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Crime Media Culture7(3) 229–236

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The context of an emergent andenduring concept

Chris Jenks1

AbstractThis paper seeks to situate the concept of a ‘moral panic’ within a set of historical and social changes

and thus to demonstrate that its impact and subsequent acceptability within the vocabulary

of sociology were in part due to the conditions of its emergence. Earlier and more positivisticcriminology was unduly committed to the ‘essence’ of an act, whereas the breakthrough afforded

by Cohen and Young’s idea was to attend to the ‘appearance’ of an act in an era when image

and representation were becoming primary phenomena within the social sciences. The work

concludes with an analysis of the social construction of transgression.

Keywordsappearance, moral panic, transgression

Let me begin by introducing the two major figures who provided us with our concept, ‘moralpanics’, Professor Stanley Cohen and Professor Jock Young. Stan was brought up in South Africa

and graduated from Witwatersrand University, after which he came to the UK to complete a PhD

at the LSE, then take a lectureship at Durham followed by a Chair at Essex. He then moved to

Israel and spent a considerable time as Director of the Institute of Criminology in Jerusalem. Finally

Stan returned to the LSE as Professor of Sociology where he now holds an Emeritus Chair.

Jock started out from a lectureship at Enfield College of Technology, which in the 1970s was

a real powerhouse of radical social theory. Enfield morphed into Middlesex where Jock held his

first Chair, he spent some time in the States where he still has a Chair at City University of New

York (CUNY) and he currently has an associate post at Kent University in the UK.Both of these people are known to be major contributors to and innovators within modern

criminology and they both have considerable and distinguished lists of publication around the

issue of moral panics but ranging well beyond that now classic idea.

Interestingly and unfortunately, our paths have crossed very little over the years. I have encoun-

tered Stan across a public lecture and I met Jock a couple of times through some of my postgraduate

peers who were teaching at Enfield in the early 1970s – I do remember that he had a rather

1 Brunel University, UKEmail: [email protected]

417602CMCXXX10.1177/1741659011417602JenksCrime Media Culture

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230 CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 7(3)

handsome Pancho Villa moustache and a smart leather shoulder bag – but, to be fair, that was

the era when we were all wearing high-heeled boots!

My supervisor, Basil Bernstein, who became known primarily through his ‘socio-linguistic

codes’, always said to me ‘if you want to get famous get yourself a concept’; by which he meant

that if someone mentions your idea it is as if you walk into the room and occupy some of theirspace and time – well, I never did, and see what happened to me. These two major theorists, Stan

and Jock, developed a stunning concept which we are still discussing 40 years on. I think it falls to

them to tell us whether this innovation has been an accelerator or a hindrance in their careers, and

it’s also up to them to tell us which of the two came up with the idea – I suspect this is a zone of

some contention and I am not going to step into that water!

Before I start to discuss ideas I have one last question to ask and that is: how should a sociolo-

gist respond when the media which they are engaging in their critique take their concepts for

granted and assume them as part of their everyday vocabulary? I have even heard the hectoring

stentor John Humphries invoke moral panic, not in contempt but as a descriptive term – the irony

was just staggering.

Now I want to engage with the rise of the moral panic concept and I shall do this by looking at

the social context within which it emerged and how the idea successfully picked up on certain key

elements of the zeitgeist – and I mean this to be a laudatory, not a reductionist, exercise.

All sociological analysis takes place in a social and historical context; it is not completely bound

to that context but neither can it wholly liberate itself from that context. It is the bisection of history

and biography that makes for the uniqueness of any sociological act. Sociology is probably no more

than 60 years old in the United Kingdom and in its first decade its preoccupations were substan-

tively around vertical stratification (that is, social class as opposed to race and gender which were

then seen, perversely, as horizontal forms of stratification). The dominant theoretical paradigms of

this earlier work were normative, holistic and, deriving largely from the United States, systemic.

