That is weird, but far more insulting is the implication that Foucault or his followers were arrogant or oblivious to the complexities and difficulties of his own project. As you mention, Foucault was probably his most forceful and most unrelenting critic, something that is recognized even by many of his (reasonable) intellectual rivals. Take this passage from G.E.R. Lloyd’s 1986 review of volume 2 of the History of Sexuality. Now, Lloyd’s review is generally *negative,* but this doesn’t stop him from noting Foucault’s disarming “capacity for self-criticism.” Indeed, Lloyd thinks that “so far as the methodology of his investigations goes, he had probably been his own most unsparing critic.” Moreover, Lloyd correctly notes that there is virtually no book or subject matter that does not go through a very public display of self-criticism:

“Thus the introduction to The Archaeology of Knowledge devotes several pages to a radical critique of Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, and The Order of Things, criticizing the last of these, for example, on the grounds that at the stage at which it was written he had not made fully explicit the methodology on which the study of the subjects it investigated had to be based. Indeed, what passes for a conclusion to The Archaeology of Knowledge takes the form of an imaginary dialogue in which the very possibility of the investigation it attempts is questioned.”

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/5180

In other words Scull’s criticism of Foucault’s work is not only out of context, it is also relatively tame when compared with the questions that Foucault posed to himself. Worse, Scull’s critique becomes even tamer when one takes into account the fact that it is 2007, and Scull’s inane observations are still premised on the notion that the youthful, 1960s Foucault represents a potential future “threat” to historians, philosophers, and truth-seekers everywhere.