Notes on Alcohol and the State

Abstract

This article is a slightly shortened version of a paper presented at the IX Nordic Congress of Sociology held at Lund, Sweden, 15- 18 August 1976. It represents an attempt to determine the place of alcohol in society through the state and political processes. The attempt should primarily be viewed in relation to the different traditions of social alcohol research. At the same time, it may be regarded as an example of a study aiming to illustrate factors determining the relationship of the state to a given social pheno menon - in the present instance, to alcohol. In the first section of this article, several factors are presented for consideration with regard to determining the over-all place of alcohol in any given society: the dominant use values of alcohol, the economic processes involved in the production and distribution of alcohol, the social circumstances and economic resources deter mining the structure of private consumption, and the social conse quences of drinking. Subsequently, the different traditions of social alcohol research are characterized according to the factors which they bring prominently to the fore in the determination of the role of alcohol in society. In the second section of this article, the general tasks of the capitalist state are discussed, and four kinds of interests relative to alcohol are derived from these: state fiscal interests, interests of industrial policy, interests of public order, and social policy interests. In the next four sections, attention is paid to the forms which each of the aforementioned interests take under different circum stances and as to how each interest should be described. At the same time, we have made an attempt to localize those objective factors which determine the relative importance of each interest under different social conditions. The last section contains some general speculation as to the relationship of the state to alcohol under Nordic pre-capitalism, concurrence capitalism and monopoly capitalism.