Modern Era
Murray Rothbard
1926–1995 · Anarcho-capitalism
The state is a gang that claims a monopoly on law.
In their words
“The State is a group of people who have managed to acquire a virtual monopoly of the use of violence in a given territorial area.”
Rothbard built an entire system on self-ownership and the nonaggression principle, concluding in For a New Liberty and The Ethics of Liberty that taxation is theft, that the state is a criminal monopoly on force, and that law, courts and defense can be supplied privately. His Man, Economy, and State restored Austrian economics to the American conversation, and he treated the history of liberty as a usable record of what worked.
Why it matters for freedom
He asked the question the others avoided: by what right does anyone claim a monopoly on coercion?
Who they stood against
the state itself, and the intellectuals who spent careers rationalizing it