Statistical laws apply to politics only while masses remain passive

Evidence

To deny that one can construct a sociology, understood in the sense of a science of society, that is a science of history and politics, which is not co-terminous with the philosophy of praxis itself, does not mean that one cannot build up an empirical compilation of practical observations which extend the sphere of philology as traditionally understood. If philology is the methodological expression of the importance of ascertaining and precising particular fact-in their unique and unrepeatable individuality, one cannot however exclude the practical utility of isolating certain more general “laws of tendency” corresponding in the political field to the laws of statistics or to the law of large numbers which have helped to advance various of the natural sciences. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1530

Categorization

• XREF: This distinction between philology and ‘laws of tendency’ is the methodological backbone the Islamophobia readings inherit — the refusal to reduce history to a mechanical formula recurs in Hall’s and Said’s critiques of Orientalist generalization. — connects to: Only tiny reversals of the system still mobilize the political imaginary — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 536; Statistical laws in politics presuppose mass passivity (actual or presumed). — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1530
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that statistical laws in politics lose validity once masses cease to be passive is a genuinely dense, paradigm-shifting observation about when quantitative social science is legitimate at all.