From the outset, anarcho-capitalism had the quality of a thought experiment. Debates about it often revolved around the difficulty of actually realizing a fully privatized world in the context of existing state structures. A common objection was the problem of defense. How could any private community protect itself against a nuclear-armed enemy? Because of such difficulties of practical realization in the present, anarcho-capitalists enjoyed taking refuge in the past. In 1970, a letter to the editor of the New Guard warned that the idea of privatizing protection would lead not to economic freedom but to “a new Feudalism.”19 The correspondent was closer to the truth than he might have known.

  In fact, David Friedman’s work was hard to separate from his extracurricular persona as an early-twelfth-century upper-class Berber named Duke Cariadoc of the Bow. He was an active member of the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA), a group that had started in Berkeley in the 1960s.20 In persona as Cariadoc, Friedman forwent glasses, used only his right hand to eat, always followed the name of God with an honorific, and sometimes followed the name of a dead non-Muslim with “curses on him for an unbeliever.” He wrote advice to people on how to be a medieval Muslim and signed his name in Arabic.21 In 1972, he launched an annual SCA gathering called the Pennsic Wars, a portmanteau of Pennyslvania and Punic. The first one drew 150 people; by the late 1990s, the two-week medieval camping event regularly attracted 10,000.22

  The topos of the Middle Ages fed into Friedman’s research. In an article in the prestigious Journal of Political Economy, he offered a “theory of the size and shape of nations,” crunching measurements of the length of medieval trade routes into formulae.23 But it was in 1978 that he made his most enduring contribution to the literature of the New Middle Ages. While his father was talking to the camera about the miracle of Hong Kong, David was praising another rock in the sea: Iceland, where he felt he could find traces of an anarcho-capitalist civilization.

  From the tenth to the thirteenth centuries, he wrote, the Nordic island “might almost have been invented by a mad economist to test the lengths to which market systems could supplant government in its most fundamental functions.”24 In medieval Iceland, he wrote, law was privately enforced; even murder was a civil offense for which one paid a fine to the victim’s family.25 The attractive feature of this model was that retribution was transferrable. Someone who suffered a crime could sell the contract for retribution to a third party—they had a property right in their own victimhood. Friedman admired the durability of the Icelandic system, which lasted over three hundred years, and suggested it could offer inspiration for the present day. Medieval Iceland showed that “the American legal system is a mere thousand years behind the cutting edge of legal technology.”26

  Others picked up the thread from Friedman. Most important was his fellow anarcho-capitalist economist Bruce Benson.27 In his 1990 book The Enterprise of the Law: Justice Without the State, Benson also proposed a rebooted medievalism as a model of criminal justice reform for the late twentieth century. In Benson’s narrative, German tribes brought the model of wergeld, or “man-price,” to the British Isles in the fifth century.28 Economic payback rather than imprisonment was the ideal mode of punishment. In the Middle Ages, it was dispensed by self-organized bodies called “hundreds,” which he praised as “cooperative protection and law enforcement associations.”29 Already by the eleventh century, though, law and order started to become more top-down. The king appointed sheriffs and took a portion of fines.30 It became illegal to settle thefts without appealing to royal law.31 As Norman centralism replaced Saxon localism, what had been interpersonal offenses became “crimes.” By the twelfth century, tax collectors and justices were part of the court, granted license to extract revenue from the population by royal imprimatur.32 Permission to operate jails—also obtained through the king—became lucrative, with prisoners charged for their own imprisonment.33 Benson saw incarceration itself as an unnecessary state function. The nadir for him came in the nineteenth century, when a public prison system financed by taxes emerged in Britain.34

  Benson’s gallop through legal history traced an arc from private to authoritarian law.35 As an anarcho-capitalist, he believed that all government-imposed forms of taxation, fines, and penalties were theft. The further we moved from the self-organization of Germanic war chiefs, the closer we came to tyranny. But he held out some hope. He observed that the public monopoly on policing was quite recent. Into the nineteenth century, there were private “thief-takers” as well as private police forces. In the late twentieth century, privatization might be turning the enterprise of law into a business again. He pointed to companies like Mesa Merchant Police and Guardsmark, which offered private security alongside long-standing agencies like Pinkerton and Wackenhut. He highlighted Behavioral Systems Southwest, which housed detained undocumented immigrants on behalf of the former Immigration and Naturalization Service.36 His biggest argument for privatizing law and order was that it would slash payroll.37 Police forces and prisons were highly unionized; privatization would solve that problem immediately.

