This study is equally based on a seminar dedicated to methological problems and social history of the political ideas and on a work in progress about the social history of the french structuralism. First of all, it analyzes the different academic assumptions of historians and political scientists upon social history of ideas. Then, the article crosses through epistemological resources provided by the “Cambridge School”, and mainly by Quentin Skinner. His study of the political thought is very helpful to interpret texts without “mythologies” (“mythology of doctrines”, “mythology of prolepsis”, “mythology of coherence”) and to learn to look at a wide range of texts or pieces of art (books, great or not, libels but also plays, frontispieces or frescoes and so on). But, considering his writings are grounded on Austin’s and Wittgenstein’s philosophies of language and are very heuristic to interpret without any anachronism a political theory, they do not attach to its social explanations. So the article explores two complementary approches. The first one offers to study the link between crises and political ideas, as Tackett did to understand the radicalization of the french deputies, or the increasing of republicanism when King Louis XVI fled the revolution and was arrested at Varennes. The second one will provide a sociological study of all the producers of political ideas (authors, publishers, critics, journalists, political parties, readers... and so on). The concept of “field” (Bourdieu) or the numerous factors of law in Max Weber’s theory are important helpers to escape mechanistic determinism. At the end, we will compare Howard S. Becker’s “art worlds” with political ideas. The purpose is to be sensitive to the collective dimension of these ideas and to the effects of this collective dimension on ideas’contents.