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POST-PONED – Curti Lecture Series
April 7, 2020 - April 9, 2020
Forty-First Annual Merle Curti Lecture Series
“How Rules Succeed and Fail: An Intellectual History of the Particular”
Lorraine Daston
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
Berlin/ University of Chicago
POST-PONED – TBA
Pyle Center
- TBA – “Miserable Failure: The War Against Fashion”
4:00pm in the Pyle Center, Vandeberg Auditorium - TBA – “Eventual Success: Cleaning Up and Clearing Out the Enlightenment City”
4:00pm in the Pyle Center, Vandeberg Auditorium - TBA – “Excessive Success: The Nations Learn to Spell”
4:00pm in the Pyle Center, Vandeberg Auditorium
If laws represent the most dignified and elevated face of rules (as in the phrase “the rule of law”), then regulations are the micro-managers that get things done on the ground. Yet the teeming particulars of regulations create not only the fact of order but also the idea of order, and even the norm of order that underpin modern life. Three historical case studies investigate how regulations succeed and fail: medieval and early modern European sumptuary regulations (miserable rule failure); Enlightenment regulation of traffic and sanitation in big cities (eventual success); and spelling regulations in early modern and modern nation states (excessive success).
Click to download view Merle Curti Lecture Poster (pdf)
