Abstract
The historian of culture Thomas Kuhn in his book on The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published in 1962, shows that, because of the implicit characteristics of their objects, the social sciences struggle to identify with the single paradigm of a shared global vision of the scientific community’s disciplinary matrix. Most of them are stalled at the pre-paradigmatic stage of the “schools” which are distinguished by their methodological perspective and orientation. Notwithstanding this, scholars have tried to develop cultural perspectives and scientific models in an attempt to contribute to the formation of paradigms, which however are only recognised for a short period by a large proportion of the international sociological and political community. First of all, we are referring to the tendency expressed by “behaviourism”, which first developed in psychology and only later in the sociological disciplines. It was a true epistemological revolution which gave rise to various approaches, from the systemic perspective to structural functionalism, through to the elaborations of scholars who identified with the variegated world of theories of action, all attributable to a certain methodological individualism. In this chapter, we will try to retrace the parameters and the salient features of these approaches to the study of political phenomena. At the end we will devote a specific section to neo-institutionalism, which has profoundly influenced sociological-political research in the last few decades.
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de Nardis, F. (2020). Understanding Political Sociology. In: Understanding Politics and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37760-1_3
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