Sobering up. From temperance to prohibition in antebellum America, 1800–1860

late Victorian intellectuals seized the language and imagery of Darwin's biology with enthusiasm, and hitched them to various continuing movements such as liberalism, individualism and collectivism, debates about heredity, race, and class, and questions of the rationality or irrationality of the human animal. Social Darwinism therefore became ubiquitous, pervading the entire range of social science from economics to ethics, by way of politics, eugenics, and moral philosophy, appealing to many different schools of thought and being taken up by an extraordinarily wide variety of social theorists. This much is well known to historians. The intriguing point brought out in Social Darwinism and English thought is that social Darwinism was often espoused by both parties to a controversy, each protagonist believing himself the only true Darwinian. The constellation of facts and fancies that signified Darwinism to those concerned was thus an ever-variable, fluctuating mass of concepts, subject to as many interpretations as there were propagandists for causes. More significantly, it also provided the ground on which radically opposed groups could at least meet, if not agree with each other. Greta Jones emphasizes the fragmented, contradictory character of social Darwinism by describing the major arenas of debate so far as Britain was concerned. Her story, though pitched at a somewhat abstract level, is certainly comprehensive and will guide many researchers through this particular labyrinth. Yet the author has more than this to tell us: she hopes to analyse what it is that pushed-and still pushes-the social sciences towards biology, and the agents that might mediate between the two. The key, it would seem, is philosophy. At the deepest level, social Darwinism resolved itself into a theory which began from the "reality" of existing social relationships-or more often an ideological picture of them-and argued back to their apparently "natural" causation. Theorists, she claims, may have reduced human activity to hard-core biology but they failed to escape the limits of the social ideologies of their time: it was no good using Darwin to justify social science, since he was as steeped in current ideology as they were. Such myopia continues today, particularly in sociobiology. The great expectations of the nineteenth century might have faded away, but social Darwinism is not yet bankrupt and, according to Dr. Jones, lives on in one form or another. [no price stated]. The word "prohibition" in American history evokes the doubly heady pleasure of forbidden drinking in the 1920s; …