The archaeology of knowledge

Abstract

It would be too much to claim that the histories of thought Foucault wrote before the methodological reflections of AK were, from the beginning, part of a single coherent project. He himself remarks that it was only after finishing OT that he saw the possibility of construing the earlier works as part of a unified enterprise. But, as our discussions of the methods at work in the three books has confirmed, there is an important sense in which this series of studies gradually develops a distinctive approach to the history of thought. AK was Foucault's effort to articulate this approach in an explicit methodology.