Irish Wild Mammals

Book excerpt: Culture Wars and Moral Panic tells the story of alcohol as a social and political issue and explains why certain countries have hosted temperance cultures and others have not. It presents an historical discourse analysis of the movements for temperance and Prohibition in the United States and in the UK. The book provides a wide-ranging commentary on alcohol as a social and political issue and illustrates how the historical movements for temperance and prohibition have much in common with the current moral panic over alcohol use in the UK. The book is written from a libertarian perspective and charts how concern over alcohol has moved from clerics to medics. It also provides an excoriating analysis of how the new 'public health' movement has used the alcohol issue to dramatize their agenda for the regulation of lifestyle. A recurrent theme of the book is that concerns over alcohol use mediates wider social anxieties and how the development of a neo-prohibitionist movement has acted as a vehicle for an interest-group status-conflict in the UK between the social conservatives of the old middle class and the social liberals of a new middle class that has developed since the end of World War Two.