Article published in the journal Telos, February 29, 2024.
"Moral panic" is a concept developed by British sociologist Stanley Cohen to describe what happens when "a condition, event, person, or group of people is designated as a threat to the values and interests of a society." In his 1972 book, Folk Devils and Moral Panics[1], he observed in particular the disproportionate coverage by the British media of a few fights between groups of young people in 1964 on Brighton beach. Having become a classic, his book has been reissued and expanded, but it has never been translated into French. On the other hand, for a dozen years the expression "moral panic" has found its place in our intellectual and political debates. But it is now used in a spirit very far from Stanley Cohen's aim. Where the British sociologist sought to calm the debates on social deviance, his French heirs have put his concept at the service of a normative vision of political and moral deviance.
The indignant of the Sixties
In the introduction to the third edition of his book (2011), Stanley Cohen notes that "the term 'moral panics' is characteristic of the late 1960s. Its tone resonated particularly with the topics shared by the sociology of deviance and the cultural studies that were then emerging: delinquency, youth cultures, subcultures and styles, vandalism, drugs and hooliganism."
The phrase itself was first used by Jock Young in 1971, but Cohen notes that it was in Marshall McLuhan's work on media that he and Young drew their inspiration. Indeed, even though "panicked" representations of the social can be traced back to the XNUMXth century,[2], the phenomenon of "moral panic" is inseparable from the amplification effects characteristic of the era of "mass media", as it was then called.
Stanley Cohen's book is subtitled The Creation of Mods and Rockers, but the sociologist cites other examples and extracts a paradigm from them: what he seeks to describe and explain is an exaggerated and irrational reaction, which arises from elements exaggerated by the press until it takes on the appearance of a social phenomenon.
A section of British society in the late 1960s was driven by a mixture of anxiety and indignation, and the media held up a magnifying mirror to it. The main object of this anxiety was behaviour perceived as deviant and associated primarily with young people from the working classes at first (Mods and Rockers), then with youth in general (long hair, sexual liberation, drug use, violence). "Moral panics" occurred when this anxiety focused on a news item that aroused indignant disapproval, mixed with fear and anxiety.
The “indignant” of the 1960s were the middle classes, the bourgeoisie, the generation of parents – who could perfectly find themselves in Greta Thunberg’s severe and moralizing “How dare you”, admonishing half a century later the same generation of worrying and necessarily guilty baby boomers.
It should be noted here that this panicked indignation was also sought and cultivated by some of the "deviants" of the time, who enjoyed it and, for the most clever, detected its marketing potential. Andrew Oldham, the manager of the Rolling Stones who wanted to be the incarnation of the deviances of a generation, thus launched the famous phrase "Would you let your daughter sleep with a Rolling Stone?", intended to terrify adults and parents.
Societal panic finally opens up to more politicized forms, especially when the phenomena studied by Stanley Cohen are combined with other factors of concern, such as immigration. Some politicians then explicitly seek to panic the electorate. In 1968, in his famous “Rivers of Blood” speech, the far-right parliamentarian Enoch Powell imagined a United Kingdom overwhelmed by foreigners at the end of the century, and suggested that his voters were already thinking about jumping ship. At the other end of the political spectrum, in continental Europe, far-left terrorism aims to destabilize societies in order to precipitate revolution.
We can thus identify, at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, a dynamic of panic in the debate and representations, of which Stanley Cohen's book offers a remarkable key to reading. Not that the population was in the grip of panic. Rather, it is, in the plural to emphasize their varied and punctual character, various moral panics that can be identified, like a new register of social emotion, magnified by the echo chamber of the mass media.
"Neo-reactionaries"
The 1980s saw a gradual calming of the political field. The cultural and social phenomena that had panicked parents in 1972 were fading. Just as the register of political terror was fading in the West (before returning in association with jihadism), the imaginary of "moral panic" was also fading, as societal debates lost intensity. The term, however, did not disappear from the academic field.
An article by Chas Critcher[3], in 2008, draws up a brief literature review. To the British version of Stanley Cohen[4] American studies have been added, the main reference of which is the book by Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda published in 1994, Moral Panics.[5]. This book highlights different models of moral panics, around seven main areas: AIDS, child abuse, drugs, immigration, media violence, street crime and youth deviance. Chas Critcher notes in his article that critics "express reservations about the ambiguous terminology of the models, the assumptions about media effects, the predetermined dynamics and the vagueness of the results. Some advocate the revision of the models, others their abandonment". But Critcher considers that these models have contributed to empirically validating the widespread presence of moral panics in democratic and capitalist societies. He suggests that the analysis of moral panics should be deepened in the future by highlighting "three important sociological themes: discourse, risk and moral regulation".
These hushed discussions within the academic world[6] will continue, but in a few years we will see a spectacular spread of the formula, which will profoundly change the terms of the debate.
In France, it was at the beginning of the 2010s that it resurfaced in the spotlight, with the books and columns of essayists Gaël Brustier and Jean-Philippe Huelin on what they call the "neo-reactionaries".[7]Their thesis is quite simple: observing a shift to the right of opinion in Western societies, they attribute it to a set of moral panics (notably "in the face of populations from Islamic immigration"). And they see it less as an evolution of social experience than as a game of the conservative right which would have imposed, with the complicity of the media, a form of "cultural hegemony".
There is here an analytical matrix that we will find later. Where Stanley Cohen observed a complex interaction between opinion and the media in what he analyzed as a social construction, Gaël Brustier and Jean-Philippe Huelin suggest that a political agenda is at work, of which the media are relays: behind the construction, there are actors, who operate according to a Gramscian logic, a notion dear to Gaël Brustier[8]But this French version of moral panic is marked by other influences: that of Chomsky (Manufacturing Consent, 1988), the later Bourdieu (On Television, 1996) and essayists from Le Monde diplomatique such as Serge Halimi (Les Nouveaux Chiens de garde, 1997).
