Reforming the self and the other: The temperance movement and the duality of modern subjectivity

Abstract

This article looks at temperance history to understand how modern preventive alcohol-control systems were created and to understand why their ideological basis has now weakened. Temperance movements made a core contribution to the development of alcohol-control systems, but their argumentation contained an interesting paradox. While they demanded availability restrictions on alcohol they also stressed individual self-determination in alcohol consumption. They were able to combine these goals, which in contemporary public health policy discourse are felt to be contradictory. This duality was possible for two reasons. First, the temperance issue was raised in nascent nation-states and parliamentary political institutions. Convictions of moral superiority led some of the movements to seek in national prohibition a complete solution to all social ills. Second, the movements were not indifferent to the desires that the self-controlling will was expected to constrain. Abstinence from drink was embedded in a Utopian vision of authentic living and independent emotional life in the individual family. As soon as the movements lost the Utopian content of their pursuits they turned into conservative single-issue movements. Today the role of parliamentary nation-states as moral communities has been lost and the endorsement of the good family-centred life can no longer be the narrow objective of public policy. Alcohol control can only be justified in terms of specific consequences, particularly those for public health.

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