Human will makes deterministic social science impossible and science itself political

Evidence

If it is true that man cannot be conceived of except as historically determined man—i.e. man who has developed, and who lives, in certain conditions, in a particular social complex or totality of social relations—is it then possible to take sociology as meaning simply the study of these conditions and the laws which regulate their development? Since the will and initiative of men themselves cannot be left out of account, this notion must be false. The problem of what “science” itself is has to be posed. Is not science itself “political activity” and political thought, in as much as it transforms men, and makes them different from what they were before? — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 916

Categorization

• XREF: ‘Science as political activity that transforms men’ connects forward to the Islamophobia field’s critique of the claimed neutrality of research on Muslims — the epistemological stance these later readings assume.