Temperance Movement

In conventional usage, a “temperance movement” is an organized effort to decrease the consumption of alcohol in society, although temperance movements of the past often expanded to embrace the reduction of other drug use. Nations all over the world have had temperance movements, and while they are most commonly associated with the processes of industrialization and urbanization in the developing world of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they have also been features of more recent cultural revival movements (among Native Americans, for example). While temperance is often associated with prohibition, the connection is not inevitable; outside of the Islamic world, prohibition exists today mainly in the regulation of drugs other than alcohol. Contemporary regulatory approaches to alcohol consumption and commerce have their origins ...