[3][6] Chartier advocates for a variant of natural law thinking, which he has employed in discussions of anarchism, economic life,[7] and the moral status and claims of non-human animals.

[9] Kevin Carson's work, in particular, provided a model for Chartier's reconciliation of his leftist politics with opposition to the state, and helped him to combine left-libertarian market anarchism with insights from natural law theory.

"[12] Aeon Skoble of Bridgewater State University suggested in a Reason review that Chartier's "arguments [in the book] are laid out with such elegance and precision that any intelligent lay reader should be able to understand them."

The book is thus valuable not only for offering a robust defense of polycentrism, but for doing so in a way that ties together two important threads from the liberal tradition, natural law and spontaneous order, and in doing so, enhances our understanding of both.

[18] The book was the focus of a Molinari Society session at the April 2011 San Diego convention of the American Philosophical Association's Pacific Division.

In the course of a tepidly favorable assessment, Timothy Gorringe maintained that some passages disposed him to "reach for the whiskey bottle," though he also observed that the book did "not parade its erudition" and suggested that it was "consistently on the side of the angels.

Ballard evaluated the book's "style of presentation" as "remarkably lucid and jargon free" and as "spare, simple, direct and logical, cutting to the heart of a discussion.