Readers of this journal need no reminder of the long-standing centrality of political ideas in intellectual history and freedom’s pride of place among them. Since the turn of the century, however, the field has witnessed a growing interest in economic ideas, with intellectual historians often studying the latter in the context of broader discussions of political ideas. The literature on neoliberalism comes to mind, with its special attention to the free market, but studies of freedom that connect it to choice offer another illustration. With a frequent application in the realm of consumption, “freedom of choice” provides a smooth entry point for historians interested in economic ideas, even more so since economic freedom is now occasionally presented as the paragon of freedom.

Having choices or getting to make them does not exhaust the meaning of freedom, for it can fall to people to make choices in circumstances they would rather escape or change if they could. It is useful, therefore, to make a distinction between choosing among the available options—that is, “freedom of choice”—and choosing to change one’s predicament regardless of existing options, which we might call the “choice of freedom.” If the former accords with the freedom-as-choice conception of the world, the latter does not. It amounts to conceiving of a state of affairs constituted of new options, with a view to changing the game itself. It is precisely the merit of the two books under review to complicate the story of the relationship between freedom and choice by showing that freedom of choice comes with its fair share of limitations and that the choice of freedom goes beyond selection from among existing alternatives.

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Despite its subtitle, A History of Freedom in Modern Life, Sophia Rosenfeld’s The Age of Choice is less focused on freedom than is Moritz Föllmer’s The Quest for Individual Freedom, which provides a richly documented account of European efforts to claim individual freedom in the twentieth century. Spanning several centuries, Rosenfeld’s book is organized thematically (not chronologically) around a variety of social practices, including choice in things, choice in ideas, romantic choice, and political choice. Following four transhistorical chapters is a chapter on the “sciences of choice” and an epilogue drawing conclusions on the place of choice in modern life, with special attention given to the role of women. To a number of historians, the organizational structure of the book may seem unusual, but it is less so when one bears in mind Rosenfeld’s methodological inclination toward philosophical history. Of course, Rosenfeld’s perspective differs from that of eighteenth-century philosophers, but to some extent it connects with their ambition to consider the manifestations of the human mind in various times and spaces.Footnote ¹ In writing a pluritemporal and multisite history of choice, Rosenfeld does not mean to emphasize turns or passages of one political, economic, or social order to another. It is not her intention to focus on the succession of time periods but to show that the study of choice in each can shed light on debates in our own time as much as it can be illuminated by them—hence her intellectual reservations about conventional periodization and her predilection for cutting across time and space. To use a more recent reference, one could argue that Rosenfeld regards choice as a kind of invariant; that is, as a form of conceptualization developed by historical actors to make sense of their own practices, and as a tool—informed by social-scientific and philosophical conceptualizations—used by historians to understand social practices in various times and spaces. Recall that French historian Paul Veyne, who regarded the determination of invariants as central to historical practice, was similarly skeptical about periodization. In addition, he thought of history as the knowledge of the specific; that is, not the singularity of events but what makes them both general and particular.Footnote ² Throughout her four main chapters, Rosenfeld does just that: she points to what makes choice both general (the logic of the menu of options and the boundedness of choices) and particular (the contexts of choice that vary with time and space).

Following Rosenfeld, it is perfectly acceptable to consider purchasing goods, deciding what to believe, choosing a partner, or voting by ballot as if these were all matters of choice. Obviously, the growing presence of the idea of choice in Western Europe and the United States after World War II allows one to make sense of myriad seemingly dissimilar activities. Moreover, since 1980, the penetration of economic language into everyday life, with its strong emphasis on choices over goods and services, has provided people with a rather convenient and now familiar frame for understanding the multiple choice acts they face every day.Footnote ³ Yet Rosenfeld suggests that the most recent views of choice-making, which are often informed by the logic of economic reasoning, should not obscure the more diverse and less formal representations spread over a broader temporal and geographical canvas. At the core of her broadened understanding, one finds the idea of “bounded choices,” which refers not so much to cognitive limitations as it does to the rules, regulations, and restrictions that are meant to make choices generally less disruptive at the individual and social levels.