  Versions of neo-medieval private justice were common in the cyberpunk of the 1990s. In William Gibson’s Virtual Light, “skip-tracers” track people down on contract.38 In Battle Angel, an anime miniseries set in 2036, a class of enterprising freelancers pursues criminals for profit. “Once there was something called the police whose purpose was to prevent crime,” one explains. “These days The Factory just puts a bounty on the head of wanted criminals and lets hunter warriors like me do the dirty work.”39 In the contemporary United States, Benson proposed other ways of reviving lost traditions. Turning ownership of streets over to residents meant people could keep out suspicious outsiders by self-policing and deepening a sense of community. He practiced what he preached, living in a gated community in Tallahassee, Florida, that had private streets, a single entrance, and a neighborhood Crime Watch.40 Privatization was bringing back the spirit of the Anglo-Saxon hundreds.41

  Benson was not just whistling into the wind. He was well funded and fêted by think tanks. In 1998, his arguments went straight into a report for the William I. Koch Commission on Crime Reduction and Prevention for the State of Kansas. Privatizing law and order, he said, was “actually a return to historical practices rather than something new.”42 For those perplexed by the turn of libertarian funders like the Charles Koch Foundation toward prison abolition in the twenty-first century, Benson’s argument sheds some light. Market radicals of his ilk believe that prison itself is a perversion of punishment, which would be better served by private restitution rather than statist attempts at rehabilitation.43 Mercenary thief-takers, justice by private posse, and tradable contracts in payback; these were the components of a reform inspired by the deep past.

  2.

  In the last decades of the twentieth century, the neoliberal movement’s center of gravity moved westward. An unlikely vortex formed in a place better known for its protest and dropout culture: San Francisco’s Bay Area. Milton and Rose Friedman blazed the trail, moving out in 1979. They bought a second home in Sea Ranch and a primary residence in Royal Towers, the tallest building on San Francisco’s Russian Hill, rising twenty-nine stories above a thicket of bay-windowed terrace houses. At the base of the hill was the Cato Institute, founded by Charles Koch, Ed Crane, and Murray Rothbard. Steps away were the offices of Inquiry and Libertarian Review.44 The Friedmans were often joined for dinner by their neighbor Antony Fisher—former chicken magnate, failed sea turtle rancher, and think tank impresario. Fisher set up the Pacific Research Institute in 1979 and the Atlas Foundation in 1981, filling out the roster of what would become highly influential pushers of privatization policies in the Reagan years.45 It was PRI that funded Bruce Benson’s work on the Middle Ages.

  By the 1990s, the most exciting parts of the West were those places that were parceled off and governed like Sea Ranch. Praising the phenomenon of gated communities, the vice president of the Cato Institute wrote that people were responding rationally “by walling [themselves] off from barbarian threats.”46 Another libertarian wondered whether using covenants to create “voluntary cities” like Sea Ranch would help solve the problem of “crack houses” in American cities—presumably by simply expelling users.47 But gated communities were more than just refuges. They were zones to experiment in. A pair of economists described them as “contractual governments … formed by entrepreneurs who produce and sell constitutional rules.”48 Votes were allotted by housing unit, or even by the size of the housing unit, instead of the old model of “one person, one vote,” which to their mind was producing suboptimal outcomes.49 Looked at this way, the new walled towns became exhibits in the case for capitalism without democracy.

