Thank you all for coming. It's a great pleasure to deliver this lecture, especially because it bears the name of best German.
I think Voltaire drank 18 cups of strong coffee.
Perhaps this would if I were to adopt this strategy,
I might finish this everlasting book on the history of rules about which you are to hear a fragment.
So we're going to be interested in arguing this evening is to present on the basis of an episode in the history of of rules, a certain kind of mania.
In fact, I'm going to contrast two episodes of Romania.
I'm interested, of course, in the content of these rules, but I'm even more interested in the kind of rule the form of rule.
And I'm going to argue that at least in certain realms in the late 17th and in the 18th century,
what a rule could be underwent a significant mutation.
But let me start off with some examples. Paris Police Ordinance February 20th,
1737 Women caught wearing dresses made of cotton and gin in defiance of previous bans of this material will be fined 300 leaflet.
Paris Police Ordinance November 28th, 1750 In defiance of the edicts of 16, 63, 16,
66 and 17 44, Parisians are still not getting up at seven a.m. to sweep their stoops.
They are still emptying the contents of their chamber pots from the window and they are still blocking the streets with manure
and bricks and generally not at all conforming to the edicts ordinance and prohibitions repeatedly issued by the authorities.
Paris Police Ordinance September 3rd, 1754 In defiance of the edicts of 16 67 16, 72, 7500, 17, three, 17, five, 17, 22, 1724, 17, 32, 1746 and 1748.
Parisians are still playing ball games in the street and endangering passers by and breaking street lanterns.
The culprits who are shop boys, artisans and liveried servants are hereby enjoined to cease and desist or pay a fine of 200 leave.
But these rules are typical of the thousands of police regulations issued between 16 67 when the
Office of the Lieutenant de Police was created and its abolition during the French Revolution.
The office was created in the words of the royal decree of sixteen sixty seven.
I'm quoting now to assure the peace of mind of the public and individuals to purge the city of all that could cause disorder,
to procure abundance and to make each live, according to his condition and his station.
Catching and punishing criminals actually rank rather low on this list instead.
Far more important was to regulate almost every detail of what we might now call urban life,
from firefighting to street cleaning to traffic and clothing.
No unruliness was in principle too small to escape the notice of the Parisian police.
Fishmongers who blocked the husar poor rowdies, who hissed during performances of the comedy,
says fashionistas who were wearing band gold and silver buttons and embroidery of any kind.
Carriage drivers who were swearing at pedestrians unprecedented in their number, their scope of their mind numbing detail.
These rules aimed to micromanage every aspect of Parisian life.
Everyone and everything, at least within city limits,
to turn famously unruly Paris into a place in which Parisians obeyed all the rules all of the time.
Never before had the vision of what rules could accomplish been so, all encompassing and so all.
So unbending, excuse me. This was in ludicrous contrast to the lived reality of life in the city.
If there was one thing that Parisians and visitors agreed upon during most of the 18th century, it was that Enlightenment Paris was a squalid,
stinking, teeming chaos where then, as no one took one's life in one's hands to cross the street.
A German visitor complaint is just one of many such reports of quote the incessant din of carriages,
HIAC and street vendors, the dirty streets, the horrid, multifarious steam and the unhealthy stench.
Describing Paris a decade or so later in his tabloid apathy.
The Paris native Louis Sebastian, M.C., described harrowing scenes of panicked pedestrians fleeing carriages driven at breakneck speeds.
As you can see here, the royal carriage making its way through a throng.
M.C. wrote a utopian novel as well as Paris in the year 24 40, and he imagines the Paris of the future as a place where,
to the astonishment of the time traveller, Parisians are polite.
They're hard working. They have abandoned high fashion for plain, sturdy clothing and where the streets are broad,
well lit and safe for pedestrians, including the king who has abandoned his royal carriage.
It's worthy of note that he thought it would take Paris at least 750 years to achieve this.
The prolific, prolix and relentlessly issued rules of Lieutenant of Police seemed wildly inadequate to the task of taming Enlightenment Paris.
Yet the rules kept coming.
Thousands of them each more unyielding than the last in its expectation of being obeyed to the letter backed up by fines or worse.
Here we see prostitutes being carted off to the side that will only the door
recite all of the long list of previously and obviously in efficacious ADX,
and the exasperated tone of the preambles betray any sign that all had not gone exactly to plan.
It is this obduracy and rigidity of rule making in the face of abject rule failure.
That is the topic of my lecture this evening.
As I said at the outset, I'm more interested in the kind of rule that Parisian ordinances exemplified than in the content of the particular rules,
although I'll be giving lots of examples. I'm going to argue that the Roumania of Enlightenment Paris represents the advent of a new kind of
rule that contrasted starkly with the equally profuse and detailed rules of the early modern period.
The latter were almost always framed with an eye toward the adjustments that would be necessary in practise.
It's very rare to encounter a freestanding or naked rule.
The formulation of the rule itself almost always includes examples and often exceptions,
and an exhortation that some amount of judgement and discretion will be necessary to apply this rule to particular circumstances.
These earlier rules were as simple as those of the later Parisian ordinances were rigid.
