Translated from the French by A. M. Sheridan Smith. First edition in English. 8vo. [6], 245, [1] pp. Original red cloth, spine lettered in gilt, front cover decorated in black, fore and bottom edges untrimmed, dust jacket (contents clean and fresh; just a hint of faint creasing to extremitiies of jacket, a fine copy). New York, Pantheon Books, 1972.
The first English translation of Foucault’s only methodological work, an exposition of his archaeological method used implicitly in Madness and Civilization (1961), The Birth of the Clinic (1963), and The Order of Things (1966). The archaeological method is premised upon the conception that discursive formations or systems of thought and knowledge are constructed and governed by rules, beyond those of grammar and logic, that operate beneath the consciousness of individual subjects and define a system of conceptual possibilities that determines the boundaries of thought in a given domain and period.
