COMPLEXITY Life at the Edge of Chaos By Roger Lewin. Macmillan. 208 pp. $22 COMPLEXITY The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos By M. Mitchell Waldrop Simon & Schuster. 380 pp. $23 IF YOU...

If It seems I'm forever mail-ordering stuff from catalogs only tosend it back. The return forms list categories under Reason For Return. Check one: Too big. Too small. Wrong color. Wrong size. Quality. Design. I've never seen one that says, "Changed my mind" or...

Iraq's embattled prime minister compared the fight for order in Iraq to the U.S. Civil War almost 150 years ago, saying the current struggle "is perhaps even more complicated."Nouri Al-Maliki's comments in an opinion piece in Wednesday's edition of The Wall Street Journal come as...

A new squad of morality police has begun detaining Palestinians who eat or drink in public during Ramadan in the West Bank, where the Islamic month of daytime fasting was always widely observed but never imposed.The 12-member squad appears to be an attempt by President...

[Foucault's] name carried a deepening, though esoteric, resonance throughout the early sixties. But it was with "Les Mots et les Choses," published in Paris in 1966 and now published here as "The Order of Things," that Foucault assumed his current eminence. [An] honest first reading produces an almost intolerable sense of verbosity, arrogance and obscure platitude. Page after page could be the rhetoric of a somewhat weary sybil indulging in free association. Recourse to th...

Michel Foucault is one of a handful of French thinkers who have, in the last 10 years, given an entirely new direction to theoretical work in the so-called "human sciences," the study of language, literature, psychiatry, intellectual history and the like. He is best known for "The Order of Things" ("Les Mots et les choses"), a rich and controversial work in which he introduced an "archaeological" method of great originality and, I believe, importance. ...

In 1965 I translated Foucault's earlier book Madness & Civilization, a work which presented me, my editor, and the reviewers … a great many problems of diction, phrasing and even, ultimately, sense. The Order of Things, which is an echo of Foucault's undertaking to write a history of madness in the Classical age, might be said not only to present but to absent (since no names are mentioned) a great many more such problems, for whereas in the history of madness Foucault was investiga...