- Also, while Weber focuses on the content of norms, I’m putting more emphasis on the efects of their form—specifically, whether they have clear criteria of satisfaction and whether those criteria are public or private.
- For Wittgenstein, rules and norms must be public things. As Wittgenstein comments: “To obey a rule, make a report, to give an order, to play a game of chess are customs (uses, institutions)” (Wittgenstein 1953, PI 199). To follow a rule, to use a particular norm as guide to action, is, therefore, for Wittgenstein, to go on as we do. Rules and norms are not, and cannot be, private and abstract—exhaustive instructions available for internal consultation by way of reflection—but rather are open, social, public, interactional phenomena, embedded within histories and traditions of practice. On this understanding, a norm is correctly followed when it yields behavior that conforms to the public standards of a given community. In order for a rule or norm to be public whether or not it has been followed must, in theory, be subject to external, public checks. Rules and rule following thus rest on a concordance of practice within a community, and correct comportment is secured by way of external checks. Seen from this perspective, the degree to which economic normativity under capitalism is insulated from public ratification and characterized by notionally private conditions of satisfaction, suggests that it amounts to a kind of pseudonormativity, failing therefore to work as a stable guide to practice.
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Notes to Pages 270–271