The Order of Things

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This article is about the Foucault book. For the Kipfer book, see The Order of Things (Kipfer book). For the
metal album, see The Order of Things (album).
The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human
Sciences (French: Les mots et les choses: Une
archologie des sciences humaines) is a 1966 book by
the French philosopher Michel Foucault. It was
translated into English and published by Pantheon
Books in 1970. (Foucault had preferred L'Ordre des
Choses for the original French title, but changed the title
because it had been used by two structuralist works
published immediately prior to Foucault's).

The Order of Things

Foucault endeavours to excavate the origins of the

human sciences, particularly but not exclusively
psychology and sociology. The book opens with an
extended discussion of Diego Velzquez's painting Las
Meninas and its complex arrangement of sightlines,
hiddenness, and appearance. Then it develops its central
claim: that all periods of history have possessed certain
underlying epistemological assumptions that determined
what was acceptable as, for example, scientific
discourse.
Foucault develops the notion of episteme, and argues
that these conditions of discourse have changed over
time, from one period's episteme to another. Foucault
demonstrates parallels in the development of three
fields: linguistics, biology, and economics.

The French edition

Author

Michel Foucault

Original title Les Mots et les choses

Country

France

Language

French

Subject

Philosophy

Published

1966 (ditions Gallimard)

Contents
1 Influence
2 Analysis
3 See also
4 Notes
5 External links

Influence

1970 (Pantheon Books, in English)

Media type

Paperback

Pages

404

ISBN

2-07-022484-8

OCLC

256703056
(https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/256703056)

Foucault's critique has been influential in the field of cultural history.[1] The various shifts in consciousness that
he points out in the first chapters of the book have led several scholars, such as Theodore Porter,[2] to scrutinize
the bases for knowledge in our present day as well as to critique the projection of modern categories of
knowledge onto subjects that remain intrinsically unintelligible, in spite of historical knowledge.

Analysis
The Order of Things brought Foucault to prominence as an intellectual figure in France. A review by Jean-Paul
Sartre attacked Foucault as "the last barricade of the bourgeoisie". Foucault responded, "Poor bourgeoisie; If
they needed me as a 'barricade', then they had already lost power!"[3]
Jean Piaget, in Structuralism, compared Foucault's episteme to Thomas Kuhn's notion of a paradigm.[4]

See also
Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century
The Archaeology of Knowledge

Notes
1. Chambon, Adrienne (1999). Reading Foucault for Social Work. New York: Columbia University Press. pp. 3637.
ISBN 0-231-10717-X.
2. Porter, Theodore (1992). Quantification and the accounting ideal in science. Social Studies of Science 22(4): pp. 633
651.
3. Miller, James (1994). The Passion of Michel Foucault. New York: Anchor Books. p.159.
4. Piaget, Jean (1970). Structuralism. New York: Harper & Row. p. 132.

External links
English translation of the Preface
(http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/sci_cult/evolit/s05/prefaceOrderFoucault.pdf)

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Categories: 1966 books Books about discourse analysis Philosophy books Works by Michel Foucault
ditions Gallimard books
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