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.
