Part II, "The Solution of Classical Democracy", is Wolff's account of democratic liberalism, the dominant political structure of the late 20th century.

Wolff argues that consensus is limited by the requirement that participants are generally rational and altruistic, and that the community in question is not too large.

The book was well received not only in academic philosophy and in traditional anarchist circles, but also by anarcho-capitalists such as Murray Rothbard, whose letters of praise "chagrined" Wolff, who was shocked to have a position that was consonant to those he thought of as "right-wingers".

[3] Wolff's premising of "the State" and the "autonomous individual" as fixed, given entities has been criticised by Thomas Martin in Social Anarchism as reflecting "basic assumptions arising from Renaissance humanism, Enlightenment liberalism, and the alliance of capitalism and central authority that has marked the industrial era.

In Wolff's later work, The autonomy of reason; a commentary on Kant's Groundwork of the metaphysic of morals, he mentioned that his views had been revised considerably as a result of criticisms that he received from a student, Andrej Rapacznski, at Colombia University in the late 1960s.