[Deleting the State: Requiem for an Illusion by Aeon J. Skoble (Independent Institute, 2026; xiii +134pp.)]
Deleting the State was originally published in 2008, and I reviewed it shortly thereafter, but its welcome reappearance offers me a chance to redress an injustice. In my earlier review, I concentrated on a difference of interpretation with Skoble over Robert Nozick’s derivation of the minimal state in Anarchy, State, and Utopia and as a result did not do justice to the book’s main arguments. (Skoble is kind enough to refer to that difference of interpretation in the “Afterword” to the present edition of the book).
Libertarian philosophers are rare among analytic philosophers, and to find one who rejects the minimal state is indeed unusual. But Skoble is the genuine article: he has been a distinguished professor of philosophy at Bridgewater State University for many years.
The present edition of Deleting the State consists of a preface to the second edition, the text of the book—reprinted unchanged from the first edition, and an afterword to the second edition. In what follows, I’ll comment on some points of interest.
The principal object of the book is to examine this argument:
1. If it’s good for people to be free, then political authority is illegitimate.
2. It is good for people to be free.
3. So, political authority is illegitimate.
By his emphasis on political authority, Skoble wishes to emphasize that he is not committed to the denial of other sorts of authority, such as a teacher’s authority over his students or parents’ authority over their children.
In what way does this argument put pressure on minimal state libertarians? It does so because they acknowledge that political authority is bad because it coerces people, but they support it anyway. They do not deny that coercion is bad and that political authority rests on coercion—if, for example, you refuse to pay your taxes, agents of the government will force you to do so—but they think that they have to support political authority in spite of this, because otherwise, society would collapse.
Supporters of a minimal state view it as a “necessary evil,” and Skoble cites a number of them to that effect. It is evil not only because it coerces people to obey the law but also because it compels people to pay taxes to support its activities. Further, since it claims to be the ultimate arbiter of when it is legally permissible to use force, it blocks people from establishing competing protection agencies, even though their doing this violates nobody’s rights.
Why, then, do minimal state libertarians support the coercion involved in a minimal state? Why don’t they go all the way to a “no-state” solution? (Readers will have noted that I have avoided the word “anarchism” in explaining Skoble’s position. This is because he thinks that the word suggests to the public both chaos and the use of violence, both of which he is anxious to differentiate from his own view).
They do so because of what he calls a “Hobbesian fear.” In the absence of a state, people will aim to secure their own survival and will not be able to cooperate sufficiently to establish a system in which they can benefit by voluntary trade and the division of labor. The state thus becomes a “necessary evil,” i.e., despite its bad coercive features, as detailed above, we have to put up with it.
In other words, Skoble imagines minimal statists as thinking, “If only anarchism—if you will allow me to use the disputed word—could work, things would be great, but sadly it couldn’t.” He quotes a number of minimal statists who hold exactly this opinion. These include Jan Narveson, Tibor Machan, and Robert Nozick. (As I mentioned earlier, I differ with him about Nozick, but I acknowledge that there is a good case for his interpretation).
But why do they think it couldn’t work? They readily admit that people would be better off if they cooperated with each other, but there is a strong incentive for them not to do so. They cannot trust one another to fulfill the terms of any agreement they would make to cooperate. In the familiar terms of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, defection dominates the cooperative solution.
In the chapter “Allaying the Hobbesian Fear,” Skoble responds to this claim about the Prisoner’s Dilemma. He maintains that philosophy should keep abreast of work in game theory, history, law economics, and history—in brief, philosophy needs to be empirical and not purely a priori. If philosophy does this, it turns out that cooperative strategies have a good chance of working out. The reason they do is that people know, or at least have good reason to believe, that they will frequently interact with the same set of people in their society. In terms of game theory, they will be in an “iterated” Prisoner’s Dilemma rather than a “one-shot” dilemma.
Those under the sway of the Hobbesian fear think that the iterated character of the Prisoner’s Dilemma won’t change things—people will still fail to trust each other, even if they know they will be interacting with them repeatedly—but a combination of theoretical and empirical work shows that this isn’t true. In particular, Robert Axelrod devised a strategy called Tit for Tat, in which players in iterated dilemmas respond to what other players have done in deciding whether to cooperate, and this strategy defeats the policy of always refusing to cooperate. Another strategy called “Pavlov” does even better.
The empirical support for these models isn’t limited to tournaments between competing computer programs, but for the details, readers will need to consult the book. One example of a successful society without the state is medieval Iceland, which both Murray Rothbard and David Friedman discuss.
Even if Skoble is right about the possibility of cooperation without a state, isn’t his program impractical? People will never accept a stateless society. Skoble’s answer is that if this is true, it will because people accept an ideology that can be challenged:
Even today, every expansion of state power, even when resisted in some quarters, has as its basis a widely accepted (and generally unexamined) claim that it is both necessary and proper. . . Today arguments about market failure and “tacit consent” have taken the place of theories of the divine right of kings.
We ought to do all that we can to promote a full libertarian program that, if not the truth for all time, is at the very least the truth for this aeon.
