https://www.publicbooks.org/cooking-monasteries-arithmetic-lorraine-daston-on-the-history-of-rules/
The root of the word arbitrary refers to "an act of will," and its associations are quite positive up until about the 16th and 17th century, when it starts to take on a distinct odor of whim and caprice–often cruel whem and caprice–in the political theory of the era. John Locke, writing in the Second Treatise on Government, can think of nothing, aboslutely nothign more intolerable than to be subject to the arbitrary will of another. "Arbitrary will" is somewhat redundant (because arbitrary is always about the exercise of will), but the ipso facto assumption is that all exercises of will as only an act of will are somehow unjustified, excessive, and a form of the unacceptable exercise of power that in the most extreme cases is that of master over slave.
