In 1913, on the eve of World War I, the French poet and socialist Charles Péguy wrote: “The world has changed less since the time of Jesus Christ than it has in the last 30 years.”

In the space of those three decades or so, Thomas Edison had lit up the night with his incandescent filament light bulb where, previously, expensive candles, whale oil, or gas had only pricked at the darkness. Through the sound recording of the phonograph, Edison also delivered what the late Australian art critic Robert Hughes in his sweeping documentary history of modernism in art, The Shock of the New, called “the most radical extension of cultural memory since the printed book.” The Lumière brothers had given us the movie camera; Guglielmo Marconi the wireless telegraph or, as we know it, the radio; Étienne Lenoir and Nicolaus Otto the internal combustion engine; and Rudolf Diesel his eponymous version of that device. Marie Curie had discovered radioactivity; Louis Pasteur’s pasteurization had led to the discovery of viruses and Robert Koch’s proofs of the germ theory of disease; Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch’s process for synthetic production of ammonia in essence made “Brot aus Luft” — food out of the air, which would go on to feed billions. And the Wright Brothers had made real the miracle of which our species had been dreaming since the myths of Daedalus and Icarus: human flight.

In this incredibly brief period, the telephone, the first battery, the first plastics, the vacuum cleaner, refrigeration, the tractor, the fountain pen and ballpoint pen, even toilet paper and the bra, and so many other inventions and discoveries arrived that radically enhanced the human condition — or at least the condition of a certain number of humans. Péguy’s awe at what had occurred in a mere three decades echoes Karl Marx’s own marveling at what capitalism had unleashed already by 1848. It is sometimes forgotten of late, but the Communist Manifesto did not just critique this economic system. The pamphlet also issued a paean to its revolutionary capacity more laudatory than even the hosannas of a Friedmanite or Objectivist: