The Fight for Better Rules

Reflections of a Reluctant Realist

Abstract

Rules are a basic property of human societies and yet they occupy a historically contested place in the modern narrative about what makes us human. Rules are infinitely malleable and ambivalent, at the same time a reflection of power inequities, a mechanism for reinforcing these inequities and a means to challenge them. Transgressing them can both create new spaces of freedom and reinforce the norms that they seek to establish. Reframing rules as potentialities helps break this spell. It allows us to ask not what we should do but what we can do, and to take the measure of the limits of our actions, as humans and as social scientists.