Tocqueville’s unabashed skepticism towards the modern power and administrative state has led to his work occasionally being placed in the context of anti-statist, anarchist theories by authors such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon or Georges Sorel (King 1967). With the early socialist Proudhon, Tocqueville shares at most the negative attitude towards modern state centralism and the plea for decentralized administrative structures, but not an anarchist ideal of freedom from rule.