Sociological laws are tautologies duplicating observed facts rather than real causes

Evidence

The so-called laws of sociology which are assumed as laws of causation (such-and-such a fact occurs because of such-and-such a law, etc.) have no causal value: they are almost always tautologies and paralogisms. Usually they are no more than a duplicate of the observed fact itself. A fact or a series of facts is described according to a mechanical process of abstract generalisation, a relationship of similarity is derived from this and given the title of law and the law is then assumed to have causal value. But what novelty is there in that? The only novelty is the collective name given to a series of petty facts, but names are not an innovation. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1533

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the toolkit’s interest in how pseudo-explanatory ‘laws’ (as in racist or civilizational ‘laws’ later deployed in Islamophobia discourse) operate as reified generalizations that smuggle causal weight.
• DEFINE: Defines Gramsci’s charge of tautological/paralogistic generalizing in sociological law-claims, a diagnosis later thinkers apply to ideology.