By the early 1970s ‘times were a-changing’ and criminology and the sociology of education

were two of the most dynamic and critical areas of study in the development of social theory. They

were both fundamentally questioning the normative order and demanding new forms of under-

standing and mobility. The values that delineated the good and the decent from the bad and

pathological were coming under question. The basic assumptions of positivist criminology were

being subjected to fierce interrogation. Given the overwhelming power of the central values and

the saturation of the socialization process in his social system, Parsons (1951) had difficulty in

accounting for crime at all. Crime had to be reconstructed after the fact as a distortion of orthrough the warping of normal dispositions within marginal subcultures. Merton (1968) sug-

gested that theft might be seen as striving for the appropriate ends but applying the inappropriate

means. Earlier, C. Wright Mills (1943) in his typically irreverent and acerbic fashion had argued

that normative criminologists all came from the same small towns, went to the same small univer-

sities, married into the same small coterie of faculty wives and consequently had small minds that

disposed them to judge decisively in relation to the morality and criminality of others. But still,

elective courses in ‘Deviancy’ persisted in the academy in the USA and the UK, and this was not

deviancy in a statistical sense. The course in the Sociology of Deviance which I took in the late

1960s was a somewhat vicarious tour of naughty things done by wicked people; often one sick-ness a week. I recall being required to write an essay on why homosexuality was dysfunctional and

this was in post-Wolfenden London!




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It is said that if you can remember the 1960s then you weren’t there – well, I can remember

the sixties, I seem to have spent most of them taking exams. But alongside this routine practice of

credentialism one was very much aware that there was a mounting tide of criticism in all spheres

of life. Parents were being questioned, politicians interrupted, professors were disagreed with,

war was out of favour, upward mobility was seen as a right, pleasure was integrated into life, liv-ing standards rose, more people were getting better educated, there was a greater emphasis on

merit, rights and democracy – the standards of the past were no longer good enough, they could

not claim respect through simply being there. Increasingly, and particularly in the academy, noth-

ing was sacred, nothing was to be taken for granted. Perhaps even criminals were people too and

the forces of law and order and indeed the law makers were not simply right, they operated from

positions of interest, but interests that were not articulated.

Whereas the problem of order had been the unproblematic basis of all sociological thinking,

there was now a noticeable shift to questions of control. We were rightly concerned with power

– how are boundaries established around phenomena, how are those boundaries policed, and

what is the power hidden behind and protected by the boundaries? This disruptive issue can be

easily formulated in the apparently simple question: ‘if someone tells you something is for your

own good then what is in it for them? – even if it’s your MP, a policeman, your teacher, or even

your parents!’

Dependency, symbiosis and reciprocity were ideas waning in their explanatory power, they

were being replaced by questions of fragmentation, conflict and choice. Thus dense, hegemonic

structures were having to concede to forms of agency and forms of identity politics, and this was

challenging stuff. The social order that we were all previously assumed to adhere to and its con-

tracts or obligations that only criminals or deviants were assumed to challenge no longer held

sway. Power made for order, benign or repressive, and agency always threatened to bring that

down.

Finally, I suppose, quasi-ontological issues arose about how the social world comes into being;

is it through the artful day-to-day practices of social actors, through language, or through its posi-

tive relation with existing sociological categories? Yet again, all questions of power.

Despite the fact that there were noticeable factions and demarcations between sociologists,

the shared drive towards demystification and reclaiming of the social provided an interesting uni-

fied thrust and despite their perspectival differences Marxists, neo-Marxists, phenomenologists,

interactionists, ethnomethodologists and more found things to talk about and we were in the era

of the NEW – new directions in sociological theory, new criminology, new sociology of educationand so on.

The ‘new’ sociologies held a number of epistemological elements in common:

• Primarily, that life is seen as project and humankind as the generator of meaning.

• Secondly, that although Marxism necessarily retained the constraint that structures bestow,

a greater voluntarism had emerged and a swing away from macro analysis.

• Third, an antagonism formed towards quantification (see Cicourel and Kitsuse [1963] and

also Hindess [1973] on official statistics) and even towards the scientific method as itself a

tool of power. ‘Science isn’t powerful because it’s true but true because it’s powerful’became the mantra. This suited me well because I was bad with numbers and I remember

being berated by John Goldthorpe for ‘soft, sloppy, interpretive work’.




