Every human collectivity has its own specific optimum principle of fixed proportions.

Evidence

This theorem can usefully be employed to clarify—and to bring out the general applicability of—many propositions concerning the science of organisations (the study of the administrative apparatus, of demographic composition, etc.) and also concerning general politics (in analyses of situations or of relations of force, in the problem of the intellectuals, etc.). Of course it must always be borne in mind that a recourse to the theory of fixed proportions has only a schematic and metaphoric value. In other words, it cannot be applied mechanically, since in human collectivities the qualitative element (or that of the technical and intellectual capacity of the individual components) is predominant, and this cannot be measured mathematically. Hence one may say that every human collectivity has its own specific optimum principle of fixed proportions. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 781

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the ‘fixed proportions’ theorem as Gramsci’s borrowed framework for analyzing organizational and political structure, with the crucial caveat that it is schematic and metaphorical, never mechanical.