There is another alternative to a centralized government of laws besides feudalism: fascism. But the important thing to remember is the lack of centralization is illusory. The feudal society eventually evolves a hierarchy of nobles and eventually a top noble, a king. In a fascist system there is also most certainly a dominant state. Fascism is just a more highly evolved form of feudalism. Even in the "republic" of pre-imperial Rome, what you really had was an oligarchy of leading families which comprised a tiny part of the free population, and below that, the great mass of slaves. After the Empire, the oligarchy still remained very influential, if not dominant. Not much really changed.

The point is all social groups require some form of organization and top-down control, and the more complex they are, the more organized they have to be. This Jeffersonian daydream of individual freeholds simply isn't viable on a large scale in a complex technical society, or at least, it requires massive numbers of toiling multitudes in the background to make it work.

Even in colonial times the rule was big plantations run by slave labor, and later, big industrial firms producing manufactured goods, using wage slaves, all requiring strict management and brutal control. Private companies are not known for their democratic forms of organization. Even libertarians quickly become petty tyrants when they run their firms. Left to themselves, all these systems quickly become petty tyrannies, that's why we need laws and democracy. But even with them, someone has to work and someone has to give orders, at every level of the hierarchy. We are social animals, not herd animals. There is a difference.

On the bright side, life today is not a brutal tyranny, and history has shown a steady progress of civil rights along with prosperity and fundamental individual freedom. Much remains to be done, but I believe democracy is alive and well and getting better all the time. The key is to let people run their own economic lives, but to prevent power and wealth from becoming too concentrated in a few hands, as it always will if left to its own devices. A system of free enterprise, managed by a constitutional government of laws responsive to an enlightened electorate is the only way to go. It's a delicate balancing act, and it has problems, but beware the temptation of an all-encompassing ideology that claims it will suddenly make everything hunky-dory. There is no state or condition of freedom. Its a process.

And of course, there will always be a faction of oligarchists and plutocrats working feverishly in the background to try and reverse the process and return to some idealized past that never existed, and where they will pull the strings.