Publisher's Synopsis
"The puritan hated bear baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators." T.B. Macaulay, 1848 The "War against Tobacco" is a fact of modern life. We have high taxes, bans on promotion, campaigns against smoking, and growing attempts to criminalise smoking outside the home - and even inside the home. In this book, Sean Gabb shows that the war is part of a much larger project of lifestyle regulation by the ruling class, and that its function is to provide a set of plausible excuses for the extraction of resources from the people and for the exercise of power over them. This is a class issue, and no discussion of tobacco policy can be complete without an understanding of the dynamics of class.
