In his most influential book, "In Defense of Freedom", freedom was defined in what Isaiah Berlin would label "negative" terms as the minimization of the use of coercion by the state in its essential role of preventing one person's freedom from intruding upon another's. While left-utopianism was considered the immediate threat to the survival of this freedom, Meyer aimed at a "New Conservatism" as the principle protagonist against liberty from the right in his day. This new conservatism viewed society as an organism whose agent was the national government rather than the states or private entities. The new conservatives were less statist than the left and even rhetorically supported freedom, but it was a freedom defined as an end rather than a means, with Meyer using Clinton Rossiter's 1955 definition of positive freedom in his "Conservatism in America" as his major foil.