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Flat contradictions appear when we confront social theories of constraint with each other. The only way to resolve these is to deny the descriptive sufficiency of the theories and to put forward more complex alternatives. Thus, the primary conditions for thinking about normative facts in all their complexity involve identifying the limits and conceptions imposed by theories on us as thinkers of constraint in society, and highlighting and putting into context the various factors participating in the observance of a rule or its transgression. However, the historian does not seem to have accomplished this "pragmatic turn." He/she has omitted, in a fit of paradoxically excessive sociologism dominated by false dualities, to historically investigate such things as interests and values, internormative situations, normative systems, individual sensibilities, life circumstances and spaces, socialization, and responsibility. A variable model, however, is all the more useful to the historian given his/her more indirect and partial access to the social. Prohibitions and constraints induce behavior–but the reality of the behavior is beyond his/her reach. This kind of inquiry, quite different from his/her colleagues’ study of living societies, nevertheless involves methods that can be of interest generally. I attempt to successively answer the following questions realistically: what is it that gives efficacy to a prescription, and how can we recognize the reality of behavior in history?