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A Seminary Co-Op Notable Book of the Year 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, New Yorker [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 Ree, 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 * 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

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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.

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