History can redirect itself by covert means despite the vagaries of human wills.

Evidence

In Vico’s Scienza Nuova , Divine Providence, which is conceived as an immanent rather than a transcendental force and is broadly identifiable with Reason or History in later idealist writers, is seen as capable of overriding the contingent vagaries of human wills and redirecting the path of history by covert means. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2419

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains Vico’s ‘cunning of Providence’ as an immanent, not transcendental, force — the conceptual ancestor of Hegelian ‘cunning of reason’. Glossary material.
• XREF: This is the intellectual lineage behind Gramsci’s own ‘cunning’ of history and behind ideology-as-naturalized-common-sense in Islamophobia scholarship; connects to Hall’s ‘common sense’ and to Orientalism’s self-reproducing logic.