Abstract
Today, in much of the world, we shop for goods, we vote for candidates, and we pick everything from entertainments to friends and lovers. How did having and making choices from menus of options come to be understood as what freedom is all about? And what have the main consequences been, both positive and negative, of living in this Age of Choice? This talk, ranging widely over time and place, will attempt to answer these twinned historical and philosophical questions as well as explore how to write the history of ideas that are typically taken for granted.
Bio
Sophia Rosenfeld is Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, where she specializes in the study of the Enlightenment, the Age of Revolutions, and the intellectual and cultural history of democracy. Her most recent book is The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in the Modern World. She is also the author of the prize-winning books A Revolution in Language: The Problem of Signs in Late Eighteenth-Century France (2001); Common Sense: A Political History (2011); and Truth and Democracy: A Short History (2019), as well as co-editor of the six-volume Cultural History of Ideas (2022). She is an elected member of both the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
