Anarcho-capitalism holds that every service conventionally supplied by the state — including law, policing, courts, and defence — can and should be supplied competitively on the market by private firms, leaving no legitimate role for a state at all. It is the libertarian minimal state taken to its vanishing point.
Rothbard derives it from self-ownership and the non-aggression principle: because the state funds itself by compulsory taxation and forbids competitors in law and protection, it is by definition an aggressor and a monopolist, and abolishing it is simply applying the libertarian axiom consistently. David Friedman's The Machinery of Freedom (1973) reaches the same institutions by a different road, arguing on purely consequentialist grounds that competing private agencies would supply law and order more efficiently than a state.
It has never been instantiated as a polity, but it is a live intellectual force — in the Austrian-economics and Mises-Institute milieu, in 'private cities' and free-port schemes, and, more recently, in the crypto and network-state movements that imagine market-provided governance and stateless contract enforcement.
Its internal debates concern how private law would actually work: how competing protection agencies would settle disputes without warring, how rights would be defined without a common legislator, and whether the result would be liberty or a patchwork of private fiefs.
Other anarchists reject its very membership in the family, on the ground that it abolishes the state while leaving intact the private property, wage-labour, and hierarchy they regard as the real substance of domination — swapping the tax-collector for the landlord and the boss, which the vertical axis flags as distortion.
It is easily caricatured as 'feudalism with better branding,' but its serious claim is a challenge worth answering: if the state is justified only as a provider of security and law, why can those not be bought and sold like everything else it defends the market in?
The extreme market-and-liberty corner: no state role is accepted in any sphere, and the region is correspondingly tight.
Liberty-first at the limit with no guarantor but contract; equality is explicitly not an aim.
Change-oriented, with means ranging from gradual privatization and secession to outright rejection of existing legal order.
Universalist and maximally thin: obligations arise only from consent, so no inherited community has any claim.
Individual as unit and duties strictly negative — indistinguishable here from right-libertarianism, since the two differ only over whether a minimal state survives.
- Murray N. Rothbard, For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, 1973
- David D. Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom, 1973