Apelidado de "Forgotten Man of the Right" e "a man who helped shape the Right's intellectual response to the triumph of FDR's welfare-warfare State." e numa breve caracterização:
"To follow Nock, what traits must a man of the Right have?
He must be both fiercely independent and believe in the power of social authority; he must love tradition but hate the State and everything it does; he must believe in radical freedom while never doubting the immutability of human nature and natural laws; he must be anti-materialist in his own life while defending economic freedom without compromise; he must be an elitist and anti-democrat yet despise elites who hold illicit power; and he must be realistic about the dim prospects for change while still retaining a strong sense of hope and enthusiasm for life. "
Algumas passagens do seu texto Our Enemy, the State:
* The historical method, moreover, establishes the important fact that, as in the case of tabetic or parasitic diseases, the depletion of social power by the State can not be checked after a certain point of progress is passed. History does not show an instance where, once beyond this point, this depletion has not ended in a complete and permanent collapse.
* The common view of Mr. Jefferson as a doctrinaire believer in the stark principle of "states' rights" is most incompetent and misleading. He believed in states' rights, assuredly, but he went much farther; states' rights were only an incident in his general system of political organization. He believed that the ultimate political unit, the repository and source of political authority and initiative, should be the smallest unit; not the federal unit, state unit or county unit, but the township, or, as he called it, the "ward." The township, and the township only, should determine the delegation of power upwards to the county, the state, and the federal units. His system of extreme decentralization is interesting and perhaps worth a moment's examination, because if the idea of the State is ever displaced by the idea of government, it seems probable that the practical expression of this idea would come out very nearly in that form.23
* The secret of freedom will be found in the individual "making himself the depository of the powers respecting himself, so far as he is competent to them, and delegating only what is beyond his competence, by a synthetical process, to higher and higher orders of functionaries, so as to trust fewer and fewer powers in proportion as the trustees become more and more oligarchical."
* Locke himself, whom we have seen putting the natural rights of property so high above those of life and liberty, was equally discriminating in his view of popular sovereignty. He was no believer in what he called "a numerous democracy," and did not contemplate a political organization that should countenance anything of the kind.27
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