Medieval Iceland and Ireland didn't have an actual government, law was decentralized.
I suppose it depends on the precise definition of government you use. Medieval Iceland had courts, laws and judges. It did not have police, so people were expected to get a ruling and then settle their own feuds.
But you're right, when I said sophisticated and peaceful I was thinking more-so than medieval societies.
All the modern examples of government-less areas of the world I can think of are countries where the state collapsed after a revolution or war, usually either quickly replaced by a (often worse) government, or constantly warring factions.
The closest peaceful example might be Belgium, which couldn't decide on a leading political party for a long time and was run by a "caretaker government" that didn't make any major decisions. But absence of decision making is not really the same thing as absence of the rule of law, which is what DPR wanted.
Empiricism may be used to demonstrate to skeptics an already proven praxeological theory, but it's not through empiricism that economic science should be done. The deflationary spiral theory is supported by empiricist economists, by the way - no wonder is so wrong.
You must be using the word empirical in a different way to how I'd normally understand it. Economists that tried to find empirical evidence for deflationary spiral theory have failed - historical data does not support the theory.
In fact, let me quote my favourite paper on the subject:
http://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/sr/sr331.pdfAre deflation and depression empirically linked? No, concludes a broad historical study of inflation and real
output growth rates. Deflation and depression do seem to have been linked during the 1930s. But in the rest
of the data for 17 countries and more than 100 years, there is virtually no evidence of such a link.
That's an empirical study, it even says so in the abstract. That's the kind of economics I find convincing - study the data. It's difficult to do the same for anarcho-capitalist ideas because there aren't any good examples of it working successfully in modern times.
Don't get me wrong, I understand the theoretical appeal of a society without a ruling government. But in practice one seems to be necessary to keep the peace, which is why so much political philosophy over the past 2000 years has focused on how to limit the power of the state rather than eliminate it entirely.