ABSTRACT
The individualist position is also borne out by a number of cases of societies that appeared to function well in the absence of any recognisable State involvement. Some examples are the medieval law merchant,18 which governed mercantile trade for centuries; the legal systems of Anglo-Saxon England;19 saga Iceland;20 medieval Ireland;21 and even those of the frontier areas of the 19th century US, that is, the not so Wild West.22 These and other cases of stateless (or nearly stateless) social order confirm that anarchy is not chaos, and that private agencies will provide for the preservation of social order, and, in so doing, develop and/or use their own systems of legal rules. These cases also indicate that stateless social orders are relatively peaceful, because most parties to disputes have incentives to seek less costly (that is, peaceful) rather than expensive (that is violent) means of resolving disputes. This applies even to the so called ‘Wild West’, which, notwithstanding all the cowboy movies, actually turns out to have been very orderly and peaceful, and far more so than the US today.
