Talking about choice is, for most of us, a special way of talking about freedom. And freedom, the bedrock American idea, is very much on our minds these days.

Our president insists that terrorists and other enemies wish us ill because of their blind hatred of freedom. We are told—and not for the first time in our history—that the only way to safeguard our freedom is to give up substantial portions of it. No doubt about it—engaging with the meanings of freedom is complicated work.

While choice is intimately bound up with freedom, it is a far more earthbound idea. Freedom is a shared value; choice is an individual, personal, often private act. We pick this college, that job, this lover or that one; this city to live in or . . . another. Or 50 others.

For most of history, and most people around the world today, the important things in life have been matters not of choice but of participation. You were born a Catholic or a Hindu; a member of a caste or a class. Even the calendar—a succession of commemorations and annual prompts to do this or that collective task—whittled down the number of choices in your life.

Then a handful of societies, notably Western Europe in the late middle ages and Japan in the 17th century, developed a sizeable merchant class, thus fostering the leisure and wealth that allowed people to explore a range of personal options. This luxury eventually spread out from the aristocracies of those cultures into a larger, if still limited, part of the ordinary population. Contemporary America, in many ways, is the climax of this movement of expanding opportunities. Choice is paraded before our eyes in a thousand ways every day. The dominant form is, of course, consumer choice: the dizzying array of stuff set out for our inspection in all media, all the time. Consumer choice provides the chief metaphor and model for our decision-making in every endeavor from elections to romance. It can be overwhelming—a perfect instance of too much choice and trivial choices feeling like no choice at all. (Yet for many of us, especially the poor, consumer choice stands as a powerful symbol, not simply of the so-called “good life,” but of power itself, and thus of autonomy and dignity.)

American individualism is built on the conviction that our number of choices ought always to be expanding—and any realm of life where we do not get to make personal choices is, by definition, oppressive. Even one’s sex, seemingly one of the most inalterable facts of life, can now be a matter of choice with the help of surgery, hormone treatments, and the rise of transsexual consciousness.