THE MORAL PANIC: DEAD OR ALIVE?

Delivered at the seminar, Revisiting Moral Panics: Moral Panics and the Family,
University of Edinburgh, 23 November 2012
Id like to thank my hosts at the Family Seminar and the Department of Social Work at
the University of Edinburgh for inviting me. I feel deeply honored to be speaking at such a
venerable institution and in the company of such distinguished participants.
Not only is the moral panic a widely-known concept, it has also attracted fans and
connoisseurs. In Cracked.com, a writer named Geoff Shakespeare, nominated his 6 favorite
most insane moral panics in American history. Some on his list (such as horror comics
and satanic ritual abuse) are everyones favorites., though its difficult to top the
extravagance of the nineteenth-century concern about premature burial (Wjcicka, 2010),
invoking as it does, Dracula, Houdini, the Scottish theologian Duns Scotus, and the
American TV program MythBusters.
But ultimately, the researcher must move beyond connoisseurship of the exotic and the
outr to become a systematic analyst of the generic form. And the conceptual benefit of the
moral panic concept can be operationalized by the speed with which it has been adopted by
researchers and scholars and the number of references to it in the literature. From decade
to decade, moral panic scholarship has hugely expanded. Most scholars never fashion a
concept that substantially inspires or influences the work of others. Even most productive
academics never achieve any more than a modest measure of influence beyond a few
citations and a handful of quotations in this textbook or that, in one journal article or
another.
In contrast, to echo the words of this seminars brochure, in words of Jason Ditton
(2007), Stanley Cohens innovation has been far and away the most influential sociological

concept to have been generated in the second half of the twentieth century, and from
David Garland (2008), likewise a voice in the brochure, the moral panic concept has been
so useful that if Cohen hadnt invented the term, it would have been necessary for
someone else to invent it.
On the other hand, as we all know, popularity is no assurance of validity. Even so, Im
interested in the numbers, and I asked Nachman Ben-Yehuda to run a citation count for
me. As measured by the use of the terms moral panic and moral panics in the title by
seven different academic search enginesthe popularity of the concept jumped five times
from the seventies to the eighties; it jumped another 6 and a half times from the eighties to
the nineties, and rose 1.6 times from the nineties to the first decade of the twenty-first
century, that is, from 2000 to 2009. Sixteen books were published in the last of these
decades with moral panic in their title.
Yet, in spite of the concepts popularity, there are critics who deny its importance,
arguing either that it was stillborn at the moment of its conception, or is deadit has
outlived its utility (Waiton, 2008). One wonders about the sagacity of pronouncements
about the nonexistence or demise of a notion that in fact seems quite robust. Why do critics
make intellectual hay out of such a manifestly bogus claim?
In graduate school, half a century ago, I took a couple of courses with Robert K.
Merton, then the most prominent sociologist in the world. One of the things I learned from
him was that when we encounter an anomalous or puzzling phenomenon we should raise
the questions: How does this come to be so? Why do so many of us accept superficial
appearances and overlook whats going on around us? Stan Cohens conceptthough not
necessarily his theoryis in this skeptical tradition. The moral panic idea would have

delighted Mertons sensibility, entailing identifying a real-world process that we hadnt yet
attached a name to.
Once we are sensitized to its substantiality, the moral panic becomes a pie-in-the face
phenomenon that we ignore only by wiping off the splatter, grinning, and pretending that
the pie never hit us. Disagreeing that a given explanation for a specific moral panic may be
flawed is not the same thing as defending the notion that there is such a thing as a moral
panic. A truism, you say? Well, lets forge on.
It makes no sense to argue, as Bill Thompson does (Thompson, and Greek, 2012;
Thompson and Williams, 2013), that Howard Beckers conceptualization of deviance
(1963), Joseph Gusfields idea of symbolic crusades (1963), or Mark Fishmans notion of
crime waves (1978), compete with or contradict Stan Cohens notion of the moral panic
(1972). All of them drink from the same well, and that is: An aroused sense of concern by
designated agents that is out of proportion to the supposed threat that that concern is about.
How this comes about is a separate matter. Thompson moves from saying that Cohens
model of the moral panic, including the phases he outlines for a paradigmatic framework,
and the generalizability from the mods and rockers to other panicsindeed, whether his
analysis of the mods and rockers itself, is flawedand I have no problem with that, to
saying that the concept of the moral panic, including the way that Ben-Yehuda and I have
used it, no longer makes any sense (Thompson and Greek, 2012, p. 2; my italics).
Here, I have to part company with Bill Thompson. I believe the concept makes a great
deal of sense, and I believe that, however flawed his analysis, Cohens placing the moral
panic concept on the stage and activating investigation into its dynamics has earned him a
place in the history of the coinage and analytic purchase of the concept.