Choices may share the characteristic that they are subjected to an arsenal of constraints, but the circumstances in which they are made also vary—institutionally, spiritually, culturally, and politically, even in the Western world. Following Rosenfeld, it can be argued that “by the start of the twentieth century, the making of small-bore choices was well on its way to being an ordinary feature of adult experience in North America, western and central Europe, and parts of Latin America, Africa, and Asia” (260), but that is not to say that similar meanings were attached to these experiences. There is indeed a risk of overhomogenization in describing social practices in terms of the logic of choice. Globalization notwithstanding, there have been significant differences in how people from different parts of the world regard the act of choice. Even among neighboring cultures, the acts of choosing a partner, a belief, a good, or a political candidate do not necessarily stand on the same footing. Rosenfeld is right that having and making choices are crucial parts of being and feeling free today, but the degree of importance attached to that state of being and feeling varies across time and space.

While Rosenfeld asks the neglected question of how much freedom there actually is in choice, Moritz Föllmer, with a resolute emphasis on contexts of adversity—including total wars, dictatorships, and colonial empires—asks how much choice can be found in freedom itself. In other words, he raises the question of what it meant and entailed for Europeans to make the choice of freedom—to aspire to make choices for themselves. Interestingly, although Föllmer limits himself to the twentieth century and does not face the same dilemma as Rosenfeld when it comes to deciding how to tell his story, his chapters also avoid a chronological sequence. His book offers a transhistorical perspective. On the face of it, it might seem that the book is organized thematically, but in practice the chapters illustrate the relationships between the quest for individual freedom and a variety of contexts, with special attention to the experience of their adversity. Föllmer takes a multipronged approach that combines cultural, social, and political dimensions to account for the variety of ways Europeans understood and strove to achieve individual freedom. That approach is meant to resist easy generalizations concerning individuality and freedom in the twentieth century. Föllmer has a remarkable ability to mobilize a wide range of sources—from historic testimonies to philosophical considerations, literary works, religious statements, visual representations, and political analyses. This is combined with an impressive effort to give voice to those who often remain unheard, which supports his conclusion that understandings of and claims to individual freedom differed according to the racial, class, gender, confessional, and political characteristics of their initiators. That being said, the variety of conceptions and actions considered makes this reader wonder about the relative status of the evidence in the book. How does Isaiah Berlin’s or Georg Simmel’s analysis of freedom or Michel Foucault’s account of the individual compare with thoughts from laypeople, journalists, trades unionists, and politicians, especially in an era during which intellectuals began to lose their place in the formation of public opinion at the expense of secondhand dealers in ideas?Footnote ⁴

When talking about freedom, it is sensible to argue that all voices count, but does it mean that to understand the transformations affecting European societies in the twentieth century, equal attention must be paid to all ideas of freedom without distinction? As Elisabeth Anker has recently pointed out, “Versions of freedom that emerge in the lives of ordinary people, or in collective movements on the ground, are often philosophically disjointed, politically ambivalent, and genealogically blurred.”Footnote ⁵ That makes the endeavor of clarifying their relation to more systematic conceptions of freedom all the more complex. Föllmer is surely right that adding cultural, social, and political history to intellectual history helps challenge the belief that a single version of individual freedom ever prevailed in modern times and societies.Footnote ⁶ Still, how is the reader to weigh the relative importance of various understandings of and claims to individual freedom? Here it seems that Föllmer’s acknowledgment of various meanings of individual freedom has a price—the supposition that adverse contexts gives some unity to the otherwise disparate ways people assess their degree of freedom and try to increase it. Föllmer’s special attention to the experiences of “ordinary Europeans” in relation to collective freedom reminds one of Simone de Beauvoir’s observation that the source of values is to be found in “the plurality of concrete, particular men projecting themselves toward their ends on the basis of situations whose particularity is as radical and as irreducible as subjectivity itself”—the difference being that, to Föllmer, the experiences of adverse contexts serve to unite the quests for individual freedom.Footnote ⁷ Obviously, claims to individual freedom, which Föllmer defines as central to his book, can hardly be taken as efforts to achieve an immutable goal. These claims might have expressed people’s willingness to make their own choices on the basis of their changing perception of the difference between desire and reality, but they corresponded to a great variety of experiences and situations. Can women’s search for greater independence during World War I, political dissidents’ struggle to regain autonomy in time of dictatorship, workers’ aspirations for greater economic independence, people’s effort to liberate themselves from established moral norms, Eastern and Western Europeans’ resistance to American culture, or the ambitions and hopes of colonizers all be viewed as variants of a quest for individual freedom? At times, Föllmer seems to assume too much self-understanding and agency of “ordinary Europeans.” Although most of them probably had a pretty clear idea of the adverse circumstances in which they found themselves throughout the twentieth century, it is doubtful that they all defined their efforts to cope in relation to individual freedom. Likewise, even if it is legitimate to attribute some agency to “ordinary Europeans,” it is unlikely that most were involved in making claims to individual freedom, unless this is understood as making ends meet.

Even if we follow Föllmer and accept the quest for individual freedom as an object of study in itself (distinct from collective freedom), the collective dimension of that quest is what produces social change—the fact that people share the belief that this goal is worth pursuing collectively, regardless of the importance they may attach to it as individuals. Föllmer’s well-chosen and convincing illustrations of how Europeans navigated a variety of adverse contexts, including war, an omnipresent state, a constraining work world, moral norms, and their fluctuating identity, make the claims to individual freedom all the more concrete. His analysis certainly enriches our understanding of what freedom meant for ordinary Europeans and how those meanings informed their actions. Yet it does not explain how claims to individual freedom form an overarching driving force in the history of the twentieth century. Föllmer himself seems to admit that they appear as a secondary force in catalyzing social change.

Rosenfeld is more explicit than Föllmer about the collective dimension of individual freedom, if only because she pays special heed to the rules and norms delimiting choice-making in the modern world. Whereas Föllmer regards choice as constrained by the very nature of the contexts he considered (their adversity) and accordingly proposes a more assertive and encompassing version of negative freedom—“freedom against”—Rosenfeld looks at freedom through the lens of the inevitably bounded character of choices. She goes beyond Berlin’s dichotomous view of freedom, arguing that “freedom from” and “freedom to” cannot exist without each other.Footnote ⁸ On this account, choices take place in a broader framework of rules and norms, which in turn makes the quest for individual freedom a socially constrained enterprise. The fact that choices are bounded, however, does not mean that those rules and norms should be regarded as impediments only: they also help people, especially those who know how to use them, to get their bearings in a rapidly changing social world. Rosenfeld’s book proves especially helpful in offering nuances to the modern understanding of freedom of choice as a selection among a menu of options and its equation of freedom with choice. In that respect, it is worth keeping in mind that people do not face the same options, which suggests that freedom of choice can coexist with constrained forms of freedom. Likewise, options can manifest in the context of coerced choice, where people make choices but enjoy little freedom. Finally, even if options are theoretically open to all, they cannot be navigated successfully without prior knowledge of the rules and norms governing the menu of options.

Rosenfeld’s conclusions are supported by extensive travel in time and space, from the spread of new values associated with consumer choice in eighteenth-century Britain to the transformation of religious choice in the early US republic, from the reformulation of choice-making in marriage in France’s revolutionary era to the use of the secret ballot and its role in the emergence of autonomous choosers in the realm of public affairs. Here and there, we are invited to pay attention to the number and quality of options available to the choosers without neglecting their variable mastery of the rules and norms governing choice.

