A good society, according to Nordic definitions, checks human passions that produce drunkenness, lewdness, and rituals of anti-social behavior. A society that fails to civilize its members confronts self-centered hedonism. Married to a strong belief in social engineering, successive generations of elected officials endeavored to minimize the consumption of alcohol and to ban recreational drug-taking. Sweden, like Finland, was part of the vodka-belt and occasions of sociability were often an excuse to get extremely drunk. For more than a century, this style of drinking provoked little concern although distilled spirits were the subject of a lengthy political struggle between the Swedish monarchy and the peasantry. But the bone of contention was the discretionary right to impose excise taxes on distilled liquor and to sell surplus spirits. The Swedish monarchy depended on alcohol taxes to finance its budget and repeatedly tried to take away from the peasant communities the right to produce and sell vodka. In 1824, the monarchy admitted defeat and the production, sale, and distribution of spirits fell into private hands. By the 1850s, according to the official historiography of Swedish drinking, the nation was succumbing to permanent drunkenness, as each man, woman, and child was said to consume as much as 46 liters of brännvin or Swedish vodka per year, which was the equivalent of nearly half a liter of pure alcohol per week. Other figures cited the annual production of 22 million gallons of pure alcohol for a population of 3 million.

Rather suddenly, drinking rituals, which dated from the introduction of spirits in Sweden in the eighteenth century, became a major concern in the late nineteenth century.