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Not to get too idealistic about it, but there was a lot of utopianism and proud technocratic ideology bouncing around intellectual circles too. Socialism through technology and industrialization. Socialism being a utopia or end-state. People really started trying to formalize societal/political/economic problems as technical problems and that was wrong. But if you were an intellectual back then, the Romanticism and that naive application of science was just part of the culture.

I'm too tired to connect this to material changes of the time, but it's there.