It should also be noted that the Articles of Confederation states were mostly stateless. They weren't entirely stateless, but compared to today they were mostly. And they worked out just fine. No violent gangs or outside invaders were taking shit over. The operative reason the Articles were scrapped for a new more powerful federal constitution was because the states were mistreating the people to the point that the people were uprising and actually winning.

So, in defense of the state, the violence initiators themselves needed to construct greater power to keep themselves in existence. The people were simply too powerful and needed to be controlled for the government to keep its initiation of violence going. This worked because enough people believed in the state. Adam Smith had only just published the Wealth of Nations, and there was no institutional way people would understand that the state is itself the enemy other than their intuition.

But today we have overwhelming evidence that the monopoly on violence is the enemy as well as virtually uncontested academic theory for why.