Each of the two books under review, in its own way, questions the now common inclination to see freedom as expression of choice while raising the issue of whether the quest for freedom is a choice like any other. Föllmer and Rosenfeld recognize that historicizing the quest for individual freedom and the recourse to choice-making helps us understand the historically contingent character of the equation between freedom and choice in recent times. As recent scholarship has shown, the change in social-scientific discourse about choice may be located around the mid-1970s, when decision systems became increasingly perceived as threatening freedom, with a shift from reason to freedom as a relevant framework for understanding choices.Footnote ⁹ Using chronologically precise turning points to mark intellectual transformations may help analytically organize the past, but transitions in intellectual frameworks are not just about ruptures. Continuities matter, too. In that respect, broader temporal perspectives prove useful. Föllmer’s focus on the long twentieth century helps us go beyond the self-evident discontinuities brought about by wars and crises to unveil the force and permanence of an ideal—individual freedom—despite the disparity of its practices. That ideal permeates practices not merely because of the commonality of adversity experiences in twentieth-century Europe, but above all because these experiences were informed by the ability of certain people to conceive of a state of affairs different than the one before them. That is why the choice of freedom, unlike any other choice, can be construed as a never-ending process that fluctuates in accordance with people’s power to reinvent themselves.

Rosenfeld’s even broader temporal frame helps put into perspective the recent equation between choice and freedom—and the concomitant departure from the earlier association of choice with reason—while underscoring continuities around the idea of bounded choice. Accordingly, she takes issue with the view that the conception of freedom as choice is the simple outcome of the neoliberal turn of the mid-1970s. If there is no such a thing as unbounded freedom of choice—one of the significant conclusions of her book—then claims regarding the actual distinctiveness of neoliberal freedom need more elaboration. In particular, one needs to explain why the belief in unconstrained choices has gained growing popularity. In view of the above, there seems to be a tension in The Age of Choice between the author’s methodological orientations centered on discontinuity and the main argument centered on a form of historical continuity between past and present. It is no accident that Rosenfeld suggests more continuity between liberalism and neoliberalism than is usually acknowledged, while noting its resonance with political adversaries, sharing the same dislike of excessive regulation and desire of emancipation.Footnote ¹⁰

As shown by Rosenfeld, self-discipline and behavioral adjustment accompanied the dissemination of choice in modern liberal societies, and they are still with us today, with self-nudging, as complement to self-control, delineating the scope of freedom of choice. Seen in this light, people’s occasional resentment toward what they see as restrictions of choice does not have to reflect principled aversion to state interference in private matters, as is often argued; it can also denote the conviction of its superfluity in a world already strongly marked by interiorized self-regulation. That may explain why complaints against the possibly abusive drifts of state regulation can coexist with the endorsement of authoritarian politics, as long as it does not concern areas where people are convinced, rightly or wrongly, of the sufficiency of self-regulation.

Despite Rosenfeld’s successful attempt to historicize the equation of freedom with choice, one may wonder whether her use of the language of contemporary choice theory does not sometimes distort her analysis of choice-making throughout time. To some extent, we all have absorbed the “economic style of reasoning” resulting from the increased vernacularization of economics language in the postwar era.Footnote ¹¹ It is tempting to see Rosenfeld’s effort to group various forms of human activity under the umbrella of choice as an indirect confirmation of the success of economic imperialism in society. The influence of choice theories on Rosenfeld’s analysis, however, has less to do with her endorsement of any theory than with her measured acceptance that our lives are made of choices. Still, is it the case that having tea rather than coffee in the morning, fish rather than meat at midday, biscuits rather than fruit in the afternoon, or soup rather than pasta in the evening are matters of choice? Or is it that these options were made amenable to the logic of choice as people learned to think of their decisions in terms of choices, as Rosenfeld points out when she discusses the introduction of the multiple-choice technique (297)? That may seem like splitting hairs, but it can be argued confidently that routines, more than choices, constitute our everyday life. Now that freedom and choice have become so intertwined, it is true that lack of choice is often mistaken for curtailed freedom. But this conclusion stems from the difficulty of thinking of choice without assuming at the same time a variety of available options. Although this is a generally fair assumption, it does not suffice to conclude that choice results mechanically from availability of options. There are many situations in which the plurality of available options is of little relevance to choice, either because people are overwhelmed by them or because they find it beneficial to relinquish them altogether.Footnote ¹² Furthermore, unless one considers unbounded rationality, the existence of available options does not imply that they are actually perused through deliberation.

