Bookchin is critical of the class-centered analysis of Marxism and simplistic anti-state forms of libertarianism and liberalism and wishes to present a more complex view of societies.

There is a strong theoretical need to contrast hierarchy with the more widespread use of the words class and State; careless use of these terms can produce a dangerous simplification of social reality.

This mentality permeates our individual psyches in a cumulative form up to the present day––not merely as capitalism but as the vast history of hierarchical society from its inception.

[4] Field wrote that Bookchin "reminds us of what humankind has been, warns us of what it is becoming, and dares us to imagine what it could be in a social structure geared to interdependence and environmental sensitivity rather than to competition and wanton destruction."

However, she criticized his account of the emergence of civilization for its reliance on the anthropologists Paul Radin and Dorothy D. Lee, and found his description of preliterate societies oversimplified and "sanitized" in its emphasis on peaceful egalitarianism.

[3] Wolfe wrote that while he was receptive to a radical critique of society, he found the book "obsessive, dogmatic and angry" and did not believe it would gain as much attention as it deserved.

He criticized Bookchin's negative attitude toward New Age views, his account of the development of modern society, and the hostile language he used to describe many authors with whom he disagreed.

[7] The anarchist author Ulrike Heider described The Ecology of Freedom as "a utopian work" in which the "social and political reality of the past, present, and future are pretty much faded out and capitalism is neither mentioned nor criticized".

He compared The Ecology of Freedom to the Marxist humanist philosopher Raya Dunayevskaya's Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution (1981).