Nowadays, the very title of the essay may seem strange to many modern American readers. The "right thing?" Surely, the right thing is just "doing your own thing."

Even in 1924, Nock explained that the notion of "doing the right thing" was not present in the thinking of many Americans, though he thought it was still widely prevalent in the minds of many British. Having spent some time in London, he noticed the number of times the phrase, "doing the right thing," was used and repeated by people going about their everyday affairs. This was observed by Nock regardless of whether the people saying it were members of the working or middle class or among the upper elite.

"A dozen times a day one will hear Englishmen mutter in an apologetic tone," Nock said, "Beastly bore, you know! — oh, dev'lish bore! — but then, you know, one really must do the Right Thing, mustn't one?'" Nock immediately saw a connection between this notion of doing the right thing and the idea of individual liberty. In fact, doing the right thing, he said, only had relevance and reality in an environment of extensive personal and economic freedom.

Freedom and three arenas of life

Nock distinguished between three arenas of human conduct. The first was that area of a person's life most directly influenced by government. There, the actions of the individual are constrained by the necessity to follow what the law proscribes, such things as not killing, stealing from, or defrauding others. That is, the negative constraints of a properly limited government.