  The most detailed investigation came courtesy of Gordon Tullock, who made the case for the gated community as a template for redesigning the future. Trained as a lawyer, he served the US State Department in Hong Kong, Seoul, and Tianjin before settling down for a career in the academy. He was an intellectual magpie, collecting and combining insights from far-flung disciplines and locations. His syncretic approach was on display when he touched down in 1979 in a favorite site for libertarian thought experiments: apartheid South Africa. Anticipating Louw and Kendall, he suggested the country should fragment into smaller units rather than uniting under universal suffrage.50 By way of illustration, Tullock pulled an unexpected rabbit from his hat: the People’s Republic of China. The communist revolution there had left much intact, he argued. Local government still resembled the system of Imperial China, broken up into “a federation of villages” of one thousand to two thousand residents overseen by “street governments,” leaving a high degree of local control.51

  A few years later, Tullock mined another surprising source for insights: the Ottoman Empire. Living at the time in a Virginia condominium with armed private police, he wondered whether “little private governments” might be generalized on the model of Ottoman millets. Under the system that lasted until the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War, one was both an imperial subject and a member of a self-governing religious community. Why, Tullock asked, couldn’t ethnic communities similarly govern themselves in the United States? School funds could be distributed, for instance, to “a Polish community in Chicago or the Cubans of Miami,” rather than allotted geographically by school district. He indulged in an even further flight of racialized fancy when he suggested that, in contemporary US cities, Black Muslims used “police force” on “their citizens … engaging in violence up to and including executions.” Perhaps to reassure his audience this was not meant negatively, Tullock noted that he approved of the order and prosperity brought by these Black Muslims. Under similar circumstances, he “would voluntarily join.”52

  In the fall of 1990, Tullock embarked on a lecture tour to Yugoslavia, speaking on the topic of decentralization and federalism. He was surprised to find that the Balkan socialist republics were not sorted out cleanly by ethnic differences but included significant minority populations. This struck him as a fatal flaw, an intuition confirmed soon after when ethnic conflict tore the country apart. He decided to write a handbook for federalizing the state, with the hope it could be used in countries across the world to preempt further violence.53 Ever attentive to his surroundings, Tullock found an early draft of his ideal polity in his own neighborhood when he moved into a gated community of about 250 homes in the sun-bleached, saguaro-blanketed hillocks north of Tucson. What he called in his writing the Sunshine Mountain Ridge Homeowners Association became the template for his ambitious effort to write a global blueprint for federalism based on elective self-sorting.54

  The virtue of the master-planned community was that it was voluntary. It had a tailored set of rules, visible from the outset, which you could either opt into and buy a home, or choose not to, and shop elsewhere. As opposed to the larger jurisdiction of a city, county, or state, the homeowner association (HOA) was a compact unit, an opportunity for micro-ordering. “What does this little ‘government’ do?” Tullock asked. They owned and maintained the streets and installed fire hydrants. Private companies provided fire protection, gas, electricity, cable, and garbage collection. The community was defended by the local sheriff but added its own guards for night shifts. It also had precise aesthetic prescriptions, including how one’s garden could look from the street and the color of one’s house. “If we get some eccentric who would like to paint his house purple,” Tullock noted, “he can be stopped.”55 Zany taste was not covered by this version of freedom—it would be too likely to clash with too many of one’s fellow property owners.

  Not satisfied to see his HOA as an idiosyncratic example of a functioning private government, Tullock used the community as evidence for a theory he called “sociological federalism,” which stated frankly that the most pertinent sociological categories are ethnicity and race. The population of Sunshine Mountain Ridge was “rather homogenous,” he noted—that is, almost entirely white and non-Hispanic, whereas almost a third of the people in the surrounding Pima County were of Mexican background. For Tullock, this was not a problem but a confirmation of his assumption: “It seems that people, on the whole, like living with other people who are similar to them.”56

