Disciplines traditionally designated as ‘comparative’ – Comparative Literature, History, etc. – have radically called into question comparison as their apparent methodological foundation, even postulating its ‘obsolescence’. Such tendencies have also been informed and driven by the insight that the label ‘comparative’ is a legacy of the nineteenth century, when the ‘comparative method’ spread from biology and philology to other developing academic disciplines. This awareness of its roots in the peak period of colonialism and imperialism has opened ‘comparison’ itself to postcolonial critiques in these disciplines. ‘Comparison’ is no longer necessarily accepted as a timeless and ‘neutral’ methodological constant, but is rather viewed as a contextual historical phenomenon. By contrast, ‘Comparative Law’ scholars have been more hesitant to challenge that radically the role of comparison and the ‘innocence of method’ (Günter Frankenberg). This chapter explores the role that a lack of disciplinary historical self-awareness plays in this display of intellectual restraint. It interrogates, in particular, the traditional self-portrayal of Comparative Law as a ‘young’ discipline and the narrative of the famous 1900 Paris Congress as a mythical point of origin. The trope of such a ‘new beginning’ in or around 1900 insinuates a critical caesura that eclipses Comparative Law’s intellectual roots in the canon of nineteenth- century comparative disciplines, obscuring how these disciplines related to a colonial/imperialistic historical context. The chapter seeks to establish that the entanglement of our disciplinary history with that of the ‘comparative method’, that the coloniality of comparison itself is indeed an important subject in its own right. It suggests a context-sensitive recovery of the discipline’s institutional and discursive history, theoretically informed by scholarship specifically aimed at resisting ‘the mystifying amnesia of the colonial aftermath’ (Leela Gandhi).

In the past two decades comparative law scholars have rediscovered the importance of the debate on method. For a long time left in the background as a by-product of the old controversy on the epistemic status of the discipline, the ‘struggle for the methods’ has experienced a sudden revival. But does it really make sense to keep on engaging in a wearying confrontation among the various possible paradigms, once one recognizes that, as Patrick Glenn observed, ‘the history of comparative law is not one of adherence to a methodological norm but rather one of deviation and variety’? It makes sense, indeed, because ‘eclecticism’ as a theoretical perspective is itself the sign of the times and cannot strive for universal validity. Looking back at the history of comparative law, one is struck by the circumstance that throughout the formative era, the idea that obtained most credit in European intellectual circles was the opposite one, namely that ‘there is a comparative method’ (rectius: ‘Comparative Method’, as it was once written). This chapter is aimed at bringing back to light some distinctive traits of the original discourse on the ‘comparative method’ and highlighting the importance of the ‘scientific paradigm’ for the acceptance of comparative law as an autonomous subject of legal research.