> Or it could look more horizontal where a bunch of farmers each either maintain their own defenses and collaborate with their neighbors, or who perhaps hire defense forces.
Which is how we are organized now, more or less. It is economically infeasible for each person to defend their own property. Kind of like the volume to surface area of a sphere. So people form arrangements with internal dispute mechanisms and then external dispute mechanisms. That looks like a state.
But how did they get their property to begin with? Land property particularly. It all comes down to "this is mine and there's nothing you can do about it", everything else is an abstraction of that, for better or worse. *He who can defend his claim owns the land." The law of the jungle underpins everything.
https://falkvinge.net/2017/03/01/a-simplified-taxless-state-a-proposal-part-1/