Rules

“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 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“

[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.

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

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 most recent book is Against Nature.