Rules

A Short History of What We Live By

By: Lorraine Daston

Narrated by: Kitty Hendrix

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 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.

©2022 Princeton University Press (P)2022 Tantor

A sweeping history of the pervasiveness of rules in society.

A great listen for anyone interested in the history of ideas surrounding the use of rules in the guises of models, algorithms and laws. Good discussion of arguments for and against bending rules or abrogating them. The narration is sprightly and fully intelligible at 1.6 speed. A slight criticism: the narrator’s pronunciation of French terms is incorrect in a few cases.

I just can't get into it

I am the PERFECT audience for this book. I have been teaching law for 38 years. I have a boundless fascination for this topic I can only call rapturous, incandescent, almost giddy. And going in, I thought, great, tying laws to algorithms and so on.

Then I started listening. I can't deal with this framework. If you define enough things as a "rule," you end up defining nothing, and just muddying the waters. We already have different concepts for ideals, paradigms, models, cultural norms, customs, etc. Something has to be a boundary that sets apart a "rule," and right out of the gate, I find that boundary unsatisfactory here. I have seen other authors try to redefine something already well defined, such as shoehorning in new words for well-established concepts in statistics. An old term, I guess, is "reinventing the wheel." That is the feeling I get here, and it has a sufficient squirm factor to cause me to do something very unusual: abandon a book pretty early. I'm sure I'm missing some good insights, but I'm not willing to sit through this, to get there.