- Length
- 448 pagesThe 1970 anonymous English translation, Routledge Classics 2002
- Reading
- HardPresupposes texts it does not explain; a guide helps
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
The Order of Things
A history of the invisible rules that decide what a period is able to think, which became an unlikely bestseller in France and made its author famous. It ends by announcing that man is a recent invention and may be nearing his end.
- Date
- 1966
- Author
- Michel Foucault
- Region
- Tunisia and Paris
- Language
- French
- 1970 English, published anonymously The standard English version; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Genealogical — History of a concept used as a critique of it
- Transmission
- Translated — Reached its later readers in another language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years back to what it answers
- 79 years
Sold out its first printing within weeks and made its author a public figure in France, which he found uncomfortable and did not discourage.
What the book says
An investigation into the underlying rules that decide, in a given period, what can count as knowledge at all. Foucault opens with a Chinese encyclopaedia, quoted from Borges, that divides animals into categories no European mind can hold together - those belonging to the emperor, embalmed ones, those drawn with a very fine camel-hair brush - and says the laughter it produces was the origin of the book. If a classification can be that alien, then our own is a classification too. He then examines three periods in the sciences of language, living things and wealth, and argues that in each the apparently unrelated fields share a hidden structure he calls an episteme. In the Renaissance, knowledge proceeds by resemblance: things signify each other, and interpretation means tracing similitudes. In the classical age resemblance is replaced by representation, and knowledge means ordering things in a table. Around 1800 that gives way to a search for hidden depths - life, labour and language become forces with histories - and man appears as an object of knowledge for the first time. The closing pages predict that this figure will disappear like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.
What it argues
That knowledge in any period rests on an underlying order that its practitioners do not see and could not state, and that this order changes abruptly rather than developing. Foucault's method - which he calls archaeology - deliberately ignores the intentions of individual thinkers and looks instead at what makes their statements possible: why, at a given moment, certain questions are askable and certain objects available for study. The three epistemes are the demonstration. What makes the argument disconcerting is the discontinuity: the shifts between them are not improvements and not explained by anything in the previous period, so the history of knowledge is not a story of progress but a succession of arrangements. The final claim follows from this. Man - the being who is both the subject that knows and an object within what is known - appeared with the modern episteme around 1800, and a further shift would end him.
What it answered
Sartre and the humanism of the postwar French left, and behind them the assumption that history is made by subjects. The book was received, correctly, as an attack on the philosophy of the subject and became the central text of what the press called structuralism - a label Foucault rejected repeatedly and to no effect. Sartre replied that it was the last barricade the bourgeoisie could raise against Marx, which is the most quoted sentence of the whole controversy.
How it argues
By meticulous reading of forgotten material - grammarians, natural historians, writers on money - chosen precisely because they are not the famous figures, since the argument is about the ground rather than the peaks. The opening pages on Velázquez's Las Meninas, a painting in which the viewer's position is occupied by what cannot be seen, are the most read thing Foucault wrote and set up the whole book. The prose is dense and rhetorically brilliant, and the absence of ordinary historical explanation - the epistemes simply change - is the point of the method and the main target of its critics.
The moment
Foucault wrote it largely in Tunisia, where he was teaching, and published it into a French intellectual scene in which structuralism was displacing existentialism. It sold twenty thousand copies in the first year, extraordinary for a book of this difficulty, and made him a celebrity. He was elected to the Collège de France in 1970 and spent the 1970s on power, discipline and punishment, work that is often read as a departure and which he described as the same enquiry from another angle.
How it travelled
Into every humanities discipline and out into general speech. Discourse, episteme and the death of man became common currency; the book founded a style of intellectual history practised worldwide; and Foucault became, on citation counts, the most cited author in the humanities. Historians have been the most resistant, objecting that the periodisation is too clean and the evidence selective, and the debate between historians and Foucauldians about how history should be written is now half a century old.
The strongest objection
That the epistemes are constructed by the selection of evidence and cannot be tested. Foucault gives no account of why one arrangement gives way to another - the shifts happen, without cause, agent or mechanism - so the scheme explains what it describes only in the sense of redescribing it, and any counterexample can be handled by adjusting the boundaries. Historians pressed this hardest, pointing out that the material excluded is as interesting as the material chosen and that the periods are far less unified than the argument requires. Foucault effectively conceded part of it: the Archaeology of Knowledge three years later is an attempt to state the method rigorously, and his later work quietly drops the epistemes in favour of an analysis of power that has agents in it.
Why read it
The preface and the chapter on Las Meninas, which are the most exhilarating fifty pages in postwar French philosophy and can be read alone. The three central studies are for those who want the demonstration. The closing pages on the disappearance of man are famous and are widely misread as a prediction rather than a claim about a figure in the history of knowledge.
- First printed
- 1966
- First in English
- 1970
- Digitised
- No
The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) is Foucault's own methodological account of what he had done here, written partly because the reception had convinced him he had not made it clear.
The 1970 English translation was published anonymously and remains the standard; it is in copyright, as is the French.
Where it stands
Live and enormously influential, though Foucault's later work on power and on the subject is more widely used. The account of discontinuity remains contested and the method has been applied far beyond the material it was developed on.
On quoting this book
In copyright in French and English. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Whether the epistemes are real historical formations or an artefact of Foucault's reading is the central and unresolved dispute, and historians and philosophers tend to answer differently. Whether he is a structuralist, which he denied, is largely a question about the label. How the archaeological method relates to the genealogical work of the 1970s is argued in every study of him. And what the death of man actually claims - the end of a way of organising knowledge, or something about human beings - is misunderstood so routinely that the misunderstanding is now part of the book's reception.