The article examines the issues of the development of historiographical studies of political and legal doctrines from the point of view of clarifying the role and significance of the relevant results in modern legal science, as well as the problems of improving the methodological foundations of the formation of the Russian historiographical model of political and legal knowledge. The study shows that the lack of developed and consistent models of historiography of political and legal doctrines in foreign and domestic legal literature is associated with certain interpretations of historical knowledge and cognitive principles, the rejection of historicism in the social sciences, which was established and spread especially in the twentieth century in Western European literature, the undeveloped types of development of national literatures covering the issues of origin and development of political and legal knowledge. In terms of improving approaches to historiographical research of political and legal knowledge, the possibilities of a deeper study of the influence of socio-religious consciousness, genre features, plots and means of expression, linguistic characteristics of the works of scientists and other studied texts are indicated. In the methodological direction, an important role can be played by referring to the constructs formed in the Russian philosophical literature, in particular the works of P. A. Florensky.