In this French sequence, a second configuration of the use of the concept of moral panic crystallizes, which leaves the strictly academic field to enter that of essays. One of the effects of this exit is the passage from the plural to the singular: where following Stanley Cohen, Anglo-Saxon sociology always evoked moral panics, French essayists absolutize the concept to make it a sort of state of society. This second configuration is also marked by several traits: a marked politicization on the left, a Gramscian vision of cultural hegemony, and a low credit given to the autonomy of opinion and the rationality of the public.
This is where these analyses reach their limits. First of all, the authors neglect the progress, well identified by sociologists and pollsters, of cultural liberalism and tolerance (steady decline in racism and xenophobia, growing tolerance towards sexual minorities). Then, from the point of view of political sociology, their approach is rather rustic, not to say rudimentary. The complex movements of opinion are reduced to irrationality and manipulation.
Finally, their works are marked by the spirit of the times, particularly in the attribution of the role of the villain. The main culprits of this manipulation enterprise are the American neoconservatives, these democrats who rallied to Reagan at the end of the 1970s: "it is they, with the theoreticians of Thatcherism, who, on the basis of a fierce anti-communism and anti-leftism, thought and succeeded in propagating their right-wing conception in the 80s and 90s... until the outbreak that reached continental Europe in the 2000s" (Journey to the End of the Right).
The reader will have understood that "moral panic", in this configuration, is no longer a simple sociological concept. It is a politicized expression. It is used to disqualify, by reducing them to a passionate and irrational phenomenon fanned by actors carrying a harmful agenda, certain movements of opinion or certain positions. Stanley Cohen had identified this drift and, in the preface to the third edition of his work (2011), linked it to the "deliberate refusal of liberals, radicals and leftists to take the public's concerns seriously".
Several authors have followed in the footsteps of Gaël Brustier and Jean-Philippe Huelin. For example, Frédérique Matonti, in a book published by Fayard in 2021: How did we become reactionaries? In an interview the same year with the Bondy Blog[9], she sums up her thinking by deploring a distortion of public debate. "The omnipresence of these speeches is a symptom of the more general modification of public debates and of the many cultural battles (starting with the fight against racism) that the left has lost. If we take the entire chain that leads from the production to the dissemination of ideas, the balances have changed considerably since the 1970s. From the new rules of the intellectual world to the concentration of publishing and the media, including the transformation of political parties, everything is done so that fast thinkers and self-proclaimed experts triumph and carry the voice of reaction loudly."
These essayists have in common a lamentation of the failure of the left in terms of cultural hegemony, and an ignorance of the real movements of opinion towards more tolerance. As if, deep down, social reality counted less than the fight of ideologies to represent it, with a horizon of hegemony (regretted when it is the right that is supposed to win, desired when it is the left). The notion of "moral panic", thus mobilized, is not simply politicized. It is put to the service of an adversarial vision of public debate.
We will point out here a difference with the campaign against the "new reactionaries", led by Daniel Lindenberg under the aegis of Pierre Rosanvallon in 2002, a campaign which mainly targeted the intellectual world.[10]. In Brustier and Huellin, as in Frédérique Matonti, it is opinion and the operators of the public space (the media first and foremost) who are at fault. The first would be manipulated and irrational, the others would be at the service of a reactionary political agenda.
Social sciences in struggle
It is in this already heavily loaded field that a third configuration emerges at the end of the 2010s. It is played out both in the activist worlds and in the academic field, and as we will see it is not always easy to tell the difference.
In the activist worlds linked to the radical left, the expression "moral panic" is becoming common usage. Manon Boltansky, in the weekly L'Anticapitaliste (No. 631, October 6, 2022), writes that Sandrine Rousseau triggers a panic fear in her political opponents (and more broadly in men): "We can speak, among these gentlemen, of a real moral panic. Sandrine Rousseau has become the political incarnation of the "woke panic". She embodies the fear of the rise of radical feminist ideas and movements and, more broadly, progressive ones, on questions of gender and sexuality, as well as on the ecological question. A panic fear that is hardly proportional to the radicalism of the ideas that Rousseau defends on these questions, moreover... or on others. But, it is already (always) too much! Like others, Sandrine Rousseau has publicly decided to side with the victims and must “pay the price”: harassment and public vindictiveness.
The militant mobilization of the concept of "moral panic" is mainly used to defend a position or a personality against criticism. The technique consists of shifting the focus from the fact generating the reaction (here the declarations and the persona of Sandrine Rousseau) to the criticisms, invalidated just like those who carry them by their panic character. Thus the concept of moral panic joins the already broad repertoire of political rhetoric, in the well-known register of the disqualification of the adversary. Nothing new under the sun.
More worrying is the way in which the term is spreading in parallel in the academic field and ends up being used not to analyze social phenomena, but to qualify or rather to disqualify those who discuss them, referring them to two possible figures: the "panicked" or the "panic entrepreneur."
It is mainly around "wokeism" and the question of identity that this ultimate avatar of moral panic is played out.
In 2017, Laurence de Cock and Régis Meyran edited a collection of short essays on the theme of “identity panics”[11]The two editors clarify their definition, which differs from that of Stanley Cohen by the preponderant role conferred on certain actors and their interests: "An identity panic is caused by a given group which diffuses in the public space a mixture of questionable facts and ideologies, with the more or less explicit objective of channeling the fears of individuals, with the aim of convincing the greatest number of people to join their group."
The authors gathered in this collection logically insist on the "entrepreneurs" of these panics, on the interests that drive them, on the political agenda that is theirs. Stanley Cohen's concept is thus impoverished: for the