Approach to a Quantitative Description of Social Systems Based on Thermodynamic Formalism

Certain statistical aspects of social systems are described by appropriately defined quantities named social potentials. Relations between social potentials are postulated by drawing an analogy with thermodynamics relations between thermodynamic potentials, thus obtaining a toy model of some of the statistical properties of social systems. Within this model, an interpretation of a socially relevant acting (acting as opposed to action, see ref. [1]) that does not invoke structural changes in social systems, is given in terms of social po-