My question is what made the Parisian authorities so confident that their rules could be formulated as if particulars always conformed to universals?
As if Parisians always did what they were told in the teeth of abundant evidence to the contrary,
in order to highlight the novelty of these rigid rules.
I'm going to begin with the suppl rules of the early modern period will then return to Enlightenment Paris and take a closer look at Rumania.
In both theory and in practise,
and I'll conclude with some speculative thoughts about why this new kind then new kind of rigid rule emerged as an ideal, if not a reality.
When and where it did, and why it has endured and is still very much with us in this age of algorithms for everything.
So let me begin in the 16th century. We are in Nuremberg.
The year is 15 25. The artist Albirex Drew, who has dedicated a manual on geometry for the use of painters, goldsmiths, sculptors, carpenters.
Stonemasons and all those who use measurement in their trade to his humanist friend Willy Bode here Como,
as befits its intended readership of artisans dirty little treatise unto advising their missing,
sometimes published under the title as devising their kunst, is written in the German vernacular.
It's not written in Latin, but the dedication to a renowned classical scholar like Pierre Coma hints at dirs ambitions to
elevate the status of these lowly crafts and also to associate them with what he calls the lost,
excuse me, the lost art of the Greeks and the Romans.
He writes that painters and other artisans who learnt their craft entirely from daily practise were like wild,
unproved trees and were rightly laughed at by connoisseurs and herders,
almost certainly alluding to his own unpleasant experiences when he first arrived in Italy and was ridiculed by his Italian colleagues,
Dumber promises that by mastering the geometry of the straight edge and compass of constructions like this one,
such art hungry youth, as he calls them would improve their minds as well as their handiwork.
Dedicate dedicated a pistol rings the changes on themes that were endlessly repeated in hundreds,
if not thousands, of books on how to do everything that began to roll from the presses in the 15th century.
These are books which intend to turn the banaszak handicrafts into genuine arts.
So remember briefly, that there is a kind of hierarchy set up between ski into a form of knowledge,
which is associated with the university, which delivers universal necessary knowledge of causes.
Then there are the arts, first and foremost the liberal arts, which,
if they cannot deliver necessary universal knowledge, at least deliver a rule, govern knowledge.
And then below that, there are the banality trades, which are at least in the hierarchy devised by the learnt a matter of blind routine repetition.
What Drucker and many of the other authors of these handbooks,
these How-To manuals of the early modern period want to do is to elevate the status of the
so-called mechanical arts to a position which could vie with thought of the liberal arts.
And they are doing so by following the cicerone and dictum that an art can be reduced to rules.
This is not only a formula for improving the status of artisans.
It's a formula for improving their mobility in every sense of the word.
Early modern courts are in competition with one another for doctors, cooks, artists,
military engineers, whoever could and rich defend and embellish the court.
This meant that artisans like Doura could pretty much write their own ticket and have a career that was first and foremost
far more lucrative than one might have had had he remained in his native Nuremberg as a goldsmith as his father had been,
but also one which promised worldly fame. This combination is captured in a fifteen eighty three engraving by the Dutch artist.
Hendrik Galtier's called ours at Uzis Art and Practise, and what we see here is the winged figure of hours of art and notice that she is struggling.
He or she seised upon a globe to suggest the worldly fame that comes from listening
to her instruction and at her feet are books and geometrical instruments.
She is instructing the male figure of practise who is drawing.
Drawing is another technique of planting one's work ahead of time recommended by these handbooks.
And here you see in the corner the hourglass, suggesting time because only experience can sediment practise.
And between these two, the partnership of hours at Uzis.
According to Goltz Yess legend, for this engraving, which is in both Dutch and Latin,
it will bring riches and worldly fame to the artisan and guiltiest who himself came from
very modest origins and also was severely crippled through an accident in his right hand.
His own meteoric career bore witness to the success of this formula.
The 15th and 16th centuries were the first age of rule mania.
In addition to books like Duras that provided artisans with rules to guide their proctors, practise philosophers, courtiers,
doctors and teachers, published rules on how to sense how to dance, how to swim, how to travel, how to spell and besiege of.
Fortified city even treatises on how to discover new truths of which latter Descartes,
just Google, the method of 16:37 is only the most famous example.
So what exactly were these rules? I can only give you a kind of scattering of examples, but I think they're fairly representative of the genre.
So let's start with a treatise first published in 1956 and republished multiple times.
This is the sixteen thirty four edition by the English mathematical practitioner Leonard Diggs,
who is instructing land surveyors on how to use what he calls diverse and most certain and sufficient rules.
Touching the measure of all manner of surfaces of timber, stone,
glass and land and digs like dirt reproaches the heady and self-willed craftsmen who adhere to their own practise unguided by rules,
and he wraps himself in the mantle of the infallible grounds as he calls them of geometry.
And you see here that in on the title page of the surveyors are using various mathematical siting instruments.
Yet his alternative rules are not only expressed almost entirely by means of examples.
He also cautions that discretion must be exercised in order to simplify calculations.
Quoting from Diggs, it were intolerable tediousness. Yay.
Impossible to set forth the true quantities of timber measure to all odd quantity of squares.
