Rules order almost every aspect of our lives. They set our work hours, dictate how we drive and set the table, tell us whether to offer an extended hand or cheek in greeting, and organize the rites of life, from birth through death. We may chafe under the rules we have, and yearn for ones we don鈥檛, yet no culture could do without them. In Rules, historian Lorraine Daston traces their development in the Western tradition and shows how rules have evolved from ancient to modern times. Drawing on a rich trove of examples, including legal treatises, cookbooks, military manuals, traffic regulations, and game handbooks, Daston demonstrates that while the content of rules is dazzlingly diverse, the forms that they take are surprisingly few and long-lived.
Daston uncovers three enduring kinds of rules: the algorithms that calculate and measure, the laws that govern, and the models that teach. She vividly illustrates how rules can change鈥攈ow supple rules stiffen, or vice versa, and how once bothersome regulations become everyday norms. Rules have been devised for almost every imaginable activity and range from meticulous regulations to the laws of nature. Daston probes beneath this variety to investigate when rules work and when they don鈥檛, and why some philosophical problems about rules are as ancient as philosophy itself while others are as modern as calculating machines.
Rules offers a wide-angle view on the history of the constraints that guide us鈥攚hether we know it or not.
Awards and Recognition
- A Chronicle of Higher Education's Best Scholarly Book of the Year
- A Seminary Co-Op Notable Book of the Year
- Winner of the PROSE Award in History of Science, Medicine, and Technology, Association of American Publishers
"Fascinating. . . . [Daston] writes with a twinkling wit."鈥擳imothy Farrington, Wall Street Journal
"In considering a series of historic anecdotes and texts, Daston helps us see rules (and their neighbors, such as laws and regulations) through the concepts of thickness and thinness, paradigms and algorithms, failures (it was nearly impossible to get eighteenth-century Parisians to stop playing ball in the streets), and states of exception. . . .By the end of Daston鈥檚 book, one feels a sense of clarity about how to think about rules, alongside a gentle sense of despair concerning what kinds of rules to hope for."鈥擱ivka Galchen, The New Yorker
"Wonderful and wildly ambitious. . . . For those of us who adore the deep and transformative history of concepts, [Rules] is a pure dopamine rush. I read it with jaw dropped and mind racing."鈥擟. Thi Nguyen, Chronicle of Higher Education
"[Daston writes] witty, wide-ranging and well-researched inquiries into the picaresque careers of such notions as 鈥榬eality,鈥� 鈥榥ature,鈥� 鈥榬ationality,鈥� 鈥榦bjectivity鈥� and 鈥榦rder,鈥� and in her latest book she brings her wry historical intelligence to bear on the capacious concept of 鈥榬ules.鈥� The delights of her scholarship are on full display."鈥擩onathan R茅e, Times Literary Supplement
"Reading Rules is an occasion for awe and delight in the fact that we are part of the same academic guild, if not discipline, as Lorraine Daston."鈥擲ue Curry Jansen, International Journal of Communication
"A timely release that will satisfy the mathematically curious, who hunger to know how algorithms actually work, as well anyone who loves debating policy."鈥�Library Journal
"Rules is ultimately one of the best written, most profound, and most far-reaching works of intellectual history that I have ever read."鈥擡rnest Davis, SIAM News
"Fascinating and highly readable. . . .This book is a real tour de force of erudition and analysis with richly revealing examples."鈥擠avid Lorimer, Paradigm Explorer
"The book is an exemplary intellectual history: a rangy, quirky, lucid and profound discussion."鈥擟olin Burrow, London Review of Books
鈥淩anging from sumptuary regulation to the laws of nature, traffic laws to the Benedictine rule, Daston shows time and again how the apparently contradictory facets of rules meant to be broken and interpreted make our more familiar, rigid rules possible, powerful, and plausible鈥攂ut exquisitely and dangerously fragile.鈥濃�擬atthew Jones, author of Reckoning with Matter: Calculating Machines, Improvement, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage
鈥�Rules is a masterpiece: clear as a tower of bells, incisively argued, beautifully written, and brilliantly witty. The subtitle is no exaggeration: Daston has actually given us a short history of what we live by. Readers will find illuminating surprises on nearly every page. I had only one criticism of this splendid book: I did not want it to end.鈥濃�擲usan Neiman, author of Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy
鈥淲ith richly detailed examples drawn from the vast sweep of centuries and a wide range of cultures and traditions, Lorraine Daston masterfully connects disparate ideas about rules, revealing an elegant order and making sound sense of profound philosophical problems that would otherwise remain intractable.鈥濃�擩ustin E. H. Smith, author of Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason
鈥淔rom calculating and cooking to dressing, behaving, engineering, and governing, we all need and use rules. In this erudite and entertaining book, Lorraine Daston shows us how they work, how they don鈥檛 work, and above all why the world is too complex for most rules to be applicable without exception.鈥濃�擟atherine Wilson, author of Epicureanism: A Very Short Introduction
