Rules: A Short History of What We Live By

(Hardback)

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Description

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 dont, 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 changehow 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 dont, 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.

Reviews

"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."---Timothy 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 Dastons 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
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[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 Re, 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 *
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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

Author Bio

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).