisters to the time of Tinder as one of steady progress toward romantic liberation — dating apps tend to cut meddling family members and neighborhood busybodies out of the process (though it appears dissatisfaction with online dating is growing.) But Rosenfeld cautions throughout the book against reading the history of increasingly unfettered choice as a story of unqualified progress. Though she mentions twenty-first-century dating only in passing, the present romantic milieu can seem like the natural end point of the process she describes. For courtship in our neoliberal era has taken on the character of consumer choice, gutted of much of what we find valuable in it, and encouraging participants to abide by the logic of the market even in their love lives.

Dating via smartphone app, after all, requires taking yourself to market and advertising yourself like a product — witness the proliferation of guides for writing a bio and choosing a profile photo, which call to mind corporate advertising strategies from a business school text more than they do dating advice. It means trawling through others’ profiles and searching for an option that catches your attention in much the way that you might survey a DoorDash menu. And once a date is planned or completed, many end up adopting a marketized mindset toward their match — considering whether the choice being made is the optimal one, whether there are better options being left on the table, and how to pursue most efficiently the affection, sex, or marriage that one is after.

Those who are broadly welcoming of the neoliberal understanding of free choice may respond to all this with a shrug: Why treat love or sex any different from soda or soap in the supermarket? Alternatively, some on the Right respond to the predicament of modern-day romance by lobbying for a retrieval of our reactionary past, when traditional gender and sexual norms were wielded as instruments of social control.

But what might a genuinely emancipatory alternative look like? Rosenfeld’s book is more an invitation to contemplate questions like this than it is an attempt to answer them. But the nineteenth-century utopian socialist Charles Fourier had some radical, and rather amusing, suggestions. Fourier was a critic of marriage as an institution, as well as what he saw as stifling social strictures that stunted our ability to enjoy our sexual powers. In his posthumously published Le Nouveau Monde Amoureux (a text that would be embraced by 1960s flower children more than a century after its writing), he offered a vision of open love shared with multiple partners — male and female, young and old, conventionally attractive and not.

Fourier balked, however, at any suggestion that the sexual freedom he championed should be understood as a market free-for-all. For a “free market” in love would, he thought, lead inevitably to a form of pernicious competition, leaving many (the old, the ugly, the disabled) amorously impoverished.

Instead he devised a system in which people were to be matched with others on the basis not just of shared or complementary sexual interests, but spiritual and intellectual ones as well. Prospective lovers were to be given several options from which to pick, and the ability to reject an offer would always be respected — though the hope was that more people would be open to a wider range of possibilities under a noncompetitive system with thoughtful matchmakers.

With its assumptions that people in general would fare better in polyamorous relationships, that the old and young can be paired without creating troubling power dynamics, and that prospective lovers will be content to be paired with others irrespective of their gender, I would be hesitant to  advocate Fourier’s system for coupling in all its particulars. (At any rate, the whole thing was likely offered mostly in a playful spirit — Fourier himself mentioned that we’d probably have to eradicate syphilis before implementing it.)

But what is interesting about his proposal is its self-conscious attempt to preserve and promote values that are either ignored or destroyed when the choice of partner is treated like just another market decision. Fourier was concerned to create a broadly inclusive society, where sexual competition no longer left in its wake a stream of embittered and deprived loners. And he was insistent that romantic life should not be reduced merely to the satisfaction of one’s present sexual desires but should enable one to flourish both physically and spiritually. He imagined a world in which potential matches were proposed by someone who was thinking carefully about the character and needs of each person, as opposed to an app trying to entice a person in any way it can to choose someone, whoever it happens to be and for whatever reason. (Or, for that matter, to just keep swiping and paying for premium upgrades.)

Fourier’s chief insight was that the choice of romantic partner should be shaped by norms and institutions that promote progressive aims rather than the goals of private market actors. Whether there exists, at present, an opening for a leftist challenge to the prevailing romantic order — with its libertarian assumptions — is a question that begs to be asked once we begin to scrutinize the notion of choice. Maybe we could start by questioning the wisdom of putting our dating lives in the hands of profit-driven entities.

