Human nature is the totality of historically determined social relations

Evidence

The basic innovation introduced by the philosophy of praxis into the science of politics and of history is the demonstration that there is no abstract “human nature”, fixed and immutable (a concept which certainly derives from religious and transcendentalist thought), but that human nature is the totality of historically determined social relations, hence an historical fact which can, within certain limits, be ascertained with the methods of philology and criticism. Consequently political science, as far as both its concrete content and its logical formulation are concerned, must be seen as a developing organism. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 617

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gramsci’s anti-essentialist definition of human nature — the anti-foundational building block beneath all construction-of-the-Other theory.