Comment by toyg

It's not just that, it's that the topic was extremely actual. Between the Russian Revolution and the general state of European countries at the beginning of the XX century, a lot of intellectuals were working hard on the concepts of "fully rational" societies, fair governance, social efficiency, just social order, and so on.

Somewhat ironically, what seems to have survived in the public consciousness is actually the critique of all those efforts (1984, We, etc). The Western mainstream seems to have abandoned any attempt to create a rational, enduring order from social chaos. Somehow we just accepted that things are fucked up and there is no hope of meaningfully unfuck them.