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• Fourth, as already stated, there was a burgeoning mistrust of the taken-for-granted, the

underlying categories that made up the social order (see Bernstein, 1974).

• A final element in this liberal stew was the ascendancy of subjectivity, a cult of the indi-

vidual in theorizing which took many forms but was often dressed as ‘reflexivity’, a kind of

critical self-regard for a standpoint. A simpler version of this had been bequeathed byBecker (1967) when he asked us ‘whose side are you on?’ and almost universally the

answer came back – ‘the underdog’ – this instanced a new, committed morality.

So here you have the receptive conditions for the high impact of moral panic theorizing, though

not exhaustively the spark for its creation. How clear, articulate and disinterested are the central

values that mark out crime? Where does middle-class adolescent high spirits drift into working-

class delinquency; how do we distinguish between pilfering from the factory stores and white-

collar crime; is crime against property different from crime against the person? Typification studies

revealed how categories of people were conflated with categories of action; labelling studies

showed how identity becomes shaped by formal designations; and social reaction studies enabled

us to see how responses to certain actions may be disproportionate but also defining. Don’t the

criminalized deserve a chance or at least a voice?

We were no longer interested in the noumenal form of crime but in its phenomenal form; its

appearance, not its essence.

The ‘moral panic’ thesis touched many of these elements in a sophisticated, critical and pio-

neering manner. But let us return to our origins once more and investigate the consensus conven-

tion in our study and its erosion.

The development of sociology confronted us with the problem of a new reality – that is, ‘ society’

as a thing to be studied, not just to take part in. Experientially, being in society is difficult enough,

but as an object of understanding it has always presented inscrutable difficulties. What then is this

thing called society?

Until the latter third of the last century sociologists were largely content to understand the

social through conceptual vehicles such as ‘order’, ‘systems’ and shared norms and values. Now

these devices served well and enabled us to sustain a feeble idea of society as being rather like the

flat earth with a centre, a cohesive force and strict edges. We talked about normative conduct and

deviant conduct. Increasingly it dawned on us that our simple model was unsupported by life

itself. Society did not rest on an even base; there were folds and subterranean tendrils moving

from part to part. The parts no longer interrelated so easily, there was no obvious harmony oragreement, but instead competition, difference and divergence.

We now had to resort to other devices such as solidarity, culture and community to express

pockets of agreement and to reaffirm our faith in the collective life. The discipline, having evolved

in part through a competition between theoretical perspectives, shifted through a series of meta-

paradigms which we regarded sequentially as the ‘linguistic turn’, the ‘reflexive turn’, the ‘cultural

turn’ and the ‘visual turn’. This macro-conceptual evolution was not just one that was driven by

an individual sense of intellectual purpose. The society itself was moving more and more rapidly

and the zeitgeist was shifting (or adapting) with equal acceleration. The Thatcherism of the 1980s

pronounced the death of the social and cast human relations loose onto the vagaries of marketforces; at the same time the academy erupted into the era of the post-, with post-history, post-

feminism, post-colonialism, post-nationalism and overarching them all the spectre of the


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‘postmodern’. Tangible metaphors of the social no longer seemed viable and our languages of

order gave way to new geographies of social space, many of which appeared entirely cognitive.

What remained, however, was a lingering, and real, sense of limits. Though diffuse and ill-defined

the limits, the margins, now took on a most important role in describing and defining the centre.

Beyond the limits – be they classificatory, theoretical or even moral – there remained asociality orchaos but ever more vivid and in greater proximity. Thus our new topic became the transgression

that transcends the limits or forces through the boundaries.

Apart from the more obvious economic, technological and political changes that had brought

our present circumstances into being, there were also two grand philosophical moments that had

predicted their moral consequences. First the Enlightenment with its insistence on the ultimate

perfectibility of humankind – a goal that was to be achieved by privileging calculative reason. And

second, Nietzsche’s announcement that ‘God is dead’.

