Six Methodological Fallacies in the Study of the History of Political Thought

This paper examines six methodological myths, which animates a wide range of fallacies in the study of the history of political thought. “The reduction of social facts to language representations” and “the reduction of the relations among politico-intellectual facts to family resemblance and language games” are the first two myths, which I try to discuss and bust in this paper. They stem from an unwarranted generalization of Wittgenstein’s ideas regarding philosophical statements and metaphysical claims to scientific (theoretical and experimental) statements. The next four myths are those, which Skinner pioneered in introducing and critically examining—i.e., “the myth of anachronism”, “the myth of reification”, “the myth of coherence” and “the myth of prolepsis”. In the Introduction, I discuss some theoretical basis for this methodological critique to the study of the history of political thought. Afterwards, in the first two parts of the paper, the two Wittgensteinian fallacies will be examined separately through a close reading of the ideas he developed in the two phases of his intellectual life. The four Skinnerian fallacies will be examined through four sections under the third part of the paper. Setting forth an overall review of the debates, which have taken shape around the six introduced fallacies, I conclude the paper with an evaluation of the relations between the Wittgenstein-inspired methodological myths and those discovered by Skinner given the fact that Skinner’s ideas regarding the methodology of the study of the history of political thought were partly under the influence of Wittgenstein’s philosophical ideas.