Third, the disease concept--and this is perhaps the most
surprising reason of all--served a *moral* function that
well-suited the prevailing sentiment regarding alcohol &
drinking in the 1940s and 1950s, the decades of the
disease concept's cultural ascendancy in the U.S.///Here
again, we encounter a sociocultural circumstance almost
the opposite of conventional wisdom's teachings.  A
generation of post-Repeal Americans characterized the
development of the disease conception and the modern
alcoholism movement's rise to cultural hegemony as an
enlightened escape from the Victorian moralism that
underlay our hundred-year-long historical experience of
temperance-prohibition-repeal.  In short, the disease idea
was part of a powerful story of cultural secularization--
just one more symbolic arena in which the witches &
goblins of the past would be vanquished & dispelled by the
cool hand of secular science.  (It is, of course, just a
little mind-boggling that AA, an inherently--albeit, in
some sense, minimalistic--religious movement, should have
occupied a key place in this secularizing symbolic trend!
Go figure again.)  Most--but not all--contemporary
observers appear to have been disinclined to see or to
acknowledge that this newly secularized sensibility
harbored a moral geography *of its own*.  In other words,
the movement from the temperance to the alcoholism popular
paradigms did not go from *old* moralism to *no* moralism,
but instead from *old* moralism to *a new set* of moral
coordinates, imperatives, and (with these) newly perceived
social shortfalls, problems, & action agendas.  There were
intellectual resources around in the post-Repeal era to
inform a perspective of *moral transformation* over the
prevailing sense of amoral scientific secularization.  For
one, Talcott Parsons published in 1951 his celebrated
analysis of the sociology of the sick role--showing how
the mere social status of being sick involved a clearly
specifiable set of moral obligations and expectations.  In
the same year, David A. Steward published a marvelous
"moral analysis" of the alcoholism conceptualization in
*QJSA* (12:489-494, 1951) and Leopold Wexberg published
his wonderful account of the remarkable multiplicity of
meanings that might be attached to calling something a
disease ("Alcoholism as a Sickness," *QJSA* 12:217-230,
1951).  But these intellectual resources passed more or
less unnoticed (or, perhaps, simply didn't fit-in well
with) the emergent alcoholism movement's drive to define
itself as the new, enlightened, scientific, and
nonjudgmental popular paradigm on the block.///Once we
appreciate that the new alcoholism paradigm actually *had*
a moral geography, it becomes a little easier to try to
interpret its ascendancy in moral and social terms.  I
should note at the outset that this interpretive
direction--once again--may be said to run strongly against
the grain of the conventional (movement) wisdom.  Seen
*from within* the movement, the ascendancy of the modern
alcoholism paradigm was a long & hard-won triumph over
popular ignorance, indifference, & hostility--the
vestiges of Victorian moralism.  That's a "supply-push"
model of the social change.  The sort of model that some
social scientists have instead suggested has more a
"demand-pull" character--because it draws attention to the
ways in which the disease paradigm "fit-in with" or
"served" significant contemporaneous social functions or
ends.  Not surprisingly, much shifts with this shift in
analytical perspective.  END OF PART VII