[5] Latter-Day Pamphlets is, at its core, a rebuke of democracy, "the grand, alarming, imminent, and indisputable Reality" of the time,[6] rooted in Carlyle's two basic principles of immutable order and eternal laws.

[8]Carlyle called the Pamphlets "Carlylese 'Tracts for the Times,'" referring to the writings of John Henry Newman and the Oxford Movement.

The comparison is apt, as Carlyle's polemical style and his search for an authoritative center of life share many similarities with the movement.

[10] The pamphlet expresses a central theme of the book — the corrosive effects of populist politics and of a culture driven by greed.

The imaginary figure of "Bobus", a corrupt sausage-maker turned politician first introduced in Past and Present, is used to epitomise the ways in which modern commercial culture saps the morality of society.

Carlyle's biographer David Alec Wilson wrote that since the "letters of Junius, nothing so sensational in politics had been printed in England".

[16] Karl Marx would later attack Carlyle's "model prisons" and "aristocracy of talent" in two articles for the New York Daily Tribune, appearing in September and October 1853 respectively.

"[21] Carlyle's arguments against the attempt to "reform society through the exclusive mechanism of the ballot-box" impacted Ruskin, John Stuart Mill, and Charles Kingsley, who equally denounced the folly of the "mere brute 'arithmocracy.

They have begotten, with a rapidity beyond recorded example, Eighteen Millions of the greatest bores ever seen in this world before:—that, hitherto, is their feat in History!

"[26] In his painting Work, inspired by the book, Ford Madox Brown depicted Carlyle watching honest workers improving the social infrastructure by laying modern drains in a suburb of London, while agents of the dishonest Bobus disfigure the area by marketing his political campaign with posters and sandwich boards.

[27] Richard Wagner wrote in "Letter to H. v. Stein" (1883), "Carlyle has plainly proved to us the natural relation of all Colonies to their mother-land", referring to The New Downing Street.