Materialism polemically named any thought excluding transcendence.

Evidence

The term “materialism” in the first fifty years of the nineteenth century should be understood not only in its restricted technical philosophical sense but with the more extended meaning that it acquired polemically in the debates that grew up in Europe with the rise and victorious development of modern culture. The name materialism was given to any philosophical doctrine which excluded transcendence from the realm of thought. It was given therefore, not only to pantheism and immanentism, but to any practical attitude inspired by political realism-i. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1612

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains the polemical, extended nineteenth-century meaning of ‘materialism’ as any doctrine that excludes transcendence and embraces political realism.
• XREF: The observation that a philosophical label accumulates polemical baggage beyond its technical sense parallels Millgram’s point on how terminology vs substance get confused — and will matter for carrying concepts into Islamophobia discourse where terms like ‘Islamophobia’ itself carry contested polemical loads.