Thinking about the Age of Choice

Sophia Rosenfeld

Contracts always have a complex relationship to choice.  On the one hand, partners to a legitimate contract have to agree to its terms voluntarily.  On the other, the contract binds the parties once it is signed and sealed.  The history of personal choice, and particularly its expansion into a synonym for freedom in the modern world, is thus very much bound up with the history of contracts of every kind.  This talk will explore the relationship among popular sovereignty, voting, and choice from the 18th century onwards and the implications for how we envision our social contract and our obligations to one another today.    

Sophia Rosenfeld is Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History and former chair of the History Department at the University of Pennsylvania.  Her latest book is The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in the Modern World (2025), which was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice.  She is also the author of A Revolution in Language (2001); Common Sense: A Political History (2011), which won the Mark Lynton History Prize and the Society for the History of the Early Republic Book Prize; and Truth and Democracy: A Short History (2019), as well as co-editor of the award-winning, six-volume Cultural History of Ideas (2022) and a former co-editor of the journal Modern Intellectual History. Her work has been translated into many languages and supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Studies (Princeton), the Institute for Advanced Studies (Paris), the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and both the Remarque Institute and the Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU, as well as well as previous positions as Professor of History at the University of Virginia and Yale University and visiting professorships at UVA Law School and the EHESS in Paris.  In 2022, she held the Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the North at the Library of Congress and was also named by the French government an Officer in the Ordre des Palmes Académiques. In 2025, she was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  She also continues to write and to speak in a wide variety of venues about the state of contemporary democracy and the challenges of free speech. Her essays and reviews on these subjects can be found in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and The Nation, among other outlets.