Books
Books
The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life
PRINCETON university press | 2024
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Choice touches virtually every aspect of our lives, from what to buy and where to live to whom to love, what profession to practice, and even what to believe. But the option to choose in such matters was not something we always possessed or even aspired to. At the same time, we have been warned by everybody from marketing gurus to psychologists about the negative consequences stemming from our current obsession with choice. It turns out that not only are we not very good at realizing our personal desires, we are also overwhelmed with too many possibilities and anxious about what best to select. There are social costs too. How did all this happen? The Age of Choice tells the long history of the invention of choice as the defining feature of modern freedom.
Taking readers from the seventeenth century to today, Sophia Rosenfeld describes how the early modern world witnessed the simultaneous rise of shopping as an activity and religious freedom as a matter of being able to pick one’s convictions. Similarly, she traces the history of choice in romantic life, politics, and the ideals of human rights. Throughout, she pays particular attention to the lives of women, those often with the fewest choices, who have frequently been the drivers of this change. She concludes with an exploration of how reproductive rights have become a symbolic flashpoint in our contemporary struggles over the association of liberty with choice.
Drawing on a wealth of sources ranging from novels and restaurant menus to the latest scientific findings about choice in psychology and economics, The Age of Choice urges us to rethink the meaning of choice and its promise and limitations in modern life.
“This is a book of astonishing insight by one of America’s most talented historians. Rosenfeld has that rare capacity to remove scales from our eyes and compel us to confront what we had failed to see. Readers will have no choice but to be enthralled.” — Darrin M. McMahon, author of Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea
“Combining philosophical sophistication with ingenious social history, Sophia Rosenfeld has given us a tour de force on the modern history of the changing relation between ideas about choice and freedom. We tend to think, like fish not knowing they live in water, that current attitudes about choice and freedom have always been with us. Rosenfeld disabuses us of this idea most elegantly and persuasively.” — Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less
“Making choices has become the cramped and controversial meaning of being free in the contemporary world. This magnificent and original book is a mirror revealing who we are and how we got that way, in how we think about markets and politics, beauty and love, indeed being human itself. For holding the mirror up—and proposing that the alternative to choice is not necessarily constraint but a different kind of freedom—Sophia Rosenfeld deserves our deepest thanks.” — Samuel Moyn, author of Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times
“A fascinating exploration of how Western society has come to prioritize the freedom to choose everything from our leaders to our meals to what happens to our bodies. Rosenfeld’s insightful analysis is sure to change the way you think about having options.” — Katy Milkman, author of How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be and host of the podcast Choiceology
“Every so often a book comes along that suddenly makes you realize that what you thought was a simple given is actually a phenomenon with a complex and problematic history. The Age of Choice is just that kind of book. With sparkling insights, rich illustrations, and beautiful writing, Rosenfeld demonstrates how modern societies have made the ability to choose the hallmark of freedom, whether in the marketplace, in ideas and belief systems, in courtship, in voting, in feminist and other rights-oriented politics, or in the social and behavioral sciences. But as we learn from Rosenfeld, this equation of choice with freedom can often exclude rather than empower.” — Lizabeth Cohen, author of A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America
“Sophia Rosenfeld’s elegantly written, accessible, and compelling new book traces how the concept of choice came into being and became central to self-making in our time. Through varied accounts of how people decided what to buy, how voting became a protected form of choosing, and how reproductive rights became a matter of choice, The Age of Choice illuminates the link between selfhood and freedom that we take to be self-evident. It offers a fresh and insightful account of how modern liberalism came to be.” — Carolyn J. Dean, author of The Self and Its Pleasures: Bataille, Lacan, and the History of the Decentered Subject
Democracy and Truth: A Short History
university of pennsylvania press | 2018
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"Fake news," wild conspiracy theories, misleading claims, doctored photos, lies peddled as facts, facts dismissed as lies—citizens of democracies increasingly inhabit a public sphere teeming with competing claims and counterclaims, with no institution or person possessing the authority to settle basic disputes in a definitive way.
The problem may be novel in some of its details—including the role of today's political leaders, along with broadcast and digital media, in intensifying the epistemic anarchy—but the challenge of determining truth in a democratic world has a backstory. In this lively and illuminating book, historian Sophia Rosenfeld explores a longstanding and largely unspoken tension at the heart of democracy between the supposed wisdom of the crowd and the need for information to be vetted and evaluated by a learned elite made up of trusted experts. What we are witnessing now is the unraveling of the détente between these competing aspects of democratic culture.