The discreet handling of these the witty shall bring to a sufficient exactness, so the message is clear rules.
Even mathematical rules had to be tweaked by judgement when applied to specific cases.
Another example In a very similar vein, the early 17th century Welsh composer Elway Bevan explained on how to write musical canons,
which are the most mathematical form of what was still then a branch of mathematics, namely harmonics.
Bevan also instructs the would be composer not so much by rules as by heaps and heaps of examples.
We now consider canons to be the most mechanically rule bound of all musical genres.
And it's not an accident that the very first computer compositions were of musical canons, but Bevan proceeds from simple example.
So by taking plainsong and using alternating rest in the different lines to get at least some form of of polyphony
to ones which are so complex that he compares them to the frame of the whole world made up of the elements of air,
earth, fire and water. This is a this is his picture of this canon in four voices.
All of this takes place without so much as a faint at formalisation.
I take these examples because I want to show that even the mathematical sciences like arithmetic,
measurement and harmonics were codified as much by examples as by rules in these handbooks, or to put it more accurately.
The examples were part and parcel of the rule.
So let me give you yet another example. This, perhaps from a context which is more prototypical of rules, namely rules of games.
A London man about town, Charles Cotton, published in 1887, a treatise called the complete game Stir,
in which he sets forth the rules in a lot more than the rules on horse racing,
billiards, chess, all manner of card games,
cockfighting just about any form of what he calls the enchanting witchery of gaming that was going on at that time.
In the more lush sections of London, cotton is profligate into tales of all kinds.
This is a real brick of a volume, the complete treatise. He is not only tells you how to play card games like this one,
he tells you to watch out when you're bending over looking at your cards that someone doesn't strip off the gold buttons on your waistcoat.
Why you? You're in a state of concentration, he tells you.
Never bet on a fighting cock unless you've been to visit the.
Courtyard and heard how frequently it grows in comparison to the others.
He tells you if you have a horse that you want to race, make sure that it empties its bowels before it starts the race.
This is a man who leaves no detail unsaid.
Various orders and laws and rules are set forth for the various games, many of which we would readily recognise as rules of the game.
So one of the rules is if you touch a chess piece, then you have to play it.
But Cotton continually warns his readers that many of these games can only be played through long observation and experience.
So there's some game. Perhaps some of you know it, it must be fiendishly difficult.
It's called Irish, and he says there's no way of giving the rules to this.
You just have to watch other people play Irish and even in chess, which is the subject of one of the book's longest chapters.
Cotton toys with the idea of first that chess as well as draughts quote, may be played by a certain rule.
But after about 20 pages of detailed instructions,
he concludes quote many more observations might be here inserted for the understanding of this noble game,
which I am forced to waive to avoid prolix city.
So Cotton is interested not only in telling you what we would consider to be the rules that proper of the game.
He's interested in telling you how to win. So, for example, he gives values for the pieces in chess, which are very much like the values we have now.
That is a bishop is worth more than a knight. But he says, look, if you notice that your adversary likes to use his night,
you should be willing to sacrifice your bishop to put that night out of commission.
That's as much of a rule as how the night can can move in.
Cotton's treatise these examples of rules,
which I've called more or less at random from early modern handbooks on how to
measure would compose a canon or win it games could easily be supplemented by many,
many more from the same period.
There are treatises on how to make jams, how to start a pig farm, how to dredge a ditch, how to draw in perspective, how to pass a bill in parliament.
Generally, anything you need to get on with daily life in an orderly manner.
In today's parlance, to call an activity an art is to draw attention to its implicit intuitive aspect.
So, for example, when we say that medicine is an art as well as a science, we are contrasting.
It's more formalised, rule governed. Part two is more savoir faire aspects.
The meaning of art in the early modern period is quite different.
It's to render explicit by rules what white might have been seen as implicit practise.
And this becomes an obsession not only for the authors of these rules and method books, but also for governments.
Cobell is only perhaps the most successful.
I assume that this is a case where the night has just been taken.
Cobell is only one of the most successful of reforming mercantilist ministers of the 17th
century who publish treatises of rules to improve the quality of artisanal products for export.
In order to fill the royal coffers in this case, he was particularly interested in the silk market in France,
and this is one of the many patterns that was published for the guidance of William Silk Weavers.
The rules of art brought to haphazard practise a certain order, and they elevated the prestige of the artisans.
But rules did not eliminate the need for discretion and experience.
They were always formulated with an eye toward inevitable exceptions.
The rules, as I said, are not freestanding models. Examples, tips and observations prop them up and filled them out.
This isn't because the rules were unnecessarily vague or unspecific or undertale, some of them fulminate with detail.
Rather, it was because no universal formulation was expected to be able to do justice to particular circumstances,
even if the authors of these books had never read Aristotle.
Nicole McKee in Ethics. They were well aware of the problem that Aristotle formulates in the NICKLEBY and ethics concerning legislation,
which is no lawmaker can foresee all of the particular cases which such a law may eventually confront.
And therefore, the judge will have to, in our Suttles words,
imagine himself in the position of the original legislator in order to avoid injustice in certain particular cases.
This is the law of of of equity.
