Implementing and refining the critical-historical method termed ‘archaeology’, developed in his work on medicine, Foucault turns in 1966 to a consideration of the underlying intellectual conditions that produced the modern disciplines known as the human sciences. Having studied the rupture ‘that every society finds itself obliged to make’ between reason and madness, Foucault now claimed that he wished ‘to write a history of order’ (EW ii, p. 261), elsewhere formulated as a ‘history of resemblances’ (OT, p. ⅹⅹⅵ). This history of order and resemblances came in two parts: Les Mots et les choses (The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences), published in 1966, and The Archaeology of Knowledge, published three years later.

In an interview about The Order of Things, Foucault defines his refined archaeological method in the following terms: