The Order of Things

1966 book by French philosopher Michel Foucault
the Foucault book

The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Les Mots et les Choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines) is a book by French philosopher Michel Foucault. It proposes that every historical period has underlying epistemic assumptions, ways of thinking, which determine what is truth and what is acceptable discourse about a subject, by delineating the origins of biology, economics, and linguistics. The introduction to the origins of the human sciences begins with detailed, forensic analyses and discussion of the complex networks of sightlines, hidden ness, and representation that exist in the group painting Las Meninas (The Ladies in waiting, 1656) by Diego Velázquez. Foucault's application of the analyses shows the structural parallels in the similar developments in perception that occurred in researchers' ways of seeing the subject in the human sciences.

The critique of epistemic practices presented in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences expanded and deepened the research methodology of cultural history. Foucault's presentation and explanation of cultural shifts in awareness about ways of thinking, prompted the historian of science Theodore Porter to investigate and examine the contemporary bases for the production of knowledge, which yielded a critique of the scientific researcher's psychological projection of modern categories of knowledge upon past people and things that remain intrinsically unintelligible, despite contemporary historical knowledge of the past under examination. In France, The Order of Things established Foucault's intellectual pre eminence among the national intelligentsia; in a review of which, the philosopher Jean Paul Sartre said that Foucault was "the last barricade of the bourgeoisie." Responding to Sartre, Foucault said, "poor bourgeoisie; if they needed me as a 'barricade', then they had already lost power!" In the book Structuralism (Le Structuralisme, 1968) Jean Piaget compared Foucault's episteme to the concept of paradigm shift, which the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn presented in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962).