By the end of his formal academic career, in the late 1970s, Nisbet considered this chance encounter with The Servile State in 1936 to be one of the most significant turning points in his professional life. Indeed, he counted The Servile State one of the five most important books he had read in his life, ranking it alongside Tocqueville’s Democracy in America; James Fitzjames Stephen’s Liberty, Equality, Fraternity; Frank Teggarts’s Processes of History; and Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. “Suffice it here to say that never again, after reading Belloc’s work, did I imagine that there could be genuine individual freedom apart from individual ownership of property.”[3] Equally important, Nisbet noted, it forced him to realize that the liberals of the twentieth-century had profoundly corrupted the vision of their nineteenth-century ancestors. Additionally, at least in the mind of Nisbet, The Servile State, along with Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Thomas More’s Utopia, Smith’s Wealth of Nations, William Graham Sumner’s The Forgotten Man, and Albert Jay Nock’s Our Enemy The State as one of the most important anti-government books of the modern West.[4]
— Read on theimaginativeconservative.org/2019/05/leviathan-inc-robert-nisbet-modern-nation-state-bradley-birzer.html