The Tyranny of Choice

This is a brilliant study on the nature of choice, and how limitless freedom can lead to despair. We are encouraged from all sides to view our lives as being full of choices. Like the products on a supermarket shelf, our careers, our relationships, our bodies, our very identities seem to be there for the choosing. But paradoxically this seeming freedom to choose can create extr...

This is a brilliant study on the nature of choice, and how limitless freedom can lead to despair. We are encouraged from all sides to view our lives as being full of choices. Like the products on a supermarket shelf, our careers, our relationships, our bodies, our very identities seem to be there for the choosing. But paradoxically this seeming freedom to choose can create extreme anxiety, and feelings of inadequacy and guilt. "Choice" explores how late capitalism's shrill exhortations to 'be oneself' can be a tyranny which only leads to ever-greater disquiet and how insistence on choice being a purely individual matter prevents social change. With wisdom, humour and sensitivity, Renata Salecl examines the complexity of the essential human capacity to choose which has become mired in consumerist ironies.

蕾娜塔•莎莉塞，哲学家与社会学家，伦敦经济学院BIOS中心客座教授。她的作品《焦虑》已被译成10种语言。2010年，她被授予“斯洛文尼亚年度女性科学家”称号，同年12月，她被评选为“斯洛文尼亚年度人物”。