Every organisation has rules whose reasons no one can give. A person who meets such a rule has two ways out of it. The first is to remove it: to say that it serves no purpose and to clear it away. The second is to break it once: to say that this case is special, that the rule may stand in general but not today. Two classic texts speak to these two ways, and they are rarely read together. Chesterton's parable of the fence is a warning against the first. Machiavelli's Prince, in its chapters on cruelty used well and badly, on the things for which rulers are praised and blamed, and on hatred and contempt, is the classic defence, with conditions, of the second.
The question of this article has two halves. What does it cost to remove a rule whose reason is unknown? And what does it cost to break a rule for an exception? Each half has a second question inside it: who pays? The article puts the questions first to the two texts, read at length, and then to two records from ARCHON, a studio in the RISCON family that publishes small, anonymised workplace scenes with readings attached: a purchase-page image that may not be changed at will, and goods that arrived without scheduled information under a principle that such goods are returned. In each a rule stands, and its reason is not stated in the scene.
The study from which this article is drawn reads restraint in ordinary organisations through the katechon, the power that "withholdeth" in the second letter to the Thessalonians: "And now ye know what withholdeth that he might be revealed in his time. For the mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now letteth will let, until he be taken out of the way." The letter does not name the holder, and the study asks of every restraint in its records what it holds back, who waits under it, and when it should be "taken out of the way". This article takes up one form of that last question. A fence is a holding. Clearing it away and stepping round it once are the two ways of taking it out of the way, and each has a price.
The article joins a debate in the study of organisations, laid out in Section 2. One side holds that red tape is mostly the residue of protections people demanded, so that cutting it means deciding whose protection to drop (Kaufman 1977). The other side studies how rules come to be kept as ends in themselves after they stop serving their purpose (Merton 1940), how a rule can be a burden that serves no legitimate purpose, either from the start or as circumstances change (Bozeman 2000), and how institutions persist for reasons other than those for which they were made (Pierson 2004). A parallel debate concerns the exception: whether it is a decision that no rule can settle in advance (Schmitt 1922), or something that the design of rules can provide for, by showing their reasons and leaving room to repair (Adler and Borys 1996), or by giving them a date on which they lapse unless renewed (Ranchordás 2014). Carl Schmitt served the Nazi regime from 1933, and critics read his theory of the exception in that light.
The contribution is a pairing. Chesterton's fence and Machiavelli's exception are usually cited on opposite sides, the first as a conservative maxim and the second as a licence for rulers. Read in full, each turns out to contain a version of the other. Chesterton's paragraph licenses departure from a rule by those who understand it, and Machiavelli's chapters bind the exception to a form in time and to a distribution of blame. Set beside the two records, the pairing shows what the bureaucracy literature tends to treat separately: the cost of removing a rule and the cost of breaking it are often paid by the same people, those nearest the work, and the records themselves point to this. The placement of the secondary works in this pairing, and their application to the two scenes, are this article's own; each work is described only by what it argues.
Section 2 sets out the debates. Section 3 describes the texts, the records and the ledger. Section 4 reads Chesterton's parable and the Purchase-Page Image. Section 5 reads Machiavelli's three chapters and the Unscheduled Goods Return. Section 6 brings the readings together, and Section 7 states what has been added, what has not, and what could follow.