The order of things : an archaeology of the human sciences / Michel Foucault.

"April 1994."

"Reprint of the 1971 ed. published by Pantheon Books, New York, in series: World of man"--Title page verso.

Includes bibliographical references.

Las meninas -- The prose of the world: The four similitudes ; Signatures ; The limits of the world ; The writing of things ; The being of language -- Representing: Don Quixote ; Order ; The representation of the sign ; Duplicated representation ; The imagination of resemblance ; Methesis and 'taxinomia' -- Speaking: Criticism and commentary ; General grammar ; The theory of the verb ; Articulation ; Designation ; Derivation ; The quadrilateral of language -- Classifying: What the historians say ; Natural history ; Structure ; Character ; Continuity and catastrophe ; Monsters and fossils ; The discourse of nature -- Exchanging: The analysis of wealth ; Money and prices ; Mercantilism ; The pledge and the price ; The creation of value ; Utility ; General table ; Desire and representation -- The limits of representation: The age of history ; The measure of labour ; The organic structure of beings ; Word inflection ; Ideology and criticism ; Objective syntheses -- Labour, life, language: The new empiricities ; Ricardo ; Cuvier ; Bopp ; Language become object -- Man and his doubles: The return of language ; The place of the king ; The analytic of finitude ; The empirical and the transcendental ; The 'cogito' and the unthought ; The retreat and return of the origin ; Discourse and man's being ; The anthropological sleep -- The human science: The three faces of knowledge ; The form of the human sciences ; The three models ; History ; Psychoanalysis and ethnology ; In conclusion.

Foucault cuts across disciplines and reaches back into the seventeenth century to show how classical systems of knowledge, which linked all of nature within a great chain of being and saw 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.