Category File
Social Control
2 documented theories filed under this subject.
- The "Free Love" CommunalismA decree nationalising women appeared in Saratov in early 1918. It was not Bolshevik policy, it was never national law, and its provenance is still argued over — but by 1919 it was being read into the record of a United States Senate committee.
- The Liquor Re-EducationThe Liquor Re-Education theory held that Prohibition was not primarily about sobriety, morality, or crime reduction, but about testing how quickly a mass population could be conditioned to obey a law that large numbers considered irrational or intrusive. In this reading, the ban on alcohol became a national behavior-modification experiment: an attempt to measure compliance, shame, habit disruption, and the social power of repeated enforcement. The theory took on a more psychological tone in later retellings, especially when linked to Pavlovian conditioning, Progressive reform, and the language of the “noble experiment.” Its core claim was that the real subject of Prohibition was not liquor, but obedience itself.