Even if the authors of these books had never heard of the law of Equity, they were very much adhering to Aristotle's warnings about the necessary,
in our subtle view, necessary constraints upon on all universals applied to variable subject matter.
So the differing degree of pungency of an exotic spice that might change your recipe or
the knot in the wood that might force the carpenter to swerve from an initial plan.
Those were the sorts of particulars which were assumed to be absolutely ubiquitous and inevitable, and therefore the rules had to do them justice.
And now take us back to 18th century Paris and a rather different kind of rule.
If the rules of the first wave of rule mania in the early modern period were thick rules cocooned in their
examples and exceptions and appeals to experience the rules of the 18th century Parisian bureaucrats within rules.
So we are now in Paris. The year is 1749.
This is a manuscript submitted by an officer of the Paris police to Louis, the 15th exquisitely illustrated by Gabriel S. Obama.
And it shows the invention of licence plates.
So what one sees here is that there are going to be a if the recommendations in this manuscript are followed,
their every fiasco is going to have a number up here.
So the police will know who the miscreants are and every cart horse on its with milk here is going to have its number over here.
The author of this treatise is Francois Jacques Griot, who is an officer of the constabulary.
He is resident in Paris, friend of. He lives in the same building, we think in the WHO moved out as Dero,
and he also proposes in this same treatise the numbering of Powers Houses the numbering of the staircases in Paris,
houses the numbering of the apartments, the doors in Paris houses.
He imagines a kind of identity card that will allow the police to trace the movements of passers by, then circa 500000 residents.
He imagines a gigantic paper shuffling machine that will allow the officials at the camera, at the police to at the.
So what you see here is see these giant wheels here.
They got there. They're sort of like the book wheels that you sometimes see in a depictions in early modern libraries and but underneath their desks,
these functionaries have a pedal which moves on the wheels and can summon up one of millions of dossiers to the touch of a foot.
He wants to weave a finely meshed net of policing that will, in his own words,
leave everyone the freedom to do good but make doing evil extremely difficult.
He's obsessed with the regulation of every aspect of the booming, expanding and notoriously unruly city of Paris circa 1750,
and it's no wonder Michele Fuko was fascinated, morbidly fascinated with this treatise.
It is a phantasmagoria of surveillance and control, but it is a complete fantasy.
As one look at the actual efforts of the police to keep even a semblance of order in 18th century,
Paris confirms, I've already read you a quotation describing the kind of chaos of mules,
pedestrians, carts, carriages, market stands competing for space in the absolutely filthy streets of 18th century Paris.
You've got to imagine not only. Are the streets, for the most part, very narrow.
They are heaped with garbage and also building materials because there's a
building boom going on and you have to put the bricks and the masonry someplace.
And moreover, to most streets starting in sort of the early 19th century are what are called in French Bombay, which means they're convex.
So there's a slight hump in the middle so that water and refuse can flow into gutters on the sides of the street.
This implies that you have a well working gutter system.
The streets of Paris are still concave, so they have in the middle a filthy stream of revenues that is meant eventually to flow into the sand.
There is this a I think the hood initialled in the 5th,
the 6th arrondissement still has a structure that you can see the Latin with a few remnants of of this form of a street design.
So the streets, they're congested, they're filthy, and they're also really dangerous.
When in the 1770s, the first sidewalks for pedestrians were created on the pontiff.
It was a seven days wonder as the words 2.2L and 01:12 suggest these raised walkways were originally meant not for pedestrians,
but for horsemen to mount their steed to get a leg up to mount this as a Montréal 212, et cetera.
No one had seen anything like it that the pedestrians actually had a place of their own to walk.
From the late 16th century to the mid-19th century.
The Parisian police and municipal administration saw their chief task as the conquest of public space,
which often boiled down to keeping the streets clean and traffic flowing.
This was no easy task. Paris, like many early modern European cities, was freed from its constraining mediaeval walls and 17th century.
So what happens is that with siege warfare and fortifications, you move the site of warfare to a series of fortified garrisons on the border.
This is what happens after the martial volleyball Louis, the 14th legendary field commander, wins several key battles.
That means that these mediaeval cities can tear down their walls and start to expand.
And that's exactly what happened. You can see you can see here that will go back of the seventeen thirties.
You can see the tracing of the old walls, and what you start to get is a lot of building and what are being called the Faubourg.
The football company here. And you also get a use of the repurposed ramparts, which all return in a few minutes in which they are turned into.
So here this is from the port. Somebody needs to sample one.
What you get here is so this would have been the top of the ramparts.
It's now being turned into Paris's first broad boulevards and nuked.
And it's a little hard to make out here. These little dots are actually rows of trees planted at strictly regulated intervals.
I'll say more about that in in a moment. This is a city where the population and commercial activity are skyrocketing.
The rising revenues from the North Atlantic trade triggers a building building boom.
And by 1779, Paris is estimated to have about 50000 houses, 17 public squares,
a 975 streets of wits ranging from two to 20 metres, and a population of about 650000 people.
A city that had had eight carriages in 1994 had about six, had about 300 in sixteen sixty and somewhere between 14000 and 20000 in 1722.
A sign, as I say, from these newly created broad boulevards on the city's repurposed ramparts.
Most of the streets are sinuous higgledy piggledy with the facades of the houses they see.
Every which way. Here is the room move, dad where Gilbert lived, which is then as now a market street.
So one of the streets where traffic was particularly congested,
it's no wonder that got played with the fantasy of just raising the whole city to the ground and starting over again.
As I say it, the Parisian police who have to deal with all of this, not just keeping the peace and catching criminals.
They are from 16 sixty seven on responsible for almost all aspects of urban administration and
assuring not only the safety but also the comfort and convenience and prosperity of Paris's citizens.
This is a period starting in the late 17th century at about the time the Office
of the Lieutenant of Police is created when early modern European cities,
at least a few of them, like Amsterdam, Paris and London, start to compete with one another.
Amsterdam is the poster child for what a orderly will govern city should look like.
Here you see the map that is going to extend the canal system of Amsterdam and a completely symmetric fashion.
Visitors to Paris or to Amsterdam marvel at the cleanliness,
the handsome and uniform street facades, the efficient sewage system, the spacious public squares,
the night-time illumination by oil lamps of the strictly regulated traffic and the workhouses to keep beggars out of the public eye.
Paris and London in the late 17th century fall painfully short of the standards set by Amsterdam and by the late 17th century.
Not only are travellers, but official delegations visiting each other's cities to take note of their innovations and
try to import it home after the creation of the Office of the Paris Lieutenant of Police,
who has approximately 50 commie cells stationed in the city's neighbourhoods, reporting to him on a daily basis,
thousands of dossiers start to be collected and filed chronologically and alphabetically.
Remember that paper shuffling machine that quiet fantasises about the police become in part because of this competition amongst cities,
the avant garde of Europe's bureaucracy? When, for instance, the empress of the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
Multi-taskers wants to set up her own when she wants to basically upgrade Vienna as her capital.
She writes to the Parisian lieutenant of police to give her recommendations.
It's no accident that it's fantasies not only about surveillance, but also paperwork centred on the Parisian police and who you see once again,
these officials consulting the many, many dossiers kept on every aspect of powers.
Releasing a good deal of that mass of paperwork was generated by the regulations I've already mentioned,
and many of these regulations are issued multiple times and they're about everything who can have a chemical laboratory.
Only doctors and apothecaries. What is the minimum age for driving a hired carriage?
18. How should you celebrate a royal birth?
Candles in the window? Yes. Firing guns into the air? No.
The proper placement of chimneys. How gold and silver should be used only for coinage, except for the occasional cross for an archbishop.
What can and cannot be worn in public? So imported Swiss cotton, Italian lace and any kind of embroidery are prohibited.
The spacing of trees planted along main thoroughfares at least 18 feet apart and innumerable
prohibitions of the sort that I began with against blocking the streets with trash,
snow carts, animals, stalls or ball games.
These regulations were rather limited efficacy. Here is a slightly exotic.
Rated view of the pontiff on a bad day,
and you can see that all the regulations that you're not supposed to have markets so these these are these are the famous 212 the sidewalks here.
This was to have market stands cluttering them. You're certainly not supposed to have the pedestrians in the middle of the street.
They're supposed to be on the sidewalks. And you see also here what this can lead to.
This poor water carrier is being kicked by a horse who has been spooked by someone driving their cattle through the turf.
When you read through all of these ordinances decade by decade,
you occasionally catch a glimpse of the episodes that Enlightenment historians habitually uses landmarks of the era.
So, for example, an ordinance closing the San Medalled cemetery in the wake of the alleged miraculous
cures of the convicts younow or the banning the suppressing of the all sick paddy.
But these are really just drops in a huge ocean of regulations that occupied the Parisian police day in, day out.
The scope and the detail of these regulations is staggering.
A heroic effort to anticipate, counter and regulate every aspect of urban life, as Montesquieu said of the police in this plea deal,
while they are perpetually concerned with details with regulations rather than laws.
But apparently all of this bureaucratic foresight, surveillance and recordkeeping was largely in vain.
All of these infringements carried fines and some even prison sentences and those daily reports from the neighbourhood.
Those 50 neighbourhood copies sell on infractions, provide evidence of vigilance and enforcement.
So every Tuesday and every Friday, the lieutenant of the police,
who also has the powers of a magistrate, is hearing cases of infractions of these regulations.
So he's handing down, for example, a truly hefty fine of 300 leaflets to one dim wasn't cook resident in the Bhutani,
who was spotted wearing a dress of court contraband called DNA printed with red roses or a lighter fine of 100 sue to the widow Shihad,
who had emptied the contents of her chamber pot onto the street below.
At nine p.m. one January evening, it was not considered exculpatory.
First together, Gallo. Watch out below as a warning to passers by beforehand.
More serious offences such as riding faster than a trot and recidivists were fined more
heavily armed because the chemical usually cashier a cut of whatever fine was levied.
They had every motive to report the miscreants.
Yet the sheer number of times that these ordinances were reissued absolutely verbatim,
except for an increasingly hysterical preamble about the iniquity of the Parisians that made it necessary to reissue the regulations.