Now the Enlightenment ideal has meant three things: (1) that we have come to confuse change

with progress; (2) that we have experimented with human excellence through various flawed

political policies; and (3) that we have become intolerant if not incredulous towards excessive or

transgressive behaviour. Nietzsche’s obituary for the Almighty, on the other hand, has given rise

to three different but contributory processes: (1) it has removed certainty; (2) it has mainstreamed

the re-evaluation of values; and (3) it has released control over infinity (see Jenks, 2003).

Perhaps only 40 years ago we discussed ‘society’ as a reality with confidence, as recently as

1990 we considered ideas like a ‘common culture’ without caution. Today, in the wake of a series

of debates we cannot even pronounce such holisms without fear of intellectual reprisals on the

basis of epistemological imperialism. ‘Identity politics’ has become a new currency with different,

and increasingly minority, groups claiming a right to speak and equivalence of significance.

Perpetually fresh questions are raised about the relationship between the core of social life and

the periphery; the centre and the margins; identity and difference, the normal and the deviant,

and the possible rules that could conceivably bind us into a collectivity. The fragility of the bond

exposed the need or perhaps propensity for groups to externalize clusters of otherness to provide

some passing stability for their own modes of conduct – moral panic buttons always in easy reach!

Now these kinds of question have always been raised but in liminal zones within the culture

such as the avant garde, radical political movements (anarchism and situationism), and counter-

cultural traditions in creative practice (surrealism). However, such questions have now moved

from the liminal zones into the centre. Berman (1983) after Marx announced ‘all that which is

solid melts into air’; we have all become aware that ‘the centre cannot hold’. An insecurity hasentered into our consciousness, an insecurity concerning our relationships with others and con-

cerning the ownership of our own desires. We are no longer sure on what basis we belong to

another being.

Various forms of dependency – or, to put the matter less provocatively, trust – are fostered by

the reconstruction of day-to-day life via abstract systems. Some such systems, in their global

extensions, have created social influences which no one wholly controls and whose outcomes

are in some part specifically unpredictable. (Giddens, 1991: 176)

This present state of uncertainty and flux within our culture raises fundamental questions con-

cerning the categories of the normal and the pathological when applied to action or social




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institutions. Such periods of instability, as we are now experiencing, tend to test and force issues

of authority and tradition – truth and surety are up for question. Clearly the 1960s provide another

recent example of such a febrile epoch. The difference in the experience of today with that of the

1960s is that now we cannot commit readily to change because there exists no collective faith in

an alternative to the existing cultural configuration – note the almost unremarkable transitionfrom one government to another in the UK in 1997 and again into a coalition in 2010. It is hard

to be militant in a culture where there is no consolidated belief in any collective form of action or

collective identity; the political right appeals to outmoded ideas of ‘nation’ (symbolized through

currency or ‘big society’) and the left targets minority groupings to create temporary clusterings

(note single-parent families or even students). It would seem that instability and uncertainty are

experienced today in peculiarly privatized forms that rarely extend beyond ourselves or our imme-

diate circle. Far from a fear of freedom, we now appear to espouse a fear of collectivity; we have

become wary of seeking out commonality with others. The vociferous politics of our time are thus

‘identity politics’, and the response to dominant conditions is often poetic. There is a pathos in

witnessing the temporary arousal of an aimless collective consciousness, and then only in the

wake of the sad and untimely death of a dilettante princess – I refer to the extended public

mourning of Diana Princess of Wales in the UK in 1997. Perhaps a more constant mechanism to

countered decentredness is economic jingoism (the invading European workforce) and belief stig-

matization (anti-semitism and islamophobia) – both provide external parameters to buttress a

febrile internality and a floating signifier of moral righteousness – the cue for a panic.

