Just Announced: The Children's & YA Book Awards Winners Explore Now
Rules: A Short History of What We Live By

Rules: A Short History of What We Live By

by Lorraine Daston
Rules: A Short History of What We Live By
Add to Wishlist
Rules: A Short History of What We Live By

Rules: A Short History of What We Live By

by Lorraine Daston

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780691239187
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Publication date: 07/12/2022
Series: The Lawrence Stone Lectures , #13
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 384
File size: 41 MB
Note: This product may take a few minutes to download.

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).

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations xi

1 Introduction: The Hidden History of Rules 1

Clues to a Hidden History 1

Rules as Both Paradigms and Algorithms 5

Universals and Particulars 15

A History of the Self-Evident 20

2 Ancient Rules: Straightedges, Models, and Laws 23

Three Semantic Clusters 23

The Rule Is the Abbot 31

Following Models 40

Conclusion: Rules between Science and Craft 45

3 The Rules of Art: Head and Hand United 48

The Understanding Hand 48

Thick Rules 56

Rules at War 63

Cookbook Knowledge 70

Conclusion: Back and Forth, Betwixt and Between 76

4 Algorithms before Mechanical Calculation 82

The Classroom 82

What Was an Algorithm? 85

Generality without Algebra 94

Computing before Computers 106

Conclusion: Thin Rules 117

5 Algorithmic Intelligence in the Age of Calculating Machines 122

Mechanical Rule-Following: Babbage versus Wittgenstein 122

"First Organize, Then Mechanize": The Human-Machine Workflow 127

Mechanical Mindfulness 135

Algorithms and Intelligence 142

Conclusion: From Mechanical to Artificial Intelligence 147

6 Rules and Regulations 151

Laws, Rules, and Regulations 151

Five Hundred Years of Rule Failure: The War on Fashion 155

Rules for an Unruly City: Policing the Streets of Enlightenment Paris 169

Rules that Succeed Too Well: How and How Not to Spell 188

Conclusion: From Rules to Norms 207

7 Natural Laws and Laws of Nature 212

The Grandest Rules of All 212

Natural Law 215

Laws of Nature 225

Conclusion: Universal Legality 233

8 Bending and Breaking Rules 238

At the Limit 238

Casuistry: Hard Cases and Tender Consciences 242

Equity: When the Law Commits Injustice 248

Prerogative and States of Exception: Rulers and the Rule of Law 255

Conclusion: Which Came First, the Rule or the Exception? 265

Epilogue: More Honored in the Breach 268

Acknowledgments 275

Notes 279

Bibliography 321

Index 349

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Ranging 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—but exquisitely and dangerously fragile.”—Matthew Jones, author of Reckoning with Matter: Calculating Machines, Improvement, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage

“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.”—Susan Neiman, author of Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy

“With 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.”—Justin E. H. Smith, author of Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason

“From 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’t work, and above all why the world is too complex for most rules to be applicable without exception.”—Catherine Wilson, author of Epicureanism: A Very Short Introduction

From the B&N Reads Blog
Page 1 of

Related Subjects

History
European History
General & Miscellaneous European History
History
European History
General & Miscellaneous European History

Customer Reviews