This is, I think, damning evidence of their futility.
So recall the examples that I began with the police ordinance of November 28th 1750 on street cleaning repeats the edicts of sixty three and 16,
66 and 1740 for verbatim the edicts.
Banning games from power streets were issued 17 times between sixteen,
sixty seven and 1750 for a 16 44 royal decree prohibiting yet again imported lace despaired.
Now, quoting from the preamble,
experience has shown that heretofore all regulations made by the kings or predecessors and by ourselves have been futile and not executed,
having served only to just fly display defiance to their authority.
The weakness of the magistrates and the corruption of the manners of this century in the
face of such humiliating failure to get Parisians to shovel their snow forswear lace,
stop playing ball in the streets or place their trash in the appointed containers at the appointed hours.
The response of the police bureaucracy was to issue yet more regulations even more.
Detailed and to redouble surveillance and reporting Wyatt's manuscript treatise of 1749 for Louie,
the 15th recommended more police inspectors, more reports, more registration and observation of everyone and everything.
Here's his his suggested form for registering all Parisians where they come from, where they're living.
Have they paid their taxes, their comings and goings?
What in retrospect looks like a glaring example of rule failure was interpreted at the time as a call for rule repair.
If the existing rules had encountered resistance and exceptions,
the solution was to weave an ever tighter mesh of rules, darning the loopholes catching the scofflaws.
This bureaucratic reflex to rule failure is so familiar to us that we no longer query its authority.
Why should the response to failed rules be yet more rules, and not just more of the very same repeal rules repeated verbatim?
What dilution of order held the famously worldly lieutenant of police in its thrall?
The lieutenant of police men like yourself, teen and Linn?
Well, these were famously worldly men.
They they knew everyone's secrets. They knew literally and figuratively where all the bodies were buried.
And yet yet these really hard headed men of action seem to believe that if they
just issued those rules against ball playing in the streets one more time,
it might actually take hold. The lieutenants of the Paris police, who were arguably France's and perhaps Europe's foremost bureaucrats,
clung to the fantasy of a perfect rule that would ensure perfect order.
They refused to give in to the recalcitrance of the Parisians.
Rules had stiffened. So what accounts for this obstinacy in the face of abject failure?
Time and time again, why were so many ordinances neither scrapped nor amended but simply reissued verbatim,
except for an increasingly ill tempered preamble? Despite the evident refusal of most Parisians to pay them any heed,
the explanations of this lamentable state of affairs in the preambles ranged from
the conciliatory so the preamble of one 17:35 reissue fire regulations suggest,
well, maybe we'll just forgot the earlier regulations. They ranged from the indulgent in that to the indignant.
It is intolerable that people are still wearing banned lace once again and melting down gold and silver coins to make buttons to flatter their party.
Historians of Paris document the resistance of the Parisians and the inadequacy of the regulations to bring chaos under control,
but they rarely remark upon the puzzling obstinacy and inflexibility of the regulations themselves.
The Roumania of the early modern period with which I began was just as prolific in rules,
just as confident that the right rules would solve all problems from learning how to swim to arriving at self-evident truths.
But the earlier examples of rules which I gave had been sick rules.
They'd given you a great deal of latitude in how to apply them, and they had been supple in the face of exceptions.
In contrast, those of the police bringing order to Enlightenment Paris were thin and rigid.
It was as if in the imaginary of the rule makers, Aristotle's problem of universals and particulars had been solved, at least within city limits.
And if it hadn't, the solution was to repeat the selfsame rules again until they were eventually obeyed.
It was as if the Parisian police suffered from some kind of obsessive compulsive neurosis,
doomed to repeat the same futile rules year after year, decade after decade unable or unwilling to adjust.
To circumstances, why a clue lies,
I think in the competition that I've already mentioned amongst European metropolises that began in the late
17th century and gathered momentum throughout the 18th century and has never stopped ever since Amsterdam,
Paris and London begin this competition. They're not only in competition with each other.
They were emulating each other, implicitly establishing new standards who were the first rank city should look,
sound and smell like when, for example, Amsterdam adopts a system of fire pumps and street lanterns.
It is imported within a decade or so to Paris and London, Parisian displays of luxury goods in betweens on the loose,
and they are duly imitated on London's fashionable shopping streets.
Rival cities vied with each other for the most free flowing traffic, the most splendid parks and promenades, and the cleanest, best lit streets.
Here we see the pontiff on a somewhat better day,
although the stated goal of all of these improvements was the comfort, safety and convenience of the city dwellers.
The authorities were acutely conscious of the judgements of foreigners when, for example,
the Parisian police banned merchant stalls from the pontiff for the umpteenth time.
They justified the regulations not just by pointing to traffic congestion,
but also to the fact that the stalls blocked quote the most magnificent view and the one most worthy of admiration by foreigners.
It is tempting to bundle all of the measures to control traffic and fight fires.
Clean streets and beautiful views together as modernisation.
And that's exactly how urban historians do refer to these efforts on the part of early modern western European metropolises.
