The Order of Things by Michel Foucault

In the work that established him as the most important French thinker since Sartre, Michel Foucault offers startling evidence that "man"—man as a subject of scientific knowledge—is at best a recent invention, the result of a fundamental mutation in our culture. With vast erudition, Foucault cuts across disciplines and reaches back into seventeenth century to show how classical systems of knowledge, which linked all of nature within a great chain of being and analogies between the stars in the heavens and the features in a human face, gave way to the modern sciences of biology, philology, and political economy. The result is nothing less than an archaeology of the sciences that unearths old patterns of meaning and reveals the shocking arbitrariness of our received truths.

- Google

The 1056th greatest nonfiction book of all time


This book is on the following lists:

  1. - 66th on Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century (Le Monde)

Buy This Book

Name Binding Sales Rank Lowest New Lowest Used Published
The Order of Things (Routledge Classics) Paperback 709394 $13.83 $5.33 2001
The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (World of Man) Hardcover 2543968 $130.16 $47.02
The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences Mass Market Paperback 3178134 $24.95 $6.94
The Order of Things (Routledge Classics) Hardcover 6769318 $96.87 $85.78 2001
The Order of Things (Routledge Classics) Kindle Edition 173637 2005
The Order of Things Paperback 1873414 $28.93 $0.01 1973
The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences Paperback 76974 $11.14 $3.30 1994
The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences (Vintage) Kindle Edition 186150 2012