by Disha Karnad Jani
In this most recent episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Sophia Rosenfeld about her new book The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life (Princeton University Press, 2025). Her book explores how the idea of making a choice from a menu of options arranged by someone else became synonymous with what it meant to be free between the early modern period and the 20th century, via shifts to consumer culture, religious life, romance, and reproduction.
Sophia Rosenfeld is the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of A Revolution in Language: The Problem of Signs in Late Eighteenth-Century France (Stanford University Press, 2004), Common Sense: A Political History (Harvard University Press, 2011), and The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life (Princeton University Press, 2025).
Disha Karnad Jani is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Research Training Group (RTG) “World Politics” at Universität Bielefeld. Her current book project is an intellectual history of the League Against Imperialism, 1927-1937. She is the co-host of In Theory, the podcast of the JHI Blog.
