The political philosopher Kenneth Minogue, in his classic study “The Liberal Mind” (1963), memorably compared modern liberalism in its prime to St. George slaying the dragon. From the 16th century to the 19th, the dragons were enormous: religious intolerance, slavery and the slave trade, wretched prison conditions. But liberalism, unlike St. George, did not know when to retire, and in the 20th century it “grew breathless in [its] pursuit of smaller and smaller dragons—for the big dragons were now harder to come by.”
The cigarette was one of those small dragons, but a decrepit liberalism has laid it low. Sarah Milov’s “The Cigarette: A Political History” tells the story of how this happened, taking us from the rise of the tobacco industry in the Southeastern United States in the 19th century to the protracted court battles that nearly obliterated cigarette manufacturers in the 1990s and early 2000s.
