The Bactra Review   The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes
There have been stateless societies which recognized and implemented fairly complex systems of rights. A far from comprehensive list would include medieval Iceland, the pre-conquest Native Americans living around Puget Sound (who even had versions of intellectual property rights), the Atlas Berbers, and the Pashtuns. (The last two were often formally claimed as part of various states, but were effectively self-governing through this century.) The basic point holds, however, since they had other institutional means of paying for rights, which would not transfer well to modern conditions (the Berbers and the Pashtuns relied, in part, on a military participation ratio of nearly 1), and in any case nobody (pace the anarchists, communist and capitalist) has come up with plausible alternatives to states for modern conditions.