Book review: Folk Devils and Moral Panics

To celebrate the 60th anniversary of our Department of Sociology, now named the Department of Sociology and Criminology, we are publishing a short blogpost series on books published by members of the Department. The series showcases the diverse and rich research legacy and traces an engaging history of the Department.

Folk Devils and Moral Panics
by Stanley Cohen

My memory isn’t as good as it used to be (as Stan might have said to illustrate ‘denial of responsibility’) but I was taught by Stan when an undergraduate at Essex in the years 1973-76 and I recall him lecturing about Folk Devils and Moral Panics (hereafter FDMP) which had been published in 1972. The book describes skirmishes between groups of young people identifying as either Mods or Rockers, the role of the media in over-reporting and sensationalising events, and the reactions of police, public, and ‘authority’ in general – as often represented by the much quoted Margate Magistrate, Dr George Simpson, who described the Bank Holiday invaders at Margate as “…long haired, mentally unstable, petty little hoodlums, … sawdust Caesars who can only find courage like rats, in hunting in packs”. In all of this, as he gathered data for his PhD, we can feel Stan wondering, ‘what on earth is going on?’.

I stayed on at Essex through 1976-77 to do an MA and attended the specialist seminar run by Stan. I was enthusiastic about developments in the transatlantic sociology of deviance and radical criminology’s discovery of Marxism, so was a little disappointed to discover that Stan’s enthusiasm of the moment was for an obscure text called  ‘I, Pierre Rivière, having slaughtered my mother, my sister and my brother… A case of parricide in the 19th century,’ edited by someone called Michel Foucault (1975). Stan’s research on Mods and Rockers had involved reviewing stories in local newspapers in Clacton, Brighton and elsewhere, and reports from the proceedings of Magistrates' courts, so perhaps he saw some methodological parallels with the project of Foucault and colleagues as they examined the court documents and newspaper reports from the 1835 trial of Pierre Rivière and his memoir written while in prison (see Davies and Speedy, 2012).

Although Discipline and Punish was not published in English until 1978, Foucault’s influence on what would become ‘The punitive city’ (Cohen, 1979) and Visions of Social Control (Cohen, 1985) was evident. The rush of provocative ideas from (post-) structuralism, post-modernism and so on, meant Stan’s attention was redirected well away from the Bank Holiday beaches of Brighton or Clacton. By the time I was doing my PhD at Middlesex and Stan was a remote third supervisor sending letters from Jerusalem where he was teaching at the Hebrew University, he was firmly turning attention toward the human rights agenda -  although of course retaining his imaginative use of deviancy theory in the way he developed his analysis of techniques of neutralization and denial in the highly influential text States of Denial (Cohen 2001; South, 2002).

I note all this because Stan’s name is so often so strongly attached to FDMP but in terms of his personal intellectual biography, the book and his years of involvement in the National Deviancy Conference (Cohen, 1971) represent a relatively short span of time. So the obvious question is, why has the book been so enduring?

The book must be one of the most well known in the British (and probably in the international) field of studies of labelling and deviance, youth culture, media amplification spirals, and official reaction, so lengthy attention to what it is about must be unnecessary. The book has generated a small industry of studies revisiting its locations, methods and analysis and any literature search will find examples. It is widely credited as an example of a study that successfully exported into everyday language the sociological concepts that make up its memorable title – although as McLaughlin (2014) points out, the idea of ‘moral panics’ can be traced back to McLuhan (1967) and was re-worked by Jock Young in his book The Drugtakers (1971: 181–182) which preceded FDMP by a year.

Looking back, perhaps the most interesting reflections on the book, its influence and later directions, are those offered by Stan himself. FDMP has always been ‘in print’, originally published by McGibbon and Kee in 1972, in paperback by Paladin in 1973 and re-published by others in later years with the original text but new introductory essays. These essays, ‘Symbols of Trouble’ (1980) and ‘Moral Panics as Cultural Politics’ (2002) have become important reference points in themselves for the ways in which Stan provided perceptive appreciation of some new works and critical commentary on other directions that he saw as products of intellectual fashion.

FDMP is a staple of the sociological curriculum and textbooks and remains a fascinating account of some moments of significance in post-war British social history, being in a way less about clashes between young people and more about clashes between generations. However, while Stan appreciated the success of FDMP and the colleagues and critics who helped to shape ‘new deviancy’ theory — as he subsequently observed in an acceptance speech for the first “Outstanding Achievement Award” of the British Society of Criminology (Cardiff, 29 June 2009) — FDMP was “surely a child of its time and place. At the end of the Seventies I went to live in Israel for what turned out seventeen years. As this period moved along, so the book and its cultural milieu seemed more and more remote.” And, so I’ll conclude here, as Stan concluded in his speech:

“after a journey into the past”, this is “where we have reached: The critique behind the concept of moral panics, is that too much attention (human resources, moral indignation, social construction) is given to the particular problem at issue.  The critique behind the concept of denial is too little attention of the same type is given to a particular problem.”

by Nigel South, Emeritus Professor

April 2025

• Essex Sociology celebrates 60 years