In four bracing chapters, Rosenfeld substantiates her claim by tracing the history of the vexed relationship between democracy and truth. She begins with an examination of the period prior to the eighteenth-century Age of Revolutions, where she uncovers the political and epistemological foundations of our democratic world. Subsequent chapters move from the Enlightenment to the rise of both populist and technocratic notions of democracy between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the troubling trends—including the collapse of social trust—that have led to the rise of our "post-truth" public life. Rosenfeld concludes by offering suggestions for how to defend the idea of truth against the forces that would undermine it.
“An essential guide to finding the roots of our current predicament, this short book provokes thought rather than simply assigning blame and consequently succeeds in the most important task of all: helping us navigate toward a revival of democracy at the very moment when it seems most under threat.” — Lynn Hunt, UCLA
“One of our most audaciously gifted historians offers a deep, subtle, and suitably prickly examination of a newly vexing set of issues. Indispensable. Irresistible.” — Don Herzog, University of Michigan Law School
“A valuable historical guide to current debates about elitism and populism, Democracy and Truth poses the hardest of questions: can we maintain a constitutional government worthy of a free people in an age of widespread misinformation and fanaticism?” — David Bromwich, Yale University
“If you are a citizen concerned and not a little confused about the frantic assault on objective truth in today's United States, Sophia Rosenfeld's learned but extremely accessible book is a must-read. Democracy and Truth explains and reveals the historical and intellectual roots of the tension between the two values named in the title, and it shows that truth can prevail—but never without a fight.” — Michael Tomasky, author of Left for Dead: The Life, Death, and Possible Resurrection of Progressive Politics in America
Reviews: The Guardian (Fara Dabhoiwala), The Nation (David Bell), Dissent (Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen), Project Syndicate (Jan-Werner Müller), The New Yorker (Briefly Noted), CATO Journal (Michael B. Levy), Coffee Party USA, book forum in Tocqueville Review (Jonny Thakkar, Antoine Lilti, Lisa Wedeen, Nathalie Caron; with reply by Sophia Rosenfeld), De Volkskrant (Marjan Slob), Sydney Review of Books (Miriam Cosic), Ideje (Zeljko Ivankovic), H-Diplo (Anton Jäger), Perspectives on Politics (Samuel Bagg), History: Reviews of New Books (Lee McIntyre), France Culture (Brice Couturier), Physics World (Robert P. Crease), American Political Thought (Keith E. Whittington), Journal of American History (David Greenberg), Contemporary Political Theory (Book Forum: Alfred Moore, Carlo Invernizzi-Accetti, Elizabeth Markovits, Zeynep Pamuk), Books and Ideas/La Vie des Idées (Sara Maza), Journal of Modern History (Helena Rosenblatt), Democratization (Nirupam Hazra), Review of International American Studies (Sakina Shakil Gröppmaier), 3:16 (Walter Horn).
Media: “The 99 Page Test,” The Institute Letter (Institute for Advanced Study), The Hedgehog Review, OPEN Best of 2019 Books, see more here.
Prizes:
Mark Lynton History Prize, Columbia University, 2012
SHEAR Book Prize (Society for Historians of the Early American Republic), 2011
Translations:
French (Le Sens commun: Histoire d’une idée politique, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2014)
Korean (Boogle Books, 2011)
Common Sense: A Political History
Harvard University press | 2014
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Common sense has always been a cornerstone of American politics. In 1776, Thomas Paine’s vital pamphlet with that title sparked the American Revolution. And today, common sense—the wisdom of ordinary people, knowledge so self-evident that it is beyond debate—remains a powerful political ideal, utilized alike by George W. Bush’s aw-shucks articulations and Barack Obama’s down-to-earth reasonableness. But far from self-evident is where our faith in common sense comes from and how its populist logic has shaped modern democracy. Common Sense: A Political History is the first book to explore this essential political phenomenon.
The story begins in the aftermath of England’s Glorious Revolution, when common sense first became a political ideal worth struggling over. This accessible and insightful account then wends its way across two continents and multiple centuries, revealing the remarkable individuals who appropriated the old, seemingly universal idea of common sense and the new strategic uses they made of it. Paine may have boasted that common sense is always on the side of the people and opposed to the rule of kings, but Rosenfeld demonstrates that common sense has been used to foster demagoguery and exclusivity as well as popular sovereignty. She provides a new account of the transatlantic Enlightenment and the Age of Revolutions, and offers a fresh reading on what the eighteenth century bequeathed to the political ferment of our own time. Far from commonsensical, the history of common sense turns out to be rife with paradox and surprise.