In the nineteen-sixties, when a representative of a state agency said: LSD is the greatest
threat facing the country today (Brecher et al., 1972, p. 369), we have to ask: Was it? Of
course not. We know that now; we knew it then. In that same decade, if we read that if
you take LSD, even once, your children may be born malformed or retarded (Davison,
1967), we have to ask, Is this true? It was not. Why was it believed? Now, multiply that
concern by thousands of times, and we have a moral panic on our hands. Multiply such
cases by thousands of episodes, and we have a major sociological concept with important
consequences.
Contrary to Thompsons charge that the concept has had a four-decade of failure
(Thomson and Greek, 2012; Thompson and Williams, 2013), in fact, weve had a fourdecade run of the moral panic concepts enormous utility to the field, and this conference is
a testament to its continuing relevance and resonance. And it is against the background of
the extravagant success of Stan Cohens notion that we must gauge the claims of its
debunkers. Successful, high-impact theories and concepts tend to attract criticism, for, in
the academic world, whoever successfully debunks them will receive attention and esteem.
Predictably, as soon as the moral panic concept entered the social science vocabulary,
critics took aim at claims of its utility and viability. We take for granted that some of the
components of the moral panic notion are controversial and difficult to measure. Still, to
me, the most specious and counterfactual argument is the refusal of some observers to
acknowledge the very existence of the moral panic.
As Stan Cohen said (2002), engaging in moral panic research is fun. The nay-sayers
refuse to jump in the water and join in on the funthey deny that its fun, indeed, they
deny the very existence of the water. (Better yet, as Ben-Yehuda told me, in a private

communication, its as if the moral panic is a mountain and its critics are mice nibbling at
its base, trying to bring it down.) The moral panics concept, say Cornwell and Linders
(2002), is so laden with ontological and methodological difficulties as to render it virtually
useless as an analytic guiding light. Norris Johnson, a disaster specialist, argues that the
moral panic further muddles our catalogue of concepts we might use to understand
collective responses to a given threat (1997). And yet, the concept thrives.
In 2002, Bill Thompson, formerly lecturer at Reading University, was embroiled in an
instance of a moral panic himself, which resulted in his victimization. He investigated
purported cases of child abuse, and had received authorization to examine child
pornographic materials. The local magistrate ignored his authorization, the Thames Valley
Police smashed in the front door of his house, and raided and searched his home and office,
confiscated said offensive materials, seized his computer and files, and as a result, he was
suspended from his university position. In short, Bill Thompson, the victim of a moral
panic, denies that the moral panic exists. This spring, Routledge will publish a book thats a
critical assault on the moral panics concept, by Bill Thompson and Andy Williams, entitled
The Myth of Moral Panics: Sex, Snuff, and Satan (2013).
A great title, I admit; who could resist it? I have enormous respect for a scholar who
swims so much against the tide as Thompson does. I like rebels, and the moral panic is
deeply entrenched in the field. Thompson refers to observers who use the concept, the
moral panic as these silly sociologists, pontificating in a Silly Season who refer to
sozzled students as a moral panic, misreading the situation because they fail to move
beyond basing their definition of the panic on reactions manifested solely by the media
and by legislators (1994, 2012, 2013).

Stanley Cohen did not argue that the media and legislators are the only agents who
express the moral panicthough he did focus largely on them. Ben-Yehuda and I, taking
our cue from Cohen, mention five agents or actors who express the panicnot only the
media and the government, but the public at large, social movement organizations or
advocacy groups, and law enforcement (2009, pp. 23-27).
In actual fact, Thompson turns out to be a stealth supporter of the moral panic concept.
He argues that the anti-porn interest groups invent evidence, fabricate horror stories,
exaggerate and distort, activate stereotypes, report opinion as fact, and claim nonexistent
casualties (2012, 2013). Operating under the if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck,
its a duck principle, one is forced to the realization that what Thompson is describing is a
moral panicthe very conclusion he denies.
A more sophisticated understanding of the moral panic is that it is equivalent to generic
sociological concepts such as social stratification, deviance, socialization, and the group.
The theories that sociologists devise to account for whats happening under the rubric of
that concept are different; Ben-Yehuda and I located three very different models, and
there are certainly others (2009, pp. 51-72).
To me, the concepts greatest analytic purchase on contemporary society comes in with
respect to the issue of micro-issues and micro-panics, a point originally raised by Angela
McRobbie (1994; McRobbie and Thornton, 1995). In a post-modern society, the potential
of a given issue to activate the fears and concerns of the society at large becomes
increasingly difficult. And increasingly, moral panics entail the overblown concern that is
expressed by what McRobbie calls the new moral minorities. Political voices now come
from a variety of social movements, pressure groups, voluntary associations, and

charitiesfeminists, gay and lesbian activists and pressure groups, civil rights and antiracist organizations, which now provide oppositional views and alternative information
and analysis. And in tandem with these diverse and fragmented interests, we have a multimediated world with its micro-media, a multiplicity of voices which compete and
contest the meaning of issues which can generate a multiplicity of micro-moral panics. We
need a microscope and a wide-angle lensthe microscope for our cases, the wide-angle lens
to delineate the reach of the concept.
Hence, instead of the obsolescence of the moral panic, what micro-panic does is downsize the typical moral panic, and multiply the number of moral panics, that is, erupting in
specific locales or among specific social circles. Micro-panics are moral panics; the analyst
doesnt need the whole society to have a moral panicif such a phenomenon were even
possible today. What we see may be the transmogrification of the moral panic into
something substantially different. Hence, rather than annihilating the notion, this should
represent a challenge for all of us to re-conceptualize, rethink, and re-research the subject.
Thank you very much.

References
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