"As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end"
About this Quote
A polite way to detonate the human ego: Foucault treats "man" not as a timeless fact but as a historically produced category, a conceptual gadget assembled under specific conditions. The provocation lands because it refuses the comforting story that human nature sits outside history, patiently waiting to be described. Instead, "archaeology" signals his method: dig through the layers of what a culture takes as obvious and you find not eternal truths, but shifts in the rules that make certain kinds of knowledge possible.
"Man is an invention of recent date" targets the modern figure of "Man" born with Enlightenment humanism and the rise of the human sciences - the idea that there is a stable subject who can be measured, explained, normalized, and improved. That capital-M "Man" is less a person than a diagram: a center point that lets institutions (schools, clinics, prisons, bureaucracies) claim authority by speaking in the name of what humans are.
The second sentence sharpens into a warning and a taunt. If "man" was made, "man" can be unmade. Foucault is gesturing at an epistemic turnover: the frameworks that produced the modern subject are fragile, and new arrangements of language, power, and knowledge could dissolve the very self-image that props up liberal morality and scientific confidence.
Context matters: writing in the wake of structuralism and amid postwar suspicion of grand narratives, Foucault isn’t predicting human extinction. He’s forecasting the end of a particular supremacy - the era where "the human" is the unquestioned measure of meaning. The sting is that our most flattering mirror may be a historical accident.
"Man is an invention of recent date" targets the modern figure of "Man" born with Enlightenment humanism and the rise of the human sciences - the idea that there is a stable subject who can be measured, explained, normalized, and improved. That capital-M "Man" is less a person than a diagram: a center point that lets institutions (schools, clinics, prisons, bureaucracies) claim authority by speaking in the name of what humans are.
The second sentence sharpens into a warning and a taunt. If "man" was made, "man" can be unmade. Foucault is gesturing at an epistemic turnover: the frameworks that produced the modern subject are fragile, and new arrangements of language, power, and knowledge could dissolve the very self-image that props up liberal morality and scientific confidence.
Context matters: writing in the wake of structuralism and amid postwar suspicion of grand narratives, Foucault isn’t predicting human extinction. He’s forecasting the end of a particular supremacy - the era where "the human" is the unquestioned measure of meaning. The sting is that our most flattering mirror may be a historical accident.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
|---|---|
| Source | The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, Michel Foucault, 1966 (English trans. Alan Sheridan, 1970) — famous closing line: "Man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end." |
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