Abstract
The article investigates the methodological debates that took place during the institutionalization process of the Italian Political Science in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto aspired for a scientific knowledge of the policy to be built in correspondence to natural sciences practices. Mosca strongly advocated for a historical method that would find the psychological forces inside the institutions that could guarantee the regularity of the political phenomena. Pareto advocated a logical-experimental method in which abstract propositions (principles) condense the common features of many facts apprehended through experience. Both projects, however, did not distinguish precisely observation, experiment and experience. For this reason, their methodologies were not able to go beyond the hegemonic political study techniques of their time.
Keywords:
history of political science; experimental method; Gaetano Mosca; Vilfredo Pareto