“Sophia Rosenfeld’s superb intellectual history traces the strange birth and controversial afterlives of one of our most fundamental political concepts. Lively and learned, it sheds long-range light on contemporary anxieties about democratic populism and those who would manipulate it in the name of ‘common sense.’” — David Armitage, Harvard University
“Breathtakingly original and daring, this book will force every reader to rethink the foundations of democracy in the modern world.” — Lynn Hunt, UCLA
“Rosenfeld illuminates one of the key ingredients of democratic-populist politics: that the common sense of the people offers a better guide to politics than the wisdom of elites. Learned and arresting, this book compels us to see that the rhetoric of common sense is anything but straightforward—or common.” — Daniel T. Rodgers, Princeton University
Reviews: Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe (Brainiac blog), American Prospect, Pop Matters, Library Journal, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Choice, Reviews in History, Révolution française.net, H-Law, Isis, American Historical Review, Political Theory, History: Review of New Books, The Historian, Journal of Modern History, Law and Society Review, Journal of the Early Republic, H-France, Political Studies Review, Canadian Journal of History, Journal of British Studies, Contributions to the History of Concepts, Reviews in American History, Historical Materialism, Philosophy Now, Études: revue de culture contemporaine, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, La Vie des idées, Acta Fabula, Revue française d’études américaines, Revue française de science politique.
A Revolution in Language: The Problem of Signs in Late Eighteenth-Century France
STANFORD University press | 2001
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What is the relationship between the ideas of the Enlightenment and the culture and ideology of the French Revolution? This book takes up that classic question by concentrating on changing conceptions of language and, especially, signs during the second half of the eighteenth century.
The author traces, first, the emergence of a new interest in the possibility of gestural communication within the philosophy, theater, and pedagogy of the last decades of the Old Regime. She then explores the varied uses and significance of a variety of semiotic experiments, including the development of a sign language for the deaf, within the language politics of the Revolution.
A Revolution in Language shows not only that many key revolutionary thinkers were unusually preoccupied by questions of language, but also that prevailing assumptions about words and other signs profoundly shaped revolutionaries' efforts to imagine and to institute an ideal polity between 1789 and the start of the new century. This book reveals the links between Enlightenment epistemology and the development of modern French political culture.
“Sopia Rosenfeld's intriguing study deals with a chapter in the intellectual history of the Old Regime and the Revolution of 1789, the puzzle of language. . . . A very fine piece of historical scholarship. . . . This really is a must-read for any serious student of the French Revolution.” — History: Reviews of New Books
“Until Rosenfeld's book, no one has attempted to explain in any convincing manner why the meanings and usage of words were so central to revolutionary political culture. . . . [A] well-researched and creatively argued book for those who claim that the revolution was, above all else, a misplaced and deadly struggle to determine who would speak for the nation.” — American Historical Review
“A Revolution in Language is a thoroughly researched and documented study that convincingly demonstrates the extent to which both philosophes and revolutionaries were preoccupied with problems of language. It furthermore shows that the epistemology of the Enlightenment strongly affected not only the thinking of revolutionary leaders, but also the development of modern French political culture.” — Gita May, Columbia University
Reviews: The New Republic, American Historical Review, History, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, History of European Ideas, Dix-huitième siècle [regular review and featured in a review essay], Literary Research/Recherche Littéraire, Annales historiques de la Révolution française, Journal of Modern History, French Review, French Politics, Culture and Society, Canadian Journal of History, Histoire, Epistémologie, Langage
A Cultural History of Ideas (6 Volumes)
Anthology Co-Edited with Peter T. Struck
BLOOMSBURY | 2023
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How has the nature of ideas evolved over time? How have ideas been shaped, employed and received in different social and cultural contexts?
In a work that spans 2,800 years, these ambitious questions are addressed by 62 experts, each contributing an overview of a particular theme in a specific period in history. The volumes explore the development of ideas , primarily in the West, from a range of disciplinary angles.
Individual volume editors ensure the cohesion of the whole and, for ease of navigation, chapter titles are identical across each of the volumes. This schema offers the reader the choice of reading about a specific period in one of the volumes or following one theme across history by reading the relevant chapter in each of the 6.
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