When discussing strategies to achieve an anarcho-capitalist society, discussion usually focuses on direct action: the progressive dismantling of reformism, political separation through secession, or the development of parallel markets via counter-economics. Yet all these approaches share a blind spot: they target the effects of the state rather than its causes. They serve as tools for practical engagement, yet they merely scratch the surface.
The first step to escape the collective illusion of statism—and thus move toward a natural transition to a society of private law—is to identify its Achilles heel. The true fragility of the state lies not in the recognition of its coercive apparatus but in its conceptual legitimacy. The state exists only because people believe, at worst, that it is a necessary evil. In other words, the real power of the state is not physical but ideological.
The argument of the “necessary evil” rests on a simple idea: “The state has always existed; without politics and government there would be chaos.” There is some truth in this: governance is indeed fundamental for maintaining social order. The error lies in confusing the state with society itself.
From a historical-evolutionary perspective, the state is not politics; it is merely one of its historical forms, just one among many possible ways of organizing government. For this reason, statist intellectuals rely on a partisan use of language: terms such as “politics” and “government” are now accepted as inherently statist, when, in reality, they are not. Understanding that the state did not create order but merely occupied it is the first step toward liberation.
Politics as Coordination
The most basic way to understand politics is as the function aimed at regulating social conflicts. In this sense, it is as old as the first human communities. The cause is simple: cooperation among individuals exists to facilitate the pursuit of goals—hence the natural interest in community—but that same union also introduces the possibility of conflict among people with different desires and interests.
The origin of politics, therefore, lies in the necessity of coexistence, and its ultimate end is civilization—understood as a framework in which each individual, following the original purpose of cooperation, may live according to his or her own will. Since cooperation arises from the pursuit of individual ends, any civilization that violates individual will contradicts itself.
From Natural Government to Monopoly
The origin of government goes hand-in-hand with that of politics. If politics is the function that regulates social conflict, government is the institution that assumes that function. When the aims of different sovereigns within the same community become incompatible, conflict—and ultimately dissolution—follow. Government arises as a social institution to preserve harmony within the natural political order, emerging spontaneously wherever coexistence requires a reference point for coordination.
That a government arises “naturally” does not mean it is free from unnatural practices or structures; rather, it means that its origin lies in the spontaneity of human interaction. However, all artificial government is, by definition, unnatural: one arises from consensus, the other from imposition.
The first recognizable forms of government appeared in tribal systems—first in bands, later in tribes. Bands—being nomadic and communally organized—lacked institutional structure; authority was circumstantial and dependent on the material and social conditions of the group. With the rise of tribes came a transition to semi-nomadic life, which required the appearance of coordinating figures based on consensus, embodied in elders, mediators, or chiefs.
With the Agricultural Revolution around 10,000 BC, the domestication of plants and animals enabled sedentary life. The institution of private property developed in this context through the idea of land as capital, reinforcing the sedentary household and patrimonial lineages, and giving shape to the family as a form of domestic government.
From the family arose villages and towns—networks of families united for cooperation—and from within them emerged the naturally understood monarchy: the social recognition of those families capable of coordinating and resolving conflicts. Political authority, far from being imposed, consolidated as an organic extension of social leadership.
Between 8,000 and 6,000 BC, population growth and trade transformed towns into cities. The polis was originally an advanced extension of the division of labor and the accumulation of capital. But its economic prosperity and social density led to the concentration of power. As Josep Maria Vallès explains:
In these societies that produce an economic surplus, mechanisms of accumulation and redistribution are set in motion, which also require activities and rules that we now call politics: that is, those that regulate conflicts over that accumulation and redistribution. With this form of organization, social positions become stratified. Economic, religious, and political functions often overlap, because those who occupy a prominent position in an economic relationship also hold it in the political relationship. [author’s translation]
This concentration of functions marked the beginning of a rupture with the natural social order. Authority gradually ceased to be an extension of cooperation and became an administration of power.
