Hamowy was closely associated with the political ideology of libertarianism and his writings and scholarship place particular emphasis on individual liberty and the limits of state action in a free society.
He returned to the United States in 1968 to become an instructor and later assistant director of the History of Western Civilization Program at Stanford University.
Hamowy is best understood as the product of a unique scholarly era in America that was heavily influenced by thinkers immersed in the continental style, many of whom arrived, directly or indirectly, from Europe to the United States from the 1930s to the 1950s.
At about the same time, he also began to attend open seminars and lectures offered by the controversial libertarian Austrian economist Von Mises, who had also arrived in America in the 1940s.
Mises greatly influenced a generation of American thinkers in addition to Hamowy including Ralph Raico, Leonard Liggio, George Reisman, Israel Kirzner, and Rothbard.
Hayek had a substantial impact on the Committee on Social Thought and Hamowy's intellectual development as a free market scholar.
Despite the breadth of Hamowy's political and social thought, there were streams of particular emphasis that were discernible to his students at Alberta and are emphasized in his scholarship.
That refers to the notion that important and complex social arrangements can arise through the spontaneous actions of countless individuals rather than from deliberate choice or central planning.