Today's guest is University of Pennsylvania historian Sophia Rosenfeld, the author of The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life. Her book explores why we've come to basically equate having more personal choices with having more freedom. She stresses it wasn't always this way—in the past, freedom was often defined as the ability to act in the way God wanted you to act, or to overcome base urges, to be more angel than beast. Rosenfeld talks about how the Reformation, which enshrined a right to choose among faiths, and the rise of shopping, which allowed us to choose among many products, worked to change all that, even up to our current day, where rhetoric about choice still dominates many political and economic arguments.   0:00—Intro 1:15—Main arguments from The Age of Choice 4:03—Earlier conceptions of freedom 7:37—The Reformation and religious freedom 10:32—Capitalism and market freedom 15:37—Consumer choice and femininity 20:00—Choice as freedom in the 20th century 26:07—Abortion rights and the choice debate 31:26—Choices vs. mandates 36:50—Overwhelmed by choice   Upcoming Reason Events The Reason Roundtable Live in NYC, July 15 The Soho Forum Debate: Jacob Hacker vs. David Goldhill, July 16   Today's Sponsor Future of Freedom: If you're tired of cable news debates and Twitter shouting matches and you're looking for serious, good-faith conversations between people who actually care about liberty, then it's time to check out the Future of Freedom podcast. Each episode dives deep into a single topic—tariffs, campus speech, the Department of Government Efficiency—and brings together two guests who disagree on the best path forward. But here's the twist: This isn't a debate show. No interrupting. No dunking. If you believe the future of freedom depends on more than just winning arguments and you're ready for something deeper than the usual echo chambers, check out the Future of Freedom podcast. Real disagreement. Real ideas. Real conversations. Subscribe to Future of Freedom wherever you get your podcasts. ______________________________________________________________________________ Transcript This is an AI-generated, AI-edited transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.   Nick Gillespie: Give me a quick précis of the book's argument. Sophia Rosenfeld: Sure, I'm happy to do that. I think choice is one of those things we do tend to equate, as you've just suggested, sort of automatically with freedom. It's sort of the water we swim in: more choice is better, more opportunities for choice is better than less. And I'm not here to really dispute that exactly, but I'm interested in both the good and bad things it's brought us, and I'm also interested in how that happened. Because actually, what's perhaps surprising to people is that freedom hasn't always been conceptualized as a matter of choice, and choice hasn't been conceptualized as what brings us freedom. So the story that I tell in the book is really about two things. It's about how choice came to proliferate so that we pick things in really disparate areas of life—ranging from political candidates to breakfast cereals to who we want to marry. We pick in all sorts of categories that would have seemed strange to