Table of Contents

• What is prohibition?
• Why does prohibition happen?
• What are the effects of prohibition?
• Examples of prohibition
• Why is prohibition often considered to fail?
• Conclusion

Prohibition is the legal banning of the production, sale, or consumption of a particular good or substance, most famously alcohol, and sociologists study it as a case study in how laws shape, and are shaped by, social behaviour. Rather than a single historical event, prohibition is best understood as a recurring social phenomenon: a society decides that something widely used and enjoyed is so morally or physically dangerous that it must be outlawed entirely, and then has to live with the consequences of that decision. The most famous example is the United States’ nationwide ban on alcohol between 1920 and 1933, but prohibitions on drugs, gambling, certain weapons, and even specific books or images have followed similar patterns across different countries and eras. Sociology is interested less in whether prohibition “works” in a narrow legal sense and more in what it reveals about power, morality, deviance, and social order.

What is prohibition?

In sociological terms, prohibition is a form of formal social control, meaning a deliberate, codified rule enforced by the state through police, courts, and punishment, as opposed to informal social control, which relies on everyday pressures like gossip, disapproval, or shame. When a government prohibits something, it is making a public statement about which behaviours are acceptable within a society and which are not. This is closely tied to the idea of legal-rational authority, a concept developed by Max Weber, a German sociologist often considered one of the founders of the discipline, who argued that modern societies are governed through formal rules and bureaucratic procedures rather than tradition or personal loyalty. For Weber, a prohibition law is a clear example of legal-rational authority in action: the state does not ban alcohol or drugs because a king dislikes them personally, but because elected bodies pass legislation through formal procedures, and that legislation is then enforced by a bureaucratic apparatus of police and courts.

Prohibition also depends on a shared sense of what is morally wrong, which sociologists trace back to the work of Émile Durkheim, a French sociologist regarded as one of the discipline’s founding figures, who introduced the concept of the collective conscience. The collective conscience refers to the shared beliefs, values, and moral sentiments that bind members of a society together and give them a common sense of right and wrong. When enough people come to view a behaviour, such as drinking alcohol, as a moral threat rather than simply a personal choice, the collective conscience can shift, and prohibition becomes politically possible. Durkheim’s insight helps explain why prohibition movements often appear during periods of rapid social change, when older moral certainties feel under threat and groups mobilise to defend or restore them through law.

Why does prohibition happen?

Prohibition rarely emerges simply because a substance is dangerous; it emerges because a politically organised group succeeds in defining that substance as a social problem. This is the basis of moral panic theory, developed by the British sociologist Stanley Cohen, who used the term to describe the process by which the media, public, and authorities react to a perceived threat with an intensity that is out of proportion to the actual danger involved. Alcohol in early twentieth-century America, for instance, was associated by temperance campaigners with domestic violence, poverty, and the supposed moral corruption of immigrant communities, and this exaggerated sense of threat helped build the public support needed to pass the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1919.

Closely related is the concept of moral entrepreneurs, a term coined by the American sociologist Howard Becker, who studied how rules about deviance are created in the first place rather than simply existing in nature. Becker argued that certain individuals and groups, whom he called moral entrepreneurs, actively campaign to have their own moral views written into law, often presenting their cause as a crusade for the good of society. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League in the United States are textbook examples of moral entrepreneurs: organised groups that successfully persuaded lawmakers that alcohol was not a private matter of personal taste but a public danger requiring legal prohibition.

Power and class also shape which substances get prohibited and which do not. Karl Marx, the German philosopher and economist whose work laid the foundations of conflict theory, argued that laws in capitalist societies tend to reflect the interests of the dominant class rather than the interests of society as a whole. Conflict theorists who followed Marx have pointed out that prohibitions frequently target behaviours associated with poorer or marginalised groups while leaving the vices of wealthier groups untouched or only lightly regulated. Cannabis prohibition in the twentieth-century United States, for example, was heavily linked in public discourse to Mexican migrant communities and African American jazz culture, while alcohol, more associated with white, middle-class, and elite social life, was eventually re-legalised.

What are the effects of prohibition?

One of the most consistent sociological findings about prohibition is that banning something rarely eliminates demand for it; instead, it tends to move the activity into illegal markets. Robert Merton, an American sociologist who developed strain theory, offers a useful framework for understanding this. Merton argued that when a society sets up widely shared goals, such as enjoying alcohol or experiencing pleasure through drugs, but then blocks the legitimate means of achieving them, people experience strain, and some respond by turning to illegitimate means instead. Under American prohibition, the legitimate means of obtaining alcohol disappeared overnight, but the goal of drinking remained intensely popular, and the result was a dramatic rise in illegal production and smuggling, commonly known as bootlegging, alongside secret, unlicensed bars known as speakeasies.