The chapter begins with a paradox, namely that the liquor laws were liberalised in the early 1960s at precisely the moment when the apartheid regime was becoming distinctly illiberal. It argues that part of the reason was that the temperance movement had failed to reproduce itself generationally while its influence on the National Party government was marginal. Moreover, Afrikaner nationalists hitched wine to the bandwaggon of cultural nationalism. Successive commissions of enquiry targeted excessive drinking amongst the Coloured population, but attempts to extend the reach of racialised prohibition stalled. Indeed, the racial provisions of the 1928 Liquor Act were repealed in 1962, following the Malan Commission which maintained that the law was being routinely flouted. After a heated parliamentary debate the law was amended such that that wine could be purchased by all South Africans. Moreover, the distribution became freer with the creation of grocers’ licences for wine and promises of intervention to reverse vertical integration in the liquor industry. This outcome signalled a defeat for temperance interests and pointed to the greater influence wielded by the wine lobby.

The first substantive chapter addresses the structural problem facing wine farmers at the Cape. Much like in France, there was a serious problem of overproduction of wines of indifferent quality leading to unstable prices. The chapter details the struggle between wine merchants and farmers, which led to the constitution of the Koöperatieve Wynbouwers Vereniging van Suid-Afrika (KWV) in 1918. It shows how the KWV successfully lobbied the Smuts government for devolved regulatory powers that enabled it to control the pricing for distilling wines from 1924. At the same time, the chapter shows that the market was constrained by low consumption amongst whites, including the Afrikaner wine farming community itself. This was compounded by the efforts of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and its allies in the South African Temperance Alliance (SATA) to pursue local option for whites and a form of temperance for the black population. The former failed, but the passage of the 1928 Liquor Act prevented the majority of the population from purchasing wine or brandy. Hence the victory of the KWV over the merchants was tempered by the legislative success of the temperance movement.

This chapter analyses in detail the major part of Socrates’ long and complex discussion with Critias about the nature of temperance. Central to the discussion is Critias’ proposal that temperance is knowing oneself. It is argued that this discussion brings out several important ways in which Socrates and Critias differ from one another. One is in their respective attitudes towards interpretation: while Socrates is negligent of interpreting the words of others, Critias shows a keen interest in the interpretation of texts. A second difference is in the pair’s conception of self-knowledge. It is argued that Critias’ conception is based on what I call a social authority model, while Socrates’ is based on what I call a reflective model. It is shown that, despite the heavily aporetic nature of the discussion, a substantive conception of temperance can be gleaned from critical engagement with that discussion.

This chapter develops in detail a conception of temperance, based on a critical engagement with the dialogue’s resources, which I dub temperance as self-realisation. I explore how this conception is modelled in the dialogue, with particular reference to Socrates’ own procedure as depicted therein. The model enables us to address questions of Socrates’ own relation to temperance, and of how temperance can be regarded as of benefit on this conception. Emphasis is placed on the exercise of temperance as a continuous process and to that extent on self-realisation as something that is necessarily imperfectible. However, it is argued that this makes sense both of the status of temperance as a branch of practical knowledge and of its ability to characterise a whole life.

Why did people petition and why did they continue to do so when petitions were rarely successful in securing immediate change? The point of petitioning was extensively discussed within nineteenth-century political and social movements. Critics questioned the wisdom of petitioning and argued in favour of electioneering or more direct forms of protest. Tellingly, however, many of these alternatives were either petitions by another name or were facilitated by subscriptional activity. Even if they were ignored or rejected by authorities, petitions were indispensable to political campaigns and social movements, including Chartism, anti-slavery, women’s suffrage, anti-Catholics, and the Anti-Corn Law League, for a variety of reasons. This explains why so many Victorian activists were indefatigable petitioners. Petitioning was the key method for mobilising popular support and pressuring Parliament; an important way of recruiting activists and developing formal political organisation, at both national and local level; raising public awareness and political consciousness; and finally, for forging valuable networks with elite politicians. Petitioning thus underpinned and made possible a broader repertoire of modern campaigning.

Socrates here draws on the cyclical and kinship arguments to further explain nearly every claim made earlier in the defense speech (Chapter 3). He provides an interconnected account of virtue, happiness, moral psychology, reincarnation, and soul–body interaction. He first describes how coming to know the divine will ultimately allow the philosopher’s soul to spend the afterlife with the gods, eternally happy. By contrast, non-philosophers reincarnate because their desire for the body-like pulls them into a new body after death. Understanding this mechanism requires clarifying how Socrates thinks of the impurities in non-philosophers’ souls. After examining this, the chapter turns to how the body deceives the soul into desiring things that are not good for it. Socrates develops the account of true courage and temperance from the exchange passage (69a–e) to explain how the philosopher avoids and resists the body’s insidious effects so that the soul can pursue wisdom and so be eternally happy.