But I think it would be more accurate to say that this competition amongst cities, which, as I say,
has never stopped, had very little to do with science and technology sort of the 19th century version of modernity,
but rather with inventing a first version of modernity, which has everything to do with orderliness, predictability and with rules.
So when M.C imagines Paris in 20 for 40, he does not imagine people in flying cars or other technological marvels.
Instead, he imagines Parisians are still getting around on foot and on horses, but they are getting around in an orderly manner.
This is the vision of the future in seven circa 1770, and it's a vision which has everything to do with a certain few pockets of urban life,
which are attempting to not only remap the physical dimensions of the city, but to re-educate the city dwellers in a certain form of conduct.
So rather than striving to realise a vision of modernity, the did not yet exist and certainly not under that name.
Enlightenment Paris and its rivals were aiming at a vision already glimpsed in the uniform facades and the efficient sewage system.
The free flowing traffic and night streets blazing with lanterns in a city like Amsterdam here was
a city in which the radius of predictability and everyday life had been impressively extended,
at least within city limits.
It was no accident that the Dutch had also pioneered mathematically based annuities, lotteries and insurance schemes during the same period.
All devices designed to rein in the role of chance in human affairs in his justly celebrated essay of 1977,
The Passions and the Interests political arguments for capitalism before its triumph.
Albert Hershman described how the vices of greed and pursuit of self-interest were morally
rehabilitated by enlightenment thinkers such as Bernard Mandeville and Adam Smith.
These thinkers argued that even if the interests could not be considered full fledged virtues, they did make people calculable,
and that was their great advantage over the more tempestuous passions of ambition, anger and lust.
The interests begin, as Hershman says, as calm passions well suited to reigning in the tempestuous ones and ended up
as demie virtues because they lubricated commerce and stabilised social life.
What Hirschman does not explain is why the doctrine of the benign interests,
which as his subtitle indicates and to date, the triumph of capitalism rather than rationalising it.
Why this doctrine emerges when and where it does.
Did the passions, after all, had been excoriated by philosophers since antiquity as enemies of reason?
Why should the argument that the calmer interest could subdue the notoriously wild passions have been persuasive?
And finally, why was it better to be predictable than to be truly good?
I'd like to suggest that the answer to these questions about the rising stock of the interests gives us a clue to the
answer of the question about why the Parisian police so stubbornly reissued their thousands of rules without adjustments,
much less concessions of defeat. In both cases, it was a vision of partial success.
Rather than bow to experience as a thick rules, had the municipal authorities banked on experience bowing to the rules in some places,
few and no but populous and much publicised in both word and image was by early modern European standards.
An astonishing degree of orderliness and predictability had been in fact achieved.
I've already sketched the role that Amsterdam played in giving a tantalising example of what the iron willed municipal authorities might accomplish.
But even in helter skelter Paris, microcosm of regularity brought about by regulation were emerging.
Whereas in Boswell's London, the right of way was adjudicated amongst pedestrians by a cudgel.
By 1786, London visitors were being advised that if they keep kept the walls of buildings to their right while walking, you will have no interruption.
Everyone will give way. In Paris, it is the broad boulevards which I've already mentioned, which were created here on the city's former ramparts.
And here this is. The The Boulevard bus to home fell about here, which gave something like the same kind of glimpse of the possible.
I'd mentioned already that they're divided into lanes by the regularly planted trees.
This means that for the first time, pedestrian horse and carriage traffic can be segregated,
which isn't considered by the Parisians to be nothing short of a miracle.
They're emblematic of another aspect of why here you see, they become an extremely popular promenade their emblem,
their emblematic of another aspect of why the municipal authorities were obsessed with order and predictability.
Once the mediaeval city walls had been rendered obsolete by new siege warfare,
you are dealing with a city that seems to no no check on its population growth.
This is also the case for London and Amsterdam.
So Amsterdam had a population of circa 50000 and hundred and two hundred and thirty five thousand by 7500 in the same period.
Paris swelled from ten thousand to about 500 and 15000 inhabitants on the eve of the French Revolution.
As many as 630000 people were living in the city. London's growth curve was even steeper.
These were cities that were bursting at the seams,
and neither the physical infrastructure nor social customs could absorb so many newcomers without buckling under the strain.
Eighteenth century almanacs of professions show that as population and prosperity waxed,
trees became ever more specialised and interdependent between twice and four times as many people were jostling each other in the streets,
throwing their waste out the windows, crowding both official and unofficial markets,
and blocking thoroughfares with bricks and other building materials. They were generally interacting with more people in more ways than ever before.
It's under these circumstances of high density,
urban mobility and sociability that a premium was placed on the predictability of human conduct once achieved, even within a narrow compass.
Predictability could become addictive as our own epoch of self-avowed control freaks hardly needs to be told.
Small successes feed vaulting ambitions.
The promise held out by both the first and second waves of Rumania was to overthrow the empire of Trouts.
Fortuna had reigned mighty in the imaginations of the authors of that first wave of rule books I mentioned.
Here we see her with her emblem out of the wheel.
Now you're up. Tomorrow you'll be down. And the fragile bubble.
And, of course, a venturesome ship going off to sea with uncertain outcome the SEC rules aim to anticipate.
