Ritter presents traditional Anglo-Saxon thinking about power, which depends on an ineffective legalism, as inferior to "continental" thinking, based on an understanding of the ultimate necessity of some form of violence. The historian Gregory Weeks commented that it is hard to tell how much of "Machstaat und Utopie" was material inserted to allow the book to be passed by the censors, and how much was the expression of Ritter's own beliefs. Weeks has argued that if Ritter was no Nazi, certainly he was a German nationalist who wished to see Germany as the world's great power. Ritter appeared to disavow part of his original work of 1940 by the addition of a footnote to the third edition of "Machstaat und Utopie" published in 1943. There Ritter praised More for his understanding of "the demoniacal forces of power" against which More had appealed to the strength of Christian morality; hence, More rightly did not reduce all politics to a "friend-foe" mentality. The historian Klaus Schwabe observes that Ritter's disapproval of the term "friend-foe" was a not-so-veiled criticism of Carl Schmitt, who had popularized the term a decade before (Schmitt had supported the Nazi regime). Thus Ritter's criticism indirectly pointed at such "Nazi" "forces of power". During World War II, Ritter became involved in work on a study of civilian-military relations in Germany from the 18th century to the 20th century. The original intent behind this work was to offer a critique of the "total war" philosophy of General Erich Ludendorff as a form of indirect protest against the Third Reich. Censorship prevented the book from being published during the war and, after 1945, Ritter revised his work to publish it as a four-volume study of German militarism. Ritter was involved in the 20 July 1944 Stauffenberg assassination plot. He was one of the few conspirators not liquidated by the Nazis. His friend and political associate, Carl Goerdeler, was slated to become the new Chancellor under a post-Nazi regime. If the coup had succeeded, the plotters planned to bargain with the Allies that Germany keep territories in Eastern Europe, then in the path of the Soviet counter-invasion. Goerdeler was executed by the Nazis in 1945. Ritter, who also belonged to the conservative German opposition to the Nazis, was imprisoned in late 1944 for the rest of the war.