As (I believe) the only resident--if oddly invisible--
card-carrying sociologist on this list, maybe I'd better
insert a kind word on behalf of my disciplinary brethren.
First of all, the irrepressible Stanton Peele is not a
sociologist but a social psychologist by training--i.e.,
according to *Diseasing of America's* dustjacket.  Second-
ly--and this will surprise nobody--sociologists come in
all flavors re the celebrated "disease concept of alcohol-
ism":  from staunch defenders/advocates (like David Pit-
tman and Paul Roman) to deliberate disciplinary neutral-
ists (like me) to perceptive critics (starting with John
Seeley).  Some sociologists have managed to be *more than
one*--so, for example, the late Selden Bacon's 1958 essay,
"Alcoholics Don't Drink," is a classic expression of the
mechanical ineluctability implication of the disease idea
whereas his equally classic 1943 essay, "Sociology and the
Problems of Alcohol," has often been read as a caution
against sending the nascent scientific research movement
down the rabbit hole of an exclusive focus on disease
alcoholism.  Thirdly, the social history of sociological
thought on the disease concept of alcoholism is, perhaps
surprisingly, remarkably tame.  If I might be permitted to
skip down memory lane for a moment:  Sociologists in the
1960s and 1970s were right in the thick of the attack on
the disease conception of *mental illness*.  Who can for-
get names like Erving Goffman, Thomas Scheff, and Edwin
Lemert, who joined forces with disaffected psychiatrists
like R.D. Laing and Thomas Szasz to mount the great
"labeling theory" or "societal reaction" critique of
conventional psychodynamic theory and nosology.  What's
really remarkable--and what remains an open history-of-
ideas question to this day--is that this great wave of
anti-disease thinking passed over sociologists interested
in alcohol/alcoholism virtually without affecting them at
all!  (Elsewhere I've written some unpublished words on
that "unnoticed wave"--but space limits going into it
here.)  Even Lemert's classic book, *Social Pathology*
(1950 or so), one of the earliest & seminal works in the
labeling theory tradition, lapsed out of the theoretical
idiom applied to other sorts of deviance when it came to
alcoholism--which topic was presented in pretty much the
AA voice!  Go figure.///The *sociological* assault on the
disease conception came later and emerged not so much from
a competing and conflicting set of disciplinary/conceptual
/perceptual goggles as from a more or less dutiful appli-
cation of "mindless" survey research methods to the alco-
holism domain.  The assault came in two forms--clinical &
general population.  David Armor & company, at RAND Corp.,
launched a wholly unintentional attack on *the clinical
side* in their follow-up studies of the drinking practices
of post-treatment clients at NIAAA funded treatment cen-
ters in the mid-1970s.  The roughly contemporary general
population assault came in its best known form in the late
Don Cahalan's efforts to operationalize disease symptoma-
tology in survey questionnaires administered to represen-
tative general (or nonclinical) population samples.  The
results in both cases were the same:  the disease indica-
tors were nowhere near as coherent as a symptomatology,
nowhere near as predictive of the "disease's" natural his-
tory, and nowhere near as immune to not-immoderate drink-
ing as conventional "disease" wisdom had long suggested.
Honest, hod-carrying, I'm-not-trying-to-cause-trouble,
survey-research data-gatherers--whose data collection
efforts had been structured along the lines of the
prevailing clinical wisdom--were faced with data that
simply did not fit the party line.  END OF PART I