It is only by having a strong sense of the ‘together’ that we can begin to understand and

account for that which is outside, at the margins or, indeed, that which defies the consensus. The

contemporary rebel is left with neither utopianism nor nihilism, but rather loneliness. Time has

already outstripped Camus (1971) and his wholly cognitive rebel:

Metaphysical rebellion is the means by which a man protests against his condition and

against the whole of creation. It is metaphysical because it disputes the ends of man and

creation. The slave protests against the condition of his state of slavery; the metaphysical

rebel protests against the human condition in general. The rebel slave affirms that there is

something in him which will not tolerate the manner in which his master treats him; the

metaphysical rebel declares that he is frustrated by the universe. For both of them it is not

only a problem of pure and simple negation. In fact in both cases we find an assessment of

values in the name of which the rebel refuses to accept the condition in which he findshimself. (Camus, 1971: 29)

And also the inspirations of the Marquis de Sade, the grand libertine, who saw God as the great

criminal and whose dedicated nihilism asserted that ‘vice and virtue comingle in the grave like

everything else’. The possibility of breaking free from moral constraint in contemporary culture

has become an intensely privatized project. As we recognize no bond we acknowledge fracture

only with difficulty – how then do we become free-of or different-to? Such questioning provides

the perfect moment to theorize the transgressive conduct that stems from such positionings.

Transgression is that which exceeds boundaries or exceeds limits (see Jenks, 2003). However,we need to affirm that human experience is the constant experience of limits, perhaps because of




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the absolute finitude of death; this is a point made forcefully by Bataille (1985). Constraint is a

constant experience in our action; it needs to be to render us social. Interestingly enough, how-

ever, the limits to our experience and the taboos that police them are never simply imposed from

the outside; rather, limits to behaviour are always personal responses to moral imperatives that

stem from the inside. This means that any limit on conduct carries with it an intense relationshipwith the desire to transgress that limit. Simple societies expressed this clearly through mythology

and more recent societies have celebrated this magnetic antipathy between order and excess

through periodic ‘carnival’ and the idea of the ‘world turned upside down’, as Bakhtin (1968)

demonstrates.

Let us say a few initial words about the complex nature of carnival laughter. It is, first of all, a

festive laughter. Therefore it is not an individual reaction to some isolated comic event. Carnival

laughter is the laughter of all the people. Second, it is universal in scope; it is directed at all and

everyone, including the carnival’s participants. The entire world is seen in its droll aspect, in its

gay relativity. Third, this laughter is ambivalent; it is gay, triumphant, and at the same time

mocking, deriding. It asserts and denies, it buries and revives. Such is the laughter of the

carnival. (Bakhtin, 1968: 11–12)

Transgressive behaviour therefore does not deny limits or boundaries; rather it exceeds them

and thus completes them. Every rule, limit, boundary or edge carries with it its own fracture, pen-

etration or impulse to disobey. The transgression is a component of the rule. Seen in this way

excess is not an aberration nor a luxury; it is rather a dynamic force in cultural reproduction – it

prevents stagnation by breaking the rule and it ensures stability by reaffirming the rule.

Transgression is not the same as disorder; it opens up chaos and reminds us of the necessity of

order. But the problem remains, we need to know the collective order, to recognize the edges in

order to transcend them. Moral panic devices are that which we employ to provide some tempo-

rary state of solidity in an uncertain world. The content of these devices may shift in time from

mods and rockers, to bankers, paedophiles and MPs’ expenses, but the form and purpose remains

constant. Such devices enable us to cling on to some piece of wreckage, as yet unsunk, to escape

the fluidity that threatens to engulf.

ReferencesBakhtin, M.M. (1968) Rabelais and His World . Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

Bataille, G. (1985) Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–1939. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Becker, H.S. (1967) Whose side are we on? Social Problems 14(Winter): 239–247.

Berman, M. (1983) All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity . London: Verso.

Bernstein, B. (1974) Sociology and the sociology of education: A brief account. In: Rex, J (Ed.) Approaches to

Sociology . London: Routledge, 145–159.

Camus, A. (1971) The Rebel . Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.

Cicourel, A. and Kitsuse, J. (1963) A note on the use of official statistics. Social Problems 11(2): 131–139.

Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Oxford: Polity.

Hindess, B. (1973) On the Use of Official Statistics in Sociology . London: Macmillan.Jenks, C. (2003) Transgression. London: Routledge.




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Merton, R. (1968) Social Theory and Social Structure. New York: Free Press.

Mills, C.W. (1943) The professional ideology of social pathologists. American Journal of Sociology 49(2):

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Parsons, T. (1951) The Social System. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
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