The archaeology of knowledge

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.