Rules - (Lawrence Stone Lectures) by Lorraine Daston

About the Book

"We are, all of us, everywhere, always, enmeshed in a web of rules and constraints. Rules fix the beginning and end of the working day and the school year, direct the ebb and flow of traffic on the roads, dictate who can be married to whom and how, place the fork to the right or the left of the plate, lay down the meter and rhyme scheme of a Petrarchan sonnet, and order the rites of birth and death. Cultures notoriously differ as to the content of their rules, but there is no culture without rules. In this book, historian of science Lorraine Daston adopts a long term perspective for studying rules from diverse sources, including monastic orders, cookbooks, and mathematical algorithms. She argues that in the Western tradition most rules can be characterized as one of the following: tools of measurement and calculation, models or paradigms, or laws. Moreover, they exist on spectra from specific to general, flexible to rigid and the specific-to-general, and universal-to-particular. In investigating how rules work, how they don't work, how they've changed across time, and why exceptions are necessary, Daston paints a vivid picture of Western civilization from the antiquity to the present"--

Book Synopsis

A panoramic history of rules in the Western world

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't, 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--how 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't, 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--whether we know it or not.

Review Quotes

"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."---Sue Curry Jansen, International Journal of Communication

"The book is an exemplary intellectual history: a rangy, quirky, lucid and profound discussion."---Colin Burrow, London Review of Books

"Fascinating and highly readable. . . .This book is a real tour de force of erudition and analysis with richly revealing examples."---David Lorimer, Paradigm Explorer

"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's 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."---Rivka 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."---C. Thi Nguyen, Chronicle of Higher Education

"Winner of the PROSE Award in History of Science, Medicine, and Technology, Association of American Publishers"

"A Seminary Co-Op Notable Book of the Year"

"

Rules is ultimately one of the best written, most profound, and most far-reaching works of intellectual history that I have ever read.

"---Ernest Davis, SIAM News

"

[Daston writes] witty, wide-ranging and well-researched inquiries into the picaresque careers of such notions as 'reality, ' 'nature, ' 'rationality, ' 'objectivity' and 'order, ' and in her latest book she brings her wry historical intelligence to bear on the capacious concept of 'rules.' The delights of her scholarship are on full display.

"---Jonathan Rée, Times Literary Supplement

"A timely release that will satisfy the mathematically curious, who hunger to know how algorithms actually work, as well anyone who loves debating policy."-- "Library Journal"

"Fascinating. . . . [Daston] writes with a twinkling wit."---Timothy Farrington, Wall Street Journal

About the Author

Lorraine Daston is director emerita of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin, visiting professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and a permanent fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study. Her books include Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (Princeton).