Obviously, the business of selecting among options is more or less significant to choice-making because people attach different value to the various choices they make. Regardless of the value people ascribe to their various choices, however, some of them are collectively deemed more significant than others. It is not just that deciding what to believe is more consequential than picking a restaurant for dinner, or that “selecting” a partner binds us more than choosing a pet when we are single. Certain choices are more significant than others because choices reflect power relationships in and across societies. The choice of freedom is a good case in point. As suggested by Föllmer, “to define and claim freedom against something was of paramount importance in twentieth-century Europe, provided that we widen the perspective beyond Berlin’s emphasis on ideological engulfment and state power to include military and factory discipline, moral pressures under different regimes, and social, racial, or gender hierarchies” (6, original emphasis). In that respect, the vast array of testimonies illustrating Europeans’ quest for individual freedom in Föllmer’s book is telling. It suggests that although the different degrees of exposure to adverse contexts are reflected in the number of options available to people, their positions in the social structure affect their perception of available options. Yet those testimonies invite readers to wonder how meaningful the phrase “ordinary Europeans” is. It seems that when confronted with adverse contexts, only a minority was able to imagine a new state of affairs with different power relations and options. Think of feminist writer Vera Brittain reflecting on the outbreak of World War I: “By means of what then appeared to have been a very long struggle, I had made for myself a way of escape from my provincial prison … and now the hardly-won road to freedom was to be closed for me by a Serbian bomb hurled from the other end of Europe at an Austrian archduke” (quoted in Föllmer, 13). Soon, the Oxford student was able to resume her quest for greater individual freedom, a pursuit that many other middle-class women could simply not contemplate. Or think of Margarete Buber, a victim of Stalinism and Nazism, who was arrested during the Soviet Great Purge in 1938 and reprimanded her fellow inmates, “I have the impression that you all accept your fate too resignedly,” and left them in no doubt of her unrealistic intentions: “I am going to appeal to the Supreme Court and lodge an application for the reopening of my case” (quoted in Föllmer, 59). Eventually, she was able to reinvent herself by contemplating new options for her future. If these women and others of the same caliber were ordinary Europeans, how are we to call the many people—intellectuals or otherwise—who failed to assert their desire for individual freedom, who, to use Erich Fromm’s phrase, sought to escape from freedom?

Once again, we see what is so distinct about the choice of freedom. Kristen Monroe has provided an illuminating characterization of that kind of choice while discussing extreme forms of altruism during interviews with rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe. She often points to perceptions of a common humanity among rescuers and insists that, on many occasions, they felt that they had no choice but to help others.Footnote ¹³ In that view, choiceless choices do not merely describe choices lacking sovereignty (e.g. Sophie’s choice). To the contrary, they also hold the promise of a different state of affairs encompassing new alternatives.

