lawrence m. friedman in interview angry:don’t Iknow that people don’t really have choices?17 Iknow that.178 In fact, I’m very explicit about that. Choices are in part an illusion. I use ametaphor – I don’t remember if I use it in the book, but I can use it here. If you go into a restaurant and there is a menu, and you choose what you want from the menu, you can say it’s my absolute choice. No one tells me what to order. On the other hand, you don’t create the menu; you take the menu for granted. In life, we may have a lot of choices, but we don’t create the menu. I make that clear in the book, but some people didn’t understand. They thought, ‘Heaven help me! It’s a conservative book, saying we have a lot of choices and he doesn’t realize how constrainedwe are, and so on.’ That’s not what I wrote. Still, I think that choice is fundamental to the way people think about their lives. I have children and grandchildren. There is a big difference between the way school was in my day and my kid’s school and my grandchildren’s school. Now they have show-and-tell. The little kids come in and they show something and tell something. We had nothing of the sort. We sat there and the teacher taught you. And now when you are 6 or 7 years old, we are telling you, ‘Your little life is really important.’ It’s a different message from ‘Sit back and let the teacher teach you.’ I think society is like that in general. It stresses the concept of your personal best. I was very impressed by the book by Robert Bellah and his associates, Habits of the Heart.19 He introduces the concept of expressive individualism. I’m just blown away by that concept. It explains so much about modern society. The term applies to our culture today, and it did not apply to it in the past. This was acrucial development. I thought that was a great book. 17 Don Herzog, ‘I hear a Rhapsody: A Reading of ‘The Republic of Choice’, Law& Social Inquiry 17 (1990), 147; cf. J. Kaplan, Review in Harvard Journal on Legislation27 (1990), 613. 18 Lawrence M. Friedman, ‘I hear Cacophony: Herzog and The Republic of Choice’, Law& Social Inquiry 17 (1992), 159. 19 Robert N Bellah, Richard Madsen, WilliamM. Sullivan, Ann Swidler & Stephen M. Tipton (eds.), Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007). 117 It’s the individualistic society.
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