Economic laws of tendency operate historicistly, not as naturalistic determinisms.

Evidence

(It should be said that these are laws of tendency which are not laws in the naturalistic sense or that of speculative determinism, but in a “historicist” sense, valid, that is, to the extent that there exists the “determined market” or in other words an environment which is organically alive and interconnected in its movements of development. Economics studies these laws of tendency in so far as they are quantitative expressions of phenomena; in the passage from economics to general history the concept of quantity is integrated with that of quality and of the dialectic quality-that-becomes-quality). — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1422

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes historicist laws of tendency from naturalistic or speculative determinist laws, a central scaffolding concept.
• XREF: Parallels the historicist-vs-naturalist split that underpins how the Islamophobia field treats contingent, context-bound social phenomena rather than eternal essences. — connects to: The law of value is more evident to experience than positivistic science admits — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 932; Historical necessity is a feeling produced by dialectical understanding, not an ontological determinism. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 709; Economic ‘natural experiments’ depend on prior policy programs, not nature — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1985