The most important place to begin placing Meyer in context is his article "Western Civilization: The Problem of Political Freedom," which closed his 1996 "In Defense of Freedom and Related Essays". As a thinker in what F. A. Hayek called the "critical rationalist" philosophical school, which is more empirical than the "constructivist rationalism" of "a priori" deductivism, Meyer's understanding of world history is central to his philosophy. Meyer's essential argument is explicitly based upon the philosopher Eric Voegelin's multivolume "Order and History" that all world history until more modern times was composed of "cosmological" societies that unified all social activity under one controlling myth subsuming society and the state into one common understanding and power monism. Meyer labeled the societies "tightly unified" in their mores, culture, economies, religion, and government by suppressing all contradictory understandings.