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