Mores. The word may not appear especially often in written or spoken English usage today, but its French equivalent, moeurs, was an essential word for Alexis de Tocqueville as he was working to understand and explain the causes and consequences of the American and French Revolutions. When Tocqueville published the first volume of Democracy in America in 1835, for example, he argued that “laws do more to maintain a democratic republic in the United States than physical causes do, and mores do more than laws” (352). When he published the second volume of his great work in 1840, he devoted the longest of the new volume's four sections on “the democratic social state of the Americans” (479) to the topic of the “influence of democracy on mores properly so-called” (653). Whether Tocqueville was exploring the crucial foundations or the pervasive effects of American democracy, he frequently highlighted the specific nature of American democratic mores for men and women in the family, society, religion, and politics by comparing and contrasting them with French aristocratic mores for men and women in the family, society, religion, and politics as well.

Tocqueville had initially defined mores in volume 1 as “the whole moral and intellectual state of a people,” a combination of emotional and intellectual attributes that included “habits of the heart,” “the various notions that men possess,” “the diverse opinions that are current among them,” and “the whole range of ideas that shape habits of mind” (331). When he turned to the study of mores in volume 2, he explored topics as various as “how mores become milder as conditions become more equal” (655), “how equality naturally divides the Americans into a multitude of small private societies” (709), “why great revolutions will become rare” (747), and “some remarks on war” (779). After devoting fully five of the new section's 26 chapters to the comparison and contrast between American democratic and European aristocratic attitudes toward marriage and the family, he concluded his chapter on “how Americans understand the equality of man and woman” (705) with the sweeping statement that