Suppose there was a political ideology that promised to liberate the working masses from the evils of alienation and exploitation, and deliver them instead unto a social order characterized by superabundant material wealth and both social and political equality.  But every single time some society tries to put this ideology into practice, the result is almost precisely the opposite of what is promised.  Instead of superabundance and freedom, the working masses are subject to grinding poverty and tyrannical oppression.

Would this be a good reason to reject the ideology?  My guess is that most libertarians think it would be, at least in the specific case of communism.  After all, it’s not just that we can find one or two counterexamples to the ideology’s promises.  It’s that

1. Every example is a counterexample – there are no cases in which the ideology’s promises hold true.
2. We have good sociological, economic, and political explanations of why the ideology generates the results it actually does when put into practice, and why it fails to deliver on its promises.

So here’s my question.  If this kind of reasoning is a good argument against communism as a political ideology, is it also a good argument against anarchism?

It is, after all, exceedingly difficult to find a good example of a successful anarchist society.  Yes, I know about Medieval Iceland.  And about the surprising relative success of a stateless Somalia.  And I agree with my anarchist friends that people tend to underestimate the ability of individuals to form peaceful, voluntary solutions to a variety of social problems.

But still, it’s a striking fact that virtually every living person on the planet falls under the authority of some state.  And that every historical instance of a stateless society has evolved (degenerated?) into a state-governed one.  Moreover, it seems like (as in the case of communism) we have good theoretical reasons for expecting precisely this result.  Anarchist societies face a well-known difficulty in overcoming the collective action problems inherent in defending themselves against external aggression and predation.  From this perspective, it would hardly be surprising if we found that stateless societies tend to be conquered by state-governed ones.  And this, of course, is precisely what we find.  Whatever else can be said about them, anarchist societies are, as an empirical matter, clearly unstable.  So how much does this count against anarchism as a normative political theory?

Can a similar argument be run against minimal state libertarianism?  This is another bird examples of which are notoriously hard to come by.  Either they don’t exist at all, or they tend to evolve (degenerate?) into (at best) a more moderate kind of classical liberal regime or (at worst) into a corporatist monstrosity in which the powers of the state are captured and expanded by powerful economic interests.  And don’t we have good theoretical reasons for expecting precisely this result, too?

HT Erik Kain, whose own skeptical musings on anarchism got me thinking about this problem again.

Update: Several commentators have made an argument that I find puzzling.  The argument is that because the theory of anarcho-capitalism is relatively new, we can’t really say that anarchism has been tried yet, and so therefore cannot say that any anarchist experiments have failed.  I find this puzzling because much of want anarcho-capitalist theories contribute is <i>descriptive</I> in nature.  They tell us that people are better able to provide for their needs through specialization and voluntary exchange, for instance, than we might otherwise be inclined to think, and that as a result services usually thought to be the exclusive function of government like defense and lawmaking, can actually be performed on the market.  But if descriptive claims like this are true, weren’t they also true before the theory of anarcho-capitalism was developed (just like diseases were always spread by germs even before the germ theory of disease)?  And so if people in stateless societies were in fact unable to provide for their needs (including the need of collective defense against predatory states), doesn’t this undermine the anarchist theory, whether it happened before or after the development and articulation of that theory?