Or, in the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald, As the moon rose higher, the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that once flowered for Dutch sailors' eyes, a fresh green breast of the new world.

Economists, political theorists, moral and political philosophers, sociologists, and even the general public rapidly took notice of what seemed like and indeed was a devastating result. Two centuries after visions of social rationality flowered in Enlightenment thinking, the project suddenly seemed, at least superficially, to be inescapably doomed.