Some historians consider Fitzhugh's worldview to be proto-fascist in its rejection of liberal values, defense of slavery, and perspectives toward race.

"; and that the Declaration of Independence "deserves the tumid yet appropriate epithets which Major Lee somewhere applies to the writings of Mr. Jefferson, it is, 'exhuberantly false, and arborescently fallacious.

He was something of a recluse in this home for most of his life and rarely travelled away from it for extended periods of time, spending most of his days there engaged in unguided reading from a vast library of books and pamphlets.

Of the writers in his library, Fitzhugh's beliefs were most heavily influenced by Thomas Carlyle, whom he read frequently and referenced in many of his works.

He made only one major visit to other parts of the nation in the entire antebellum period – an 1855 journey to the north where he met and argued with abolitionists Gerrit Smith and Wendell Phillips.

After the Civil War, Fitzhugh spent a short time judging for the Freedmen's Court and then retiring to Kentucky after his wife's death in 1877.

In it, he took on not only Adam Smith,[17] the foundational thinker of capitalism, but also John Locke,[18] Thomas Jefferson, and the entire liberal tradition.

France and the Northern States of our Union have alone fully and fairly tried the experiment of a social organization founded upon universal liberty and equality of rights.

In France and in our Northern States the experiment has already failed, if we are to form our opinions from the discontent of the masses, or to believe the evidence of the Socialists, Communists, Anti-Renters, and a thousand other agrarian sects that have arisen in these countries, and threaten to subvert the whole social fabric.

The leaders of these sects, at least in France, comprise within their ranks the greater number of the most cultivated and profound minds in the nation, who have made government their study.

In free society this substratum, the weak, poor and ignorant, is borne down upon and oppressed with continually increasing weight by all above.

They are driven to cities to dwell in damp and crowded cellars, and thousands are even forced to lie in the open air.

[21]Fitzhugh believed that slavery represented a lingering element of pre-liberal, or even pre-feudal social organization, and proposed the expansion of the institution of slavery to return to a pre-feudal social order of antiquity and alleviate the supposed harm caused by liberalism and capitalism: The competition among laborers to get employment begets an intestine war, more destructive than the war from above.

In the science of government and of morals, in pure metaphysics, and in all the walks of intellectual philosophy, we have been beating the air with our wings or revolving in circles, but have not advanced an inch.

Every scholar whose mind is at all imbued with ancient history and literature, sees that Greece and Rome were indebted to this institution alone for the taste, the leisure and the means to cultivate their heads and their hearts.

He is an enemy to himself, and an intolerable pest and nuisance to society, where ever among the whites he is free [...] it is the right and duty of the State to enslave them, because experience has clearly proved that it is the only practicable mode of governing them.

"[25] While he subscribed to many of the racist views towards black people which were common among anti-abolitionists at the time, he did criticize the racial pseudo-scientific theories proposed by Josiah C. Nott in his book The Types of Mankind.

Both the book's title and its subtitle were phrases taken from the writing of Thomas Carlyle, the Scottish social critic and a great hero to Fitzhugh's generation of proslavery thinkers.

[27] The aim of his book, Fitzhugh claimed, was to show that "the unrestricted exploitation of so-called free society is more oppressive to the laborer than domestic slavery.

The order and subordination observable in the physical, animal and human world, show that some are formed for higher, others for lower stations—the few to command, the many to obey.

"[32]Regarding the question of who should be free and who should be enslaved, Fitzhugh wrote: Whilst, as a general and abstract question, negro slavery has no other claims over other forms of slavery, except that from inferiority, or rather peculiarity, of race, almost all negroes require masters, whilst only the children, the women, the very weak, poor, and ignorant, &c., among the whites, need some protective and governing relation of this kind; yet as a subject of temporary, but world-wide importance, negro slavery has become the most necessary of all human institutions.

The serfs of Russia, Poland, Turkey, and Hungary, are happier and better provided for than the free laborers of Western Europe.

The women, the children, the negroes, and but few of the non-property holders were consulted, or consented to the Revolution, or the governments that ensued from its success.

[39]George Fitzhugh was among a cadre of Southern intellectuals who advocated for a universal slavery which included the white race.

[40] Fitzhugh's contempt for wage labor and laissez-faire capitalism are themes which dominated his Failure of Free Society and Cannibals All!

The results of free labor alienated the working class and therefore, produced movements for socialism, abolitionism, and feminism.

As a solution, Fitzhugh advocated for extending the paternalistic relationship of the plantation system to encompass lower class whites.

[41] Fitzhugh postulated slavery as a humane alternative for both black and white laborers that would rectify the evils in laissez-faire capitalism.

[46] Fitzhugh differed from his peers in promoting absolute power at the expense of the slave master class' rights.