The fact that the choice of freedom is in a class of its own does not imply that choices of other kinds are inconsequential regarding individual freedom. It is difficult to adjudicate between the relative social significance of the four types of choice—choice in things, choice in ideas, romantic choice, and political choice—discussed by Rosenfeld. Their relative positions in the hierarchy of choices may vary across time and space, but at a certain point, they reflect the state of power relations in society. With regard to individual freedom, therefore, the relevant question is not just whether people can make their own choices, but also whether they make socially significant choices. Take choice in ideas, for instance. Even if it is probably excessive to affirm that ideas govern the world, such a belief is itself an indication of the extent of their supposed influence. We can expect that ideas stand in good place in the hierarchy of choices and that making choices in the realm of ideas is strongly influenced by political, social, racial, and gender hierarchies. As Rosenfeld puts it, “capacity for sound choice-making in the realm of ideas and beliefs became something like a litmus test [in eighteenth-century America]; failure provided just the evidence needed to deny the status of independent beings to whole categories of people … Arguably, it often still does” (107). The social significance of political choice probably comes second in the hierarchy of choices, because lack of ideas leads to a true impoverishment of political life, which in turn limits people’s choices. Unsurprisingly, expressing one’s voices in the realm of politics has long been and still is difficult for people enduring social domination. To this day, the right to express one’s voice cuts across social divisions. As for the choice of a partner, it matters to oneself, one’s family, one’s friends, and other close-knit groups. Romantic choice has long been structured by a set of rules that reflect power relations, but it is unlikely to be as socially significant as choice in ideas and politics. Judging from the marketization of Western societies, choice in things has gained considerable currency. Although that kind of choice has become highly significant to many, the development of American-style consumer society from the 1950s has come with greater control over and decreased autonomy of consumer choice, as well as increased obsolescence of consumption skills. It may be wondered whether the exercise of consumer choice as selection of the most preferred option has much social significance in that context.Footnote ¹⁴

In sum, the idea that people are entitled to their own choices cannot be readily equated with individual freedom because personal choices have a collective dimension. When one thinks of how most choices are made, one sees that there is no such a thing as a purely personal choice. Consultation with others seems an ineliminable feature of what we call “personal choice.” The very notion of an autonomous choice is therefore not to be equated with its personal nature. In addition, people’s choices influence each other. As economists have long established, the logic of choice involves interdependent decisions, not just interpersonal relationships.

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In the mid-1970s, as the Western world was experiencing a large-scale economic commotion, economist Tibor Scitovsky authored an intriguing book: The Joyless Economy: An Inquiry into Human Satisfaction and Consumer Dissatisfaction.Footnote ¹⁵ Beyond the discussion of the consumer theory of economics, which he thought was focused on comfort and neglected pleasure, Scitovsky delivered a scathing criticism of the American way of life. Arguing that Americans had perhaps not shaken their Puritan prejudice against pleasure, he identified the problem as a combination of overdeveloped skills of production and underdeveloped skills of consumption. For their part, Europeans were said to have the opposite disposition. Scitovsky was not the first or the last to caricature cultural differences between the United States and Europe, but while commenting about the former’s peculiarities, he brought up an important issue:

His lamentations were part of a more general criticism that regarded decision systems as restricting freedom. As we have seen, that criticism emerged in a time when the notion of choice increasingly permeated the discourse about individual freedom. For Scitovsky, freedom of choice seemed to be a misnomer: the availability of options did not carry much weight in the face of the means available to persuaders. “Whose choices are ours?” he wondered, questioning the equation between freedom and (consumer) choice. In Scitovsky’s account, the idealization of Europe, with its sophisticated consumer enjoying the good life, was exaggerated, but it emphasized that mass consumption reduces the autonomy of consumer choice.

All this is to say that, in the United States, emancipatory movements, such as consumer protection, desegregation, student revolt, feminism, and sexual liberation crystallizing in the early 1960s, built up in a much more market-oriented culture than in Europe. Using freedom of choice as a rallying cry, these social movements put choice at least in the perimeter of freedom in American politics (if not on par with it). Interestingly, these progressive movements were parallelled by attempts that simply urged more economic freedom. In his influential Capitalism and Freedom, for instance, Milton Friedman averred that there cannot be political freedom without economic freedom; moreover, he presented his contribution as an effort to reconnect liberalism with freedom, rather than welfare and equality.Footnote ¹⁷ Even before Friedman’s pronouncements, it had not been unusual for social scientists to connect America’s freedom with consumer choice.Footnote ¹⁸ By the mid-1970s, with the growing influence of the neoliberal doctrine, especially in the United Kingdom and United States, the differences in how North Americans and Europeans understood freedom were often ironed out in scholarly discourses centered on freedom of choice as availability of options.Footnote ¹⁹ Simply put, at the same time as the status of freedom as a universal ideal was contested, it was recast as economic freedom. In the United States, that development coincided with attempts to sustain a form of freedom where only some people are protected against interference by others, including the state. In Europe, it coincided with attempts by the state to defend a form of freedom where all people are granted equal access to opportunities (education, health, etc.), the quality of which varies considerably.

