The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

Paul-Michel Foucault was a prolific post-World War II scholar. Beginning with Mental Illness and Psychology in 1954, Foucault continued to publish academic books, lectures, and articles up until his sudden death in 1984 at the age of 57. At the time of his death, he was working on the fourth volume of The History of Sexuality, titled The Confessions of the Flesh. This fourth volume was published posthumously in 2018, marking Foucault’s continued importance for contemporary thought.

All of Foucault’s scholarship has a common theme: the relationship between power and knowledge. Foucault explores this idea in different ways, though notably all of his explorations relate to the “human sciences” (psychology, sociology, anthropology, literary analysis, etc.). Foucault had a particular interest in psychology, clinical medicine, and the relationship of both to sexuality. Foucault’s contemporaries were thinkers like Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus. After World War II, these French philosophers deeply questioned the inherent meanings and social structures in life passed down by previous generations because of the atrocities of the war. Beauvoir deconstructed what it meant to be a woman, while Sartre and Camus questioned the very possibility of inherent meaning in life. Foucault’s work questioned the very meaning of knowledge.

Foucault views the entirety of history as a series of shifting relationships between power and knowledge production. His view contrasts with the commonly-held Western view that history is a narrative of progress: We tend to believe that we have become better than the people of the Classical era because advancements in science and knowledge have produced better and more accurate truths and material results. This progress is often measured in equity, material goods, and freedom of expression. Foucault’s methodology of the “archaeology of knowledge” intentionally avoids making judgment values on whether or not one episteme is better or worse than another. He is concerned with understanding the past and excavating the intangible ideas and changes in ways of thinking that made such epistemes possible.

For example, Foucault, a gay man, notably states in The History of Sexuality that homosexuality did not exist before the 19th century. Foucault did not mean that pre-19th century society was horribly repressive toward gay people to the point where they could not exist, but rather that previous ways of thinking about sexuality in other epistemes were so fundamentally different that modern ideas about the hetero/homosexuality split would be incoherent to people in the Classical Age. Foucault means the exact same when he claims in The Order of Things that “man did not exist” (336) before the 19th century. Foucault’s methodology, like actual archeologists, aims to understand how societies (epistemes) shift from one point to another over time without judging one as superior to the other. The answer, for Foucault, lies in the relationship between power within a society and the ability of those with power to shape discourse on knowledge.