In this context, the Roman Empire emerged with its city-empires—urban centers that extended their dominion beyond natural limits through trade, tribute, or force. Yet, although it was the state’s closest historical relative, not even the Empire was one. As Álvaro d’Ors observed, the imperium in Rome was a personal power, not a sovereign legal abstraction. The ruler exercised authority by virtue of his prestige or mission, not on behalf of an impersonal entity. The emperor governed vast territories, but he never presented himself as the ultimate source of law—as the state would later do.
After the fall of the Roman Empire, the medieval polycentric order emerged spontaneously. Far from being a regression, it represented the recovery—although incomplete—of the natural political order. With the fragmentation of power, multiple centers of authority arose: families, lordships, guilds, parishes, universities, and village communities reorganized social life from the bottom up. It was, in Hoppean terms, the last major historical example of an order based on jurisdictional competition and the decentralization of power.
With the crisis of feudalism and the dawn of the Modern Age came a transition from the polycentric order toward the centralization of political power—giving birth to the state. The state arose as an attempt at territorial pacification in a context of institutional crisis and religious wars. Where the feudal order lacked sufficient authority to resolve internal conflicts, unification was achieved through the elimination of feudal lordships and principalities, leading to territorial consolidation and the monopolization of ultimate jurisdiction. As Charles Tilly put it: “War made the state, and the state made war.”
The idea of political centralization emerged from the Renaissance’s fascination with the unified political forms of antiquity—the Greek polis and republican and imperial Rome—promoting a vision of political unity concentrated in an absolute sovereign. In contrast to feudal fragmentation, it advanced the notion of an autonomous power, liberated from ecclesiastical control and placing religion at the service of the monarch.
The medieval monarchy—grounded in decentralization and unable to impose itself politically—gave way in the early Modern Age to the state monarchy, where administrative and military centralization granted the sovereign the ability to impose his jurisdiction and wage war at will.
The State as Artificial Order
The state’s defining feature has two inseparable faces: the territorial monopoly of ultimate jurisdiction and the construction of an ideological framework designed to justify such domination. Being a monopoly means it initiates or threatens to initiate physical violence to block any competing providers—in this case, producers of ultimate jurisdiction—making the state both judge and party, and thereby destroying the very principle of justice.
This jurisdiction implies the centralization of political power and of the legitimate use of physical violence. Together, these elements enable the state to define what the law is and to enforce it. Since the ultimate legitimacy of this law rests on the mere use or threat of physical violence, every state positions itself within what we may call legal authoritarianism.
It is this unilateral power to structure order that makes the state a form of imposed government. It shares parallels with the structure of a mafia, where one is forced to pay for one’s own protection. However, there is a crucial difference: while the mafia retains an illicit character, the state seeks to create the ideological conditions that legitimize its existence—turning coercion into civic virtue.
The power of the state, therefore, lies not in brute force but in ideology. When we speak of parties and political ideologies, we almost always do so within the state’s framework—that is, within statist politics—making politics a closed and deceptive game that gives the illusion of choice. Regardless of who holds power, every victory within politics is a victory for centralization—and therefore, a defeat of the individual as a sovereign being.
Conclusion
The state is the first institution in history to ideologically consolidate political centralization as a moral good. Yet it is not the first aggressive institution to have existed. Analyzing the historical role of slavery helps us understand that the state will not be abolished through direct action, but through ideological dissolution.
Just as the institution of slavery endured on the basis of a socially shared belief—morally, religiously, and economically justified as necessary for social order—so too does the state rest upon the same kind of belief. And, just as the abolition of slavery followed from a change in thought, the disappearance of the state will not come through violence or reformism, but through the dissolution of the ideological consensus that sustains it: the belief that some men have the right to rule over others.
The construction of a private property order depends, first and foremost, on recognizing that authority is not in itself unnatural, and that institutions such as politics and government—in their most basic sense—are tools for coordination and the preservation of social harmony. The state, by monopolizing government and absorbing all intermediate forms of authority, constitutes a fraud as protector of order—a fiction sustained ideologically.
The revolution will not be against the armies of the state, but against its ideas; reviewing history and reclaiming language will be our great first step.