Even though differences persist between the United States and Europe when it comes to defining freedom, freedom of choice has long pervaded the political discourse on both sides of the Atlantic, relegating collective freedom to the background. It may be that the celebration of freedom of choice has been pushed to an extreme in the United States recently, but the actual novelty of American political discourse lies more in its unscrupulous and overt acceptance that availability of options concerns mostly economic things, knowing that an increasing number of things have come to be seen as such in the past fifty years or so. More than choice itself, expanding market options stand for freedom today. To some extent, Friedman’s aspirations in the early 1960s have been fulfilled. Rosenfeld’s long-term perspective is especially helpful here. In describing how choice-making entered people’s lives from the late nineteenth century onward, and in insisting that such a development has come along with the emergence of an army of advisers—“from shopkeepers to dancing masters to party leaders and election officials to, now, the makers of algorithms” (13)—she makes us realize that economic freedom is a poor substitute for freedom. Our choices may satisfy our preferences, but how much autonomy do we enjoy now that “choice architects” have set up shop in many parts of our lives?

Does the story told by Föllmer about the quest for individual freedom in twentieth-century Europe leave room for different conclusions? “If the story of American freedom can be told,” asks Föllmer, “then what about the story of European freedom?” (225). From that perspective, it is worth noting that while Rosenfeld centers choice for her history of freedom in modern life, Föllmer hardly mentions freedom of choice in his book. As he patiently recounts the various efforts of Europeans to achieve individual freedom, Föllmer does not favor one form of freedom over another, even if he is aware of the growing significance of choice in European societies in the twentieth century. What holds his attention is that, in the past century, the quest for individual freedom was often conducted in socially, economically, and politically difficult environments—not that these environments predetermined claims for freedom but that they may have supported the efforts of people to imagine different environments for themselves. Föllmer tends to avoid the language of choice and favors the more political language of self-determination: “At its center are ordinary Europeans’ efforts to expand their realm of control, to carve out a space for themselves, to live freely according to their own preferred understanding” (225–6). He has in mind a decades-long process in which ordinary people put pressure on political regimes and cultural norms. Even if the result of that process was always uncertain at the collective level, depending on conjunctions of circumstances, people’s quest for freedom eventually mattered as one force among many for social change. That is not to say that Föllmer sets great store in the state of being free. To him, freedom cannot be taken for granted. It is not something for people to claim or to miss. Rather, it is a sort of quest for the Holy Grail in which people understand themselves collectively by constantly reinventing freedom. His account suggests an almost Sisyphean character to Europeans’ efforts, with many boulders to push to the top of many mountains, but it does acknowledge people’s agency.

Together these books improve our understanding of the relationship between choice and freedom, for they make clear that freedom of choice is not freedom and that the choice of freedom is unlike any other. It is unclear whether the challenges to freedom today are more serious than those that faced past generations, but having short memories will not help us find the road to freedom. Back in 1944, while the future of the world was still highly uncertain, Friedrich Hayek and Karl Polanyi wrote from two different perspectives about the market society—the obstacles it faced and the dangers it represented—while advocating for more freedom. Now that the marketization of society is even more pronounced, it is tempting to interpret political tensions as the result of a confrontation between economic and social forces. Judging from Föllmer’s and Rosenfeld’s accounts while bearing in mind the conclusions of The Road to Serfdom and The Great Transformation, it appears that the political confusion of the day has more to do with the marked discrepancy between individual and collective freedom.