The Prohibition Mania: A Reply to Professor Irving Fisher and Others

DARROW, Clarence and Victor S. Yarros.

$2,000.00

Item Number: 100936

New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927.

First edition of Darrow and Yarros’ forceful answer to economist Irving Fisher’s defense of Prohibition. Octavo, original cloth. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper in the year of publication, “Inscribed to S.D. Green with the regards of Clarence Darrow Nov. 20th 1927.” In near fine condition.

When leading economist Irving Fisher championed Prohibition in his 1927 Prohibition at its Worst, he offered "empirical examinations of social statistics such as alcohol consumption, criminal activity and health" (Thornton, Economics of Prohibition). Clarence Darrow and Victor Yarros, the outspoken anarchist who was Darrow's longtime law partner, quickly responded with Prohibition Mania, turning "the spotlight on many of the weaknesses inherent in Fisher's reasoning" (Saturday Review). They charge Fisher with being "wrong in nearly all his conclusions," and devote the book to a detailed "analysis and discussion of the statements, arguments and conclusions in Professor Fisher's book… they inquire into the economic and social benefits which he insists flow from Prohibition and find them to be illusory or not proved" (New York Times). Historian Roderick Long points out that to economist Murray Rothbard, co-author Yarros "had been a Spencerian anarchist… but by the 1930s he had abandoned free-market anarchism for social democracy, in part because he had become convinced that the democratic state was a useful tool in the struggle against economic privilege" (Rothbard Memorial Lecture, Austrian Scholars Conference 2006).