Postmodern ideas’ acceptance, not their content, is what needs materialist explanation

Evidence

Let me, before continuing, make one point clear. I do not claim that, say, Foucault’s philosophy or Rushdie’s fiction is in any very direct sense to be derived from the economic and political developments discussed above. I am rather concerned to explain here the acceptance by quite large numbers of people of certain ideas. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 617

Categorization

• DEFINE: Draws the crucial methodological distinction between explaining the genesis of an idea and explaining the social conditions of its reception — a precise move that bounds the materialist claim.
• XREF: connects to: Materialist and ideational explanations of neoliberalism’s endurance are complementary, not rival — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 14; Capitalist realism requires materialist explanation, not individual psychology — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1644; Postmodernists enabled misuse of their ideas by retreating into subtlety — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 249