A bestseller’s political analysis can interest a minority while its lifestyle vision sells

Evidence

The fact that Firestone’s book was a bestseller, a Bantam paperback with multiple printings, is indicative of its postmodern elements: despite the fact that its analysis of patriarchy and calls for total revolution, which occupy most of the book, would interest only a small minority of its readers, Firestone’s ideas about the future of gender, sex, sexuality, the family, and, most important, the lifestyles indicated by these insights spoke to the shifts already under way in Western cultures/societies, shifts that produced and were produced by postmodernity. The fact that this book was until very recently out of print for many years indicates, I would argue, both the extent to which the radical utopian revolutionary moment it bespeaks and represents is superseded, and also the extent to which its postmodern programs have become commonplace. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 871

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: A single popular book could crystallize a scattered intellectual network into a movement — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 166; Consumption practices have replaced political conviction as ideology — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 853

Broader Connections

• A single popular book could crystallize a scattered intellectual network into a movement #corroborates (0.75) — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 166
• Consumption practices have replaced political conviction as ideology #expands (0.72) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 853