  Why would people want to “secede” to gated communities? “Are they seeking to avoid people of other races?” Cato’s David Boaz asked skeptically in 1996.57 Tullock’s analysis pointed toward yes. He defended segregation for both its voluntary quality and its utilitarian outcomes. No state forced division; people would do it themselves. And once they had done so, their binding contracts would define the limits of their exercise of individual expression, and private security forces would ensure the exclusion of undesirables. This was the vision of an orderly checkerboard of racial homogeneity, enabled by the abandonment of any prospect of redressing inequality through collective action. Writing from the scrublands of southern Arizona, Tullock saw the fortified Caucasian citadel as both a speculative dream and an existing reality.

  3.

  David Friedman saw one path to a stateless future in building alternative institutions, or what he called “the skeleton of anarcho-capitalism” within society.58 Gated communities modeled polycentric law. According to this theory, there need not be a single code of law applicable to all. In fact, things work more smoothly when there are many codes. It was a shortcoming of the modern world that only one set of laws applied within the whole of a given territory. By contrast, libertarians celebrated the idea of different groups carrying their law around with them. This was what Hans-Hermann Hoppe called the “hierarchic-anarchic” order of the medieval era.59 Market radicals should take their “cues from the European Middle Ages,” he wrote, “striving to create a U.S. punctuated by a large and increasing number of territorially disconnected free cities.”60 Authority was not the problem. Rules were not the problem. The problem was not having enough authorities and rules to choose from.

  That this understanding of the Middle Ages was based more on imagination than rigorous scholarly study goes without saying. The medieval world was regularly reduced to a few convenient bullet points. But to nitpick historical accuracy would be to miss the point. Just before Friedman wrote his article on Iceland, he published another in which he described medieval reenactment as a “joint fantasy.”61 At the re-creationist gatherings, he introduced something called the Enchanted Ground, an area sectioned off by a golden rope and a sign reading WITHIN THESE BOUNDS THE TWENTIETH CENTURY DOES NOT EXIST. This kind of re-creation is also known as LARPing (live action role playing) or cosplay (from the “costume play” of devoted fans of fictional characters). In political discussions, cosplay is sometimes used as a term of derision for a kind of politics that is escapist, not engaged with the real world. But as Friedman himself points out, his own response to the Middle Ages is unique in that it is real. You wear the period clothing, get blisters on your hands from the sword, prepare and eat the medieval food. In the same way, the historical LARPing of anarcho-capitalists had real-world outcomes. They invite us to speculate but to do so concretely—to play for real.

  An example of this was David’s son, Patri Friedman—named after his father’s fellow creative anachronist, a Harvard history of science PhD who went by the name Patri du Chat Gris. Patri attended the Pennsic Wars in his youth, and later became a fan of the celebrated Burning Man cultural festival in the Nevada desert. He reveled in the ingenuity and creativity of the participants who made “two-mile-long laser images … visible from space in a dusty environment” and not one but two “forty-foot-long fire-breathing dragon cars.”62 But he had one complaint: there was no commerce permitted at the event. In his vision of utopia, as in those of anarcho-capitalists before him, commodification was not checked at the door but rather dominated everything in sight.

  Patri’s goal was to re-create the enchanted ground of Burning Man but put utopia up for sale. The emblem of Burning Man was a stick figure with its arms in the air. The Seasteading Institute’s logo placed a cargo ship in its hands. “Atlas swam,” quipped one critical article.63 This was a gated community at sea, an aquatic take on the voluntary city, and a floating jurisdiction. When David Friedman spoke at the second conference of the institute, he explained its significance by returning to the familiar trope of the Ottoman Empire. “The world as a whole is a polylegal system,” he said. Usually this meant that different patches of land were attached to different legal regimes. But what if the territory could be mobile, plugging into one set of laws one year and another the next? Or it could use flags of convenience as ships do, carrying the labor law or intellectual property law of Liberia or Panama with it to a more highly regulated part of the world. Seasteads could be legal mobile homes.