I view such books as a form of social engineering as it were. Fun to mentally task yourself as to what you would do in such situations but not worthy of much mental effort.
In a nation such as America where firearms are as common as stop signs I don’t think thugs would last very long. Remember fifty years ago when we carried rifles in the rear windows of our pickup trucks? There was probably fifty such trucks in my high school parking lot.
Thugs have guns too.
To prey on others they join together in gangs.
In self-defense, the rest of us also must band together. Which leads directly to the emergence of leaders, rules (laws), etc.
It should be noted that criminal gangs in such circumstances have an inherent advantage over the rest of us. They choose when and where to attack. By the time decent people get themselves together to fight back, the gang has moved on or dispersed.
Since food has to be grown, the decent people of the world cannot stay together permanently to defend each other, they have to disperse to deal with the tasks of survival. Historically the way this was handled was by the people designating one man as King (Duke, Count, etc.), who kept enough thugs around him in his Brute Squad to squash any competing gangs. (To be accurate, the King more often designated himself.)
This of course left the people totally vulnerable to oppression by the King and his Brute Squad, but oppression by one is preferable to free-lance oppression by many, and at least the King had a vested interest in keeping his people alive and productive.
AFAIK, the only truly pacifist and (more or less) anarchic society on record is that of the Moriori. It’s interesting to look up what happened when they encountered a non-pacifist society. In this case, it was’t whitey, it was their warlike cousins the Maori.
The Maori enslaved, raped, murdered and cannibalised the Moriori.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moriori_people