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The Order of Things (original title: Les Mots et les choses, French
French language

French is a Romance language spoken around the world by around 80 million people as first language, by 190 million as second language, and by about another 200 million people as an acquired tongue, with significant speakers in 54 countries....
 for Words and Things) is a book written by Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault was a French philosophy, historian, intellectual, Critical theory and sociologist. He held a chair at the Coll?ge de France with the title "History of Systems of Thought," and also taught at the University of California, Berkeley....
 and was published in 1966.

The full title of the book is: Les Mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines. It was translated into English and published by Pantheon Books
Pantheon Books

Pantheon Books is an United States imprint with editorial independence that is part of the Knopf Publishing Group, which was acquired by Random House in 1960....
 in 1970 under the full title The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (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 book opens with an extended discussion of Diego Velázquez
Diego Velázquez

Diego Rodr?guez de Silva y Vel?zquez was a Spain painting who was the leading artist in the Noble court of King Philip IV of Spain. He was an individualistic artist of the contemporary baroque period, important as a portrait painting....
's painting Las Meninas
Las Meninas

Las Meninas is a 1656 painting by Diego Vel?zquez, the leading artist of the Spanish Golden Age, in the Museo del Prado in Madrid. The work's complex and enigmatic composition raises questions about reality and illusion, and creates an uncertain relationship between the viewer and the figures depicted....
 and its complex arrangement of sight-lines, hiddenness and appearance.






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The Order of Things (original title: Les Mots et les choses, French
French language

French is a Romance language spoken around the world by around 80 million people as first language, by 190 million as second language, and by about another 200 million people as an acquired tongue, with significant speakers in 54 countries....
 for Words and Things) is a book written by Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault was a French philosophy, historian, intellectual, Critical theory and sociologist. He held a chair at the Coll?ge de France with the title "History of Systems of Thought," and also taught at the University of California, Berkeley....
 and was published in 1966.

The full title of the book is: Les Mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines. It was translated into English and published by Pantheon Books
Pantheon Books

Pantheon Books is an United States imprint with editorial independence that is part of the Knopf Publishing Group, which was acquired by Random House in 1960....
 in 1970 under the full title The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (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 book opens with an extended discussion of Diego Velázquez
Diego Velázquez

Diego Rodr?guez de Silva y Vel?zquez was a Spain painting who was the leading artist in the Noble court of King Philip IV of Spain. He was an individualistic artist of the contemporary baroque period, important as a portrait painting....
's painting Las Meninas
Las Meninas

Las Meninas is a 1656 painting by Diego Vel?zquez, the leading artist of the Spanish Golden Age, in the Museo del Prado in Madrid. The work's complex and enigmatic composition raises questions about reality and illusion, and creates an uncertain relationship between the viewer and the figures depicted....
 and its complex arrangement of sight-lines, hiddenness and appearance. Then it develops its central claim: that all periods of history have possessed certain underlying conditions of truth that constituted what was acceptable as, for example, scientific discourse. Foucault argues that these conditions of discourse have changed over time, from one period's episteme
Episteme

Episteme, as distinguished from techne, is etymologically derived from the Greek language word ?p?st??? for knowledge or science, which comes from the verb ?p?sta?a?, "to know"....
 to another. (Aside: Jean Piaget
Jean Piaget

Jean Piaget was a Switzerland philosophy and natural science,well known for his work studying children, his theory of cognitive development and for his epistemological view called "genetic epistemology."...
, in "Structuralism" (1968/1970, p.132), compares Foucault's épistème to Thomas Kuhn's notion of a paradigm
Paradigm

The word paradigm has been used in linguistics and science to describe distinct concepts.To the 1960s, the word was specific to grammar: the 1900 Merriam-Webster dictionary defines its technical use only in the context of grammar or, in rhetoric, as a term for an illustrative parable or fable....
.)

Foucault's critique in Les mots et les choses has been very influential to cultural history. The various consciousness shifts that he points out in the first chapters of the book have led several scholars to scrutinize the bases for knowledge in our present day as well as critiquing the projection of modern categories of knowledge onto subjects that remain intrinsically unintelligible, in spite of historical knowledge.

The Order of Things brought Foucault to prominence as an intellectual figure in France. A review by Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre , commonly known simply as Jean-Paul Sartre , was a French existentialism philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary criticism....
 attacked Foucault as 'the last rampart of the bourgeoisie
Bourgeoisie

Bourgeoisie is a classification used in analyzing human societies to describe a social class of people. Historically, the bourgeoisie comes from the middle or merchant classes of the Middle Ages, whose status or power came from employment, education, and wealth, as distinguished from those whose power came from being born into an aristocrati...
'. Foucault responded, "Poor bourgeoisie; If they needed me as a 'barricade', then they had already lost power!"