Readers of Foucault are likely to question the value of his work on at least three levels. First, alternatively befogged by the tortuous opacities of his prose and dazzled by the seeming gratuitousness of his audacious claims, they may well ask if there is anything at all here worth their while. Do his writings, beneath all the fireworks and attendant billows of smoke, in fact express a position of sufficient clarity, plausibility, and interest to merit sustained attention? The preceding chapters represent my own effort to provide an affirmative answer to this question. By careful analysis of all the major books Foucault wrote through the 1960s, I have tried to show that they do express a coherent and challenging approach to the history of Western thought. The next sort of question likely to confront Foucault's readers is that of his historical accuracy. Here an adequate response would require detailed specialist investigations beyond both the scope of this book and the competence of its author. However, I have offered a general framework for the historical evaluation of Foucault's work, based on a distinction of the levels of specific history, constructive history, and critical history. Moreover, I have discussed some typical difficulties raised by historians concerning the first two levels and have offered fuller evaluations of the critical history of FD and OT. My tentative overall assessment is that, at all levels, Foucault's history is sufficiently responsible and challenging to be worth serious attention, but it is also often greatly oversimplified and lacking in evidential support.