Collage of deToqueville

Here are some quotes from the first part of deToqueville's Democracy in America. From this, you can see the general direction of his thoughts.

Amongst the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of conditions.

The equality he speaks of here does not seem to be the modern American idea of 'all men created equal,' but rather the simple lack of a nobility, and the conditions that engenders.

[This tendency toward equality] is the most uniform, the most ancient, and the most permanent tendency which is to be found in history.

...at this point he gives a summary of 700 years of feudal French history.

In perusing the pages of our history, we shall scarcely meet with a single great event, in the lapse of seven hundred years, which has not turned to the advantage of equality.

Whithersoever we turn our eyes we shall witness the same continual revolution throughout the whole of Christendom.

The gradual development of the equality of conditions is therefore a providential fact, and it possesses all the characteristics of a divine decree: it is universal, it is durable, it constantly eludes all human interference, and all events as well as all men contribute to its progress.

The whole book which is here offered to the public has been written under the impression of a kind of religious dread produced in the author's mind by the contemplation of so irresistible a revolution, which has advanced for centuries in spite of such amazing obstacles, and which is still proceeding in the midst of the ruins it has made.