The human sciences today are more than a branch of knowledge: they are already embodied in social practice and institutions.
Michel Foucault analyses their appearance, their reciprocal links, and the philosophy on which they are based. It is only quite recently that 'man' has emerged as an object of our knowledge. It is an error to believe that he has been the object of curiosity for thousands of years: he is the result of a mutation within our culture. Michel Foucault studies this mutation, from the seventeenth century onwards, in the three domains in which Classical language – which was identified with Discourse – was privileged in being able to represent the order of things: general grammar, the analysis of wealth, and natural history. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, there emerged a philology, a biology, and a political economy, in which things no longer obeyed the laws of representation, but those of their own development. The reign of Discourse came to an end, and 'man' found his place of birth in the new relation of words to things.
This book is not a 'history' of the human sciences, but an analysis of their foundations, their substrata, a reflection of what makes them possible now, an archaeology of contemporary modes of thought.
