Abstract
The present essay aims to contribute to the contemporary debate on what the most appropriate approach for political historiography is. In it, three approaches are outlined as the most influential and widespread today: philosophico-methodological historicism, contextualism, and the paradigmatic approach. The paradigmatic approach is investigated with respect to its nature, contents and heuristic parameters, and the legitimacy of its application is explained. The defining feature of this approach is that it presents the development of political thought as a progressive three-stage dialectical and logical process of “overcoming” the “outdated” and establishing new paradigms. The implementation of the paradigmatic approach in political historiography allows the coming of new political doctrines to be seen as the expression of the requirements set by the existing political paradigm in a given historical period and not as the effect of chance or divine inspiration.
Highlights
The present essay aims to contribute to the contemporary debate on which approach is most appropriate for political historiography
The most influential and most widespread approaches in contemporary political historiography may be classified into three categories: philosophico-methodological historicism, contextualism, and the paradigmatic approach
What is crucial in this notion of political paradigms is the unity of meaning and dynamics inherent in them, making it essentially different from the existing concepts, which accept the possibility of applying the paradigmatic approach to the humanities
Summary
The present essay aims to contribute to the contemporary debate on which approach is most appropriate for political historiography. The view of historiography as a “reconstruction” is the most widespread and, at the same time, the one most contested in philosophico-methodological literature.11 The reason for this is the fact that a “reconstruction” of the doctrines of the past presupposes, on the one hand, that the scholar approaches the historical process in such a way as to guarantee the logical coherency of the reconstruction proposed.
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