Smoking, Class and the Legitimisation of Power

The "War against Tobacco" is one of the central facts of modern life. In this book, Sean Gabb analyses the nature and progress of the "war". The stated reasons for the war have varied according to time and place. According to Dr Gabb, however, all reasons have one thing in common-they rest on a base of lies and half truths. But this is not simply a book about the history of tobacco and the scientific debate on its dangers. It also examines why, given the status of the evidence against it, there is a war against tobacco. Dr Gabb shows that this 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 book provides a kind of "unified field" theory to bring within a single explanatory structure some of the most important attacks on free choice and government limitation that we face today.