Recurrent themes in Tocqueville's major works

The traditions of philosophy of history – for it is clear that Tocqueville's inversion of the words (“la philosophic historique”) was not intended to challenge their proper ordering – or the equally familiar legitimate subjects of inquiry for a histoire raisonnée or speculative history, had taken root in the eighteenth century, which had borrowed much from the seventeenth century's incipient interest in the travel literature and ethnographic studies of non-European cultures. But until the eighteenth century, history remained a series of stories, not related to other kinds of stories (of nature, the earth, space), or with humanist philology and the study, mainly by magistrates and lawyers, of laws and institutions.