The policing of alcoholics: Power and resistance in early welfare-state Sweden

Abstract

ABSTRACT What in this article is called ‘the policing of alcoholics’ was a process involving several agents and institutional bodies, including but not limited to, officials and at the alcoholics’ institutions, regional and local temperance boards, police authorities and local poor-law boards as well and several others. For the welfare state in the making, the recalcitrant and morally depraved alcoholic represented an anomaly, someone who did not really belong to society. Policing was in the last instance legitimated by the role it played in the process of creating a new social order. The early welfare state should not mainly be seen as a form of ‘liberal’ governance but as a state formation where a continuity with older forms of governance, i. e. policing, existed. The empirical material for this article is taken from the alcoholics’ institution at Svartsjö in the late 1930s and early 1940s. By being subjected to the workings of the power apparatuses in institutions like these, an undifferentiated mass of vagrants, beggars, drunkards, petty criminals, and unruly and socially troublesome people were transformed into a new welfare category, the alcohol abusers. Importantly, this was a process to which the alcohol abusers, through their resistance, also contributed.