This is the reason interview with Nick Gillespie, and I want to talk to you about the choices you've made that have brought you to my office today, my podcast today.

That's because my 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 basically come to equate having more personal choices with

having more freedom. I know I do. She stresses that it wasn't always this way. In the past,

freedom was often defined as the ability to act in the way that God wanted you to act

or to overcome your more base urges, to be more angel than beasts.

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 options right in front of us,

worked to change all that,

even up to our current day, where rhetoric about choice still dominates many political and

economic arguments. This is a mind-blowing conversation, and I hope you choose wisely to listen

all the way through. Here is the reason interview with Sophia Rosenfeld.

Give me a quick presee of the books argument. 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, that 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 so perhaps surprising to people is that freedom hasn't always been

conceptualized as a matter of choice, and choice hasn't always 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

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