In August of 1872, the town of Pontefract held an election in which a secret ballot was used for the first time in Great Britain. The ballot box was a historical innovation: in earlier eras, it was common for democratic voting to take place amid raucous debate and deliberation, concluding with a public poll by show of hands. Rosenfeld reports that journalists from all around traveled to witness the Pontefract election, reported on it as a curious spectacle of sorts, and then — in a glimpse of the world of political punditry to come — proceeded to speculate about the innermost thoughts of voters who were now voting without sharing their reasoning.

There was, of course, a certain amount of freedom that came with the secret ballot. No longer would it be easy to bribe (or threaten) someone into voting a particular way, for the ballot box rendered it impossible to confirm who voted for whom. But at the same time, this new practice transformed voting from a public act for which one was accountable to one’s fellow citizens to an essentially private act of preference expression:

Ultimately, the introduction of the secret ballot on a national and then global scale helped cement several assumptions that were new to political thinking. . . . The first is that when it comes to politics, “independent” people . . . have judgments and preferences that can be discerned and measured, just as they can when we are talking about consumer goods. . . . What follows from this presupposition is a second, which takes the form of a problem: these judgments and preferences are not likely to be shared across the board, even if focused on the collective good, precisely because they are rooted largely in personal and privately held values, tastes, aspirations, and consciences.

Looking at this through a philosophical lens, the ballot box transforms the democratic process from one that aspires to empower “the whole people [to] rule concerning the whole people,” as Jean-Jacques Rousseau put it, into an arena more like that of (again) market competition. A person is no longer encouraged to think of their vote as a public act that needs to be justified to their fellow citizens but is instead incentivized to treat the vote as an instrument for advancing their personal preferences by vanquishing others at the polling station.

While acknowledging the liberatory gains achieved through the ability to cast one’s own vote without being subject to arm-twisting, the engine of these advances is a system that downplays the sense of civil and social responsibility that might be thought to come with the franchise. While voters these days can of course engage in endless debate and discussion with their political allies and opponents alike, increasingly few seem to think that there’s anything like a public duty to look one’s fellow citizens in the eye and offer a justification for one’s vote. In the voting booth, one feels free to cast a ballot for whatever reason one wants, no matter how frivolous, ill-informed, selfish, or even vindictive. Answering to others has become morally optional and incidental to the activity of casting a vote.

This development bodes ill for democracy. It’s not immediately clear what to do about it though, as national deliberative town halls do not seem to be in the cards. In my own view, local politics, if they are lively and robust, provide opportunities to work and deliberate with one’s fellow citizens as equals. These kinds of relationships, when developed over time, have been known to encourage cultures of cooperation, in which people attend to one another’s needs and values, working toward compromise and shared ends.

As participation in local politics dwindles, it’s often pointed out that a lot of important policy gets determined at the local level: around housing, environmental regulation, education, and so on. But perhaps local politics should be refortified for another reason: it’s the place where it just might be possible to see democratic choice enlivened by a more communitarian, civic-minded spirit. And much the same can be said about trade unions, whose decline in the United States has gone hand in hand with increasing social atomization and a rightward shift of working-class voters.

Whether one is at the supermarket, on the dating apps, or in the voting booth, the trend in the neoliberal era is toward a conception of choice that walls a person off from the perspectives and interests of others. We buy and sell products without bothering to ask whether we are doing well by the person on the other end of the exchange. We seek out romantic partners like we choose items off a menu, facilitated by profit-maximizing algorithms indifferent to the flourishing of their users. We vote as atomized citizens with the hope of getting what we ourselves want, without entering imaginatively into the political standpoint of others in hopes of pursuing the common good together.

The Age of Choice is very insightful on an array of topics I’ve not discussed here, including feminism and reproductive choice, the selection of organized religion and faith, and the psychology of advertising. But at the broadest level, the book is an invitation to think about the way our nature as choosers interacts with social and economic forms throughout history. The past few decades have seen the increasing dominance of a self-centered, marketized conception of choice, one that is leaving cold a growing number of Americans. Given the centrality of choice to human life, finding our way to more collective and pro-social ways of thinking about this notion may be essential to addressing our era’s myriad crises.