The Russa's of Fortuna, by building variability into their very formulation, the thin rules aim to defeat Fortuna once and for all.
Giving her no quarter. So let me conclude these two episodes from the history of Rules of Romania, the thick,
supple rules of the early modern arts and the third rigid rules of 18th century Paris
police highlight a contrast between two very different visions of what a rule can be.
For practitioners of the mechanical arts like Dura and many other early modern authors of books that reduced practise to an art rules were flexible,
necessarily so whether the subject was carpentry, cookery or siege warfare.
Unexpected particulars might at any moment ambush the universal rule.
In contrast. The rules on regulations ordained for 18th century Paris.
This is once again guilt imagining what it would be like to have regular facades,
house facades in Paris all facing the same way for these for these rules.
A rule has to be rigid, and it has to be freestanding for the lieutenant of the Paris police.
A rigid rule expressed a bureaucratic ideal in which regulations foresaw all
eventualities and were obeyed as automatically as a driver today stops at a red light.
This vision of a perfect rule goes hand-in-hand with a vision of a perfect order in
which Parisians never invent a new way of evading prohibitions against lace and games,
or if they do, the tight web of police surveillance will catch them in the act.
All of the rule makers knew all too well this was not the world in which they lived.
The sheer number of times that the Parisian ordinances were reissued and the increasingly hysterical tone of their Prologis speak volumes
about what historian Annette FAJ has described as the stubborn resistance of the people of Paris to new regulations and unwavering attention,
vigilance and judgement on the part of the police inspectors made up for the failure of the thin
rules like the return of the repressed Aristotle's ancient problems of universals and particulars,
and the seasoned judgement needed to cope with particulars crept in through the back door.
If these examples put you in mind of the thousands of human invigilators hired by Facebook to patrol
paste postings of unsavoury content that the algorithms were supposed to eliminate automatically,
your associations would not be amiss. The dream of the perfect rule In this case,
the algorithms developed by the Facebook programmers has not relinquished its grasp on the imagination of the rule makers.
On the contrary, the dream has turned febrile and contagious.
Those ubiquitous utopias and dystopias of algorithms for everything from stocking your fridge to finding your mate to writing your next book.
My point is not that digitalisation should somehow be minimised as something less than a revolution.
I do think it is a revolution comparable to the print revolution of the early modern period.
My point is rather that there's nothing new about the dream of a perfect rule all encompassing in its scope and merely automatic in its execution.
No historian can resist a delusion that refuses to die, no matter how often it is buried with a stake through its heart.
Why just the dream of the perfect rule endure?
It's worth noting that although this dream is long lived, it is not eternal, nor is it necessary outside of logic,
it's very difficult to find examples before the 17th century, even in the mathematical disciplines of these kinds of rules.
But already in the early 18th century, especially in the context of modernising cities, aspirations rise.
A girl policed city is not simply a safe city.
It is an orderly city in which the streets are broad and straight.
The houses are numbered and all face the same way.
The night blazes with a thousand lanterns.
There's a fire department that arrives on time, carriages are licenced and the carriage drivers no longer menace pedestrians.
Residents dispose of their trash at the appointed time and place.
It took almost 200 years for Parisians to internalise these norms, and these norms were always fragile as repeated street uprisings testify.
What's important for my purposes is that partial success nourished hopes of complete success.
It was the relative orderliness of early 18th century Paris with its first broad boulevards,
as opposed to the spaghetti tangle of mediaeval streets that encouraged Quiet and his fellow police officers to press for more regulations.
Of more aspects of urban life, in short.
Promises made on behalf of the perfect rule were backward rather than forward looking like the algorithms that emerged from machine learning.
They extrapolate from the known past to the unknown future.
And just like past dreams of perfect rules, they do so from highly selective examples of the known past.
Those parts, which are the most regular, the most stable, the parts that offer most encouragement to the vision of the perfectly orderly,
perfectly stable, perfectly transparent world required for perfect rules to work.
Under these circumstances, it's not surprising. Projects for perfect rules should fail with such dismal regularity.
What cries out for explanation is their emergence and, above all, their astonishing persistence.
The historical conditions under which such dreams first emerged offers us a clue in certain pockets of the world.
Few, but prominent life really was slowly and fitfully becoming more predictable.
The Parisian police visionary quiet effectively believed that he had solved Aristotle's problem of fitting universal rules to particulars.
He didn't succeed, not by a long shot, but partial success in this context and others was enough to keep the dream alive until today,
where it has been rekindled by machine learning. The visionaries of machine learning effectively believed that they can solve another
philosophical problem Hume's problem of induction for the algorithms to work.
The future must, in a strong sense, be like the past. It is the temporal version of Aristotle's problem of universals.
David Hume spent most of his own life in some of these pockets of partial regularity Edinburgh and Paris.
And since David Hume, it's been axiomatic that induction assumes that tomorrow will be like today and yesterday.
Hume's problem makes the contingency of induction explicit.
My aim has been to show that historical contingencies can alter even what a rule is.
The history of the dream of the thin rule the perfect rule suggests that, like Aristotle's universals,
even the axioms of induction might hold only under certain historical conditions.
Thank you for your attention.