consider the roster of his contemporaries: Saint-Simon (1760–1825), Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865), and Karl Marx (1818–1883), each the source of a different version of socialism. Everyone in this post-Enlightenment moment was longing for the aurea mediocritas, the golden mean: in wealth, height, weight, and so on. This longing contains some element of wishful thinking mixed with a great deal of harmony and … Platonicity.
