When Freedom Becomes a Way of Governing: What Sweden’s Alcohol History Can Teach Us

What Does it Mean to be “Free” to Drink?

In contemporary consumer culture, freedom is one of our most cherished ideals. We are told we are free to choose what we buy, what we consume, and how we live. Alcohol is no exception. In most liberal societies, drinking is framed as a personal choice—an expression of lifestyle, taste, and identity. Yet, as Mariana Valverde (1998) noted liberal societies have long struggled with the dilemmas of freedom when it comes to alcohol.

When freedom is associated to alcohol consumption it appears to collapse into compulsion, exposing the dynamics of what Reith et al. (2023) conceptualise as intoxicating consumption: a market system that promotes pleasure and stimulation while displacing the consequences of excess onto the self-governing consumer. In our recent article, Governing the Drinker: Liberty and Consumer Subjectivity in Sweden, 1850s–1980s, we explore this paradox by looking at more than a century of Swedish alcohol discourse. Our central question is simple but provocative: how has the idea of freedom been used to shape the kind of consumer we are expected to become?

Three Drinkers, Three Versions of Freedom

Drawing on the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s (1969) distinction between negative liberty (freedom from interference) and positive liberty (freedom as self-mastery), we trace three historical versions of the Swedish alcohol consumer.

1. The pathological consumer (1850s – 1900s) In the mid 1800s, heavy drinking was increasingly framed as a disease of the will. Medical experts such as Magnus Huss described alcoholism as chronicus. At the same time, Protestant reformers argued that sobriety was essential for democracy and social progress. Freedom was paradoxical. On the one hand, liberal economic reforms promoted market expansion. On the other, alcohol was seen as something that robbed individuals of rational autonomy.Restricting drink was justified as a way to restore “true” freedom.
2. The deviant consumer (1910s–1950s) With the introduction of the infamous motbok (the Swedish alcohol ration book, which remained in effect between 1919 and 1955), alcohol purchases were strictly monitored. Citizens were issued personal booklets that limited how much they could buy, and every purchase was recorded. Women faced tighter restrictions than men, and those deemed morally or financially unreliable could be excluded altogether. In this period, freedom took on a distinctly paternalistic character, aligned with the emerging Social Democratic vision of the Folkhem (“People’s Home”), in which the state assumed responsibility for safeguarding the moral and social well-being of its citizens. Drinking was permitted, but only under supervision. Positive liberty, understood as guidance toward rational self-control, legitimised far-reaching state intervention in the name of collective welfare.
3. The responsible consumer (1960s–1980s) After the rationing system was abolished, Sweden moved toward a more liberal approach, in which the state increasingly relied on persuasion and social influence within what was described as a new society of acceptance. At the same time, medical discourse shifted toward the symptom theory, interpreting alcoholism not as moral deviance or a fixed disease, but as a sign of deeper psychological or social imbalance. Within this emerging neoliberal ethos, citizens were governed less through prohibition and more through appeals to responsibility and self-management. Campaigns like Spola Kröken (Flush the Booze) encouraged moderation as a rational, self-chosen improvement of one’s quality of life. Freedom became internalised: the ideal consumer was no longer the monitored drinker, but the self-regulating one, expected to balance pleasure with prudence and assume responsibility through self-discipline.

Governing Through Freedom

What connects these three subjects is a deeper transformation of how freedom itself was mobilised. Rather than seeing freedom and regulation as opposites, our historical analysis shows that freedom became a tool of governance. Appeals to liberty were repeatedly used to justify different forms of intervention. From Prohibition to rationing to public welfare campaigns the consumer was never simply “free” or “controlled.” Instead, freedom was constantly redefined in ways that shaped what counted as legitimate consumption.

Why This Matters Today

This history is not just about Sweden. Today, we see similar patterns across many domains of consumption. Health campaigns encourage us to track calories, steps, and alcohol units. Sober curious movements turn abstinence into a lifestyle identity. Digital apps invite us to monitor our own risk behaviours. In all these cases, freedom is not removed. It is reformatted.

We are encouraged to see ourselves as autonomous, rational choosers, yet we are also expected to continuously audit, manage, and optimise ourselves. This is the contemporary form of the responsible consumer. Our article argues that this subject is not only a recent invention of neoliberalism (Giesler & Veresiu, 2014), it is the outcome of a long historical layering of moral, medical, and political discourses about addiction and autonomy. Earlier ideas about pathology and deviance have not disappeared; they persist beneath today’s language of responsibility.

Rethinking Consumer Freedom

For scholars of marketing and consumer culture, this article raises important questions in relation to how markets participate in the moral and political construction of consumer freedom (Tadajewski et al., 2014).

If freedom is central to consumer society, we must ask: Who defines what “true” freedom means? When does intervention become justified in the name of autonomy? How do markets and states jointly shape the boundaries of acceptable choice?

By taking a long historical view, we show that consumer subjectivity is not created overnight by a single policy or campaign. It is sedimented over decades—sometimes centuries—through shifting alliances between medical expertise, political ideology, and market interests. As Žižek (2023) put it, freedom is not simply something consumers possess; it is organised, contested, and governed within social and ideological frameworks that quietly establish its limits.

Consumers experience themselves as free not because they act without constraint, but because those constraints are presented as the normal and legitimate conditions under which freedom should be exercised. Liberty thus functions less as unlimited personal choice and more as a normative horizon that delineates which behaviours count as responsible, acceptable, and morally appropriate.

References

Berlin, I. (1969). Four essays on liberty. Oxford University Press.
Giesler, M., & Veresiu, E. (2014). Creating the Responsible Consumer: Moralistic Governance Regimes and Consumer Subjectivity. Journal of Consumer Research, 41(3), 840–857. https://doi.org/10.1086/677842
Reith, G., Hunt, G., Antin, T. M. J., & Frank, V. A. (2023). Intoxicating consumption: Capitalism and the commodification of pleasure. In The Routledge Handbook of Intoxicants and Intoxication (pp. 89–100). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429058141-8
Tadajewski, M., Chelekis, J., DeBerry-Spence, B., Figueiredo, B., Kravets, O., Nuttavuthisit, K., Peñaloza, L., & Moisander, J. (2014). The discourses of marketing and development: towards “critical transformative marketing research.” Journal of Marketing Management, 30(17–18), 1728–1771. https://doi.org/10.1080/0267257X.2014.952660
Valverde, M. (1998). Diseases of the Will: Alcohol and the Dilemmas of Freedom. Cambridge University Press.
Žižek, S. (2023). Freedom: A disease without cure. Bloomsbury Academic.

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