That David Foster Wallace designed his fiction to serve a therapeutic function for readers is, at this point, axiomatic. Timothy Aubry (Reading as Therapy) has effectively demonstrated how it serves this function, as well as how his fiction’s contingent relation to addiction and recovery stories enabled Wallace to reinject what he saw as a dispassionate and exhausted postmodern form with moral and affective urgency. Rob Short (Big Books) has thoroughly documented how Wallace’s own adherence to the twelve-step recovery program of Alcoholics Anonymous (1939) shapes the aesthetic practice of his novels. Wallace also frequently used the text to stage “the production and elision of intimacy between the (male) author and the (male) reader.” In conversation with this sections other chapters on gender and sexuality, this chapter explores the ways in which Wallace’s writing occupies queer spaces in its representation of the fractured contingency of the addicted self in recovery. Specifically, the chapter draws a comparison with Whitman, through his first and only novel Franklin Evans or The Inebriate: A Tale of the Times (1842), by far his largest commercial success during his lifetime despite being generally forgotten and, like Wallace, a first novel he would often disavow. For Whitman, masking his exact intention to connect with the reader in his poetry, as well as through this addiction and recovery novel, was the very mechanism by which he could construct the queer intimacies socially and politically foreclosed during his lifetime. As scholars like Michael Warner (“Whitman Drunk”) and Michael Moon (Disseminating Whitman) have documented, Whitman too attended alcohol recovery meetings in part to listen to “dirty” stories about same-sex encounters. Through this connection, I hope to accomplish two goals: first, to recontextualize the fantasy of pre-postmodern and even pre-realist novels imagined to be better suited to the aesthetic project of therapy and recovery in a post-postmodern America, and second, to bring Wallace’s aesthetic practice in closer contact with issues of sexuality that the universalizing gesture of fiction-as-therapy can too often elide. While the chapter does not argue that Wallace was a queer writer, it elucidates the disruptive potential of queer readings within the context of late postmodernist constructions of self.

Chapter 3 considers the various divisions of moral virtue. This chapter describes Thomas’s response to the Stoic thesis that the virtuous person lacks passions. Aristotle states that some moral virtues are about the passions. The chapter ends with a discussion of the Neoplatonic thesis that there are different kinds or stages of virtue that lead to contemplation.

Frederick Douglass’s perspective on temperance had much in common with the arguments articulated by northern free black conduct writers, reformers and institution builders. Like many of them, Douglass believed that the rhetoric and daily practice of temperance served the larger fight against slavery and racism by contributing to the forms of black self-mastery, independence, and self-determination most feared by proponents of slavery in the United States. Alcohol consumption, meanwhile, cultivated exactly the kind of dependence preferred by slaveholders. Emphasizing its revolutionary potential for African Americans, Douglass characterized temperance as essential for the black freedom struggle throughout his career, continuing to make his case for temperance even in the last decades of the nineteenth century when African Americans faced the specter of the rise of Jim Crow and the encroachment of new forms of oppression and servitude.

Polls and practical experience both point to a widespread ignorance of the principles of Catholic Social Teaching among Catholic lay people in the United States. A greater emphasis on education in social doctrine is evidently required. One component of this should be to call attention to the eight areas of lay apostolic activity identified by Pope John Paul II in Christifideles laici: promoting the dignity of the human person; fostering respect for the right to life; defending freedom of conscience and religious freedom; protecting and encouraging marriage and family life; participating in public life; placing the individual at the center of socioeconomic life; and the evangelization of culture. Of particular importance in motivating lay people to engage in apostolic activity is the inculcation of the idea of personal vocation. And highly relevant in a wealthy society like ours is the question of lifestyle. The chapter therefore concludes by calling for an updated understanding of the virtue of temperance as it relates to social teaching.

The common good (bonum commune) has, since antiquity, referred to the aim of social and political association, and was particularly prominent in medieval Christian political theology. Since St. John XXIII’s 1961 encyclical letter, Mater et magistra, ecclesiastical statements about social teaching have employed a formulation of the common good, usually in the version that appeared in the Second Vatican Council’s 1965 Pastoral Constitution for the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et spes, as “the sum of those conditions of social life that allow social groups and their individual members relatively thorough and ready access to their own fulfillment.” This chapter discusses the origins and development of this formulation as well as the ways that it has been used in subsequent Catholic Social Teaching. While it has sometimes been interpreted as an “instrumental” account of the common good, the sources and uses of the notion suggest that it is the particularly modern political component of a fuller notion of the common good continuous with the tradition. In particular, the recent formulation is concerned to limit the power of the modern state and protect the dignity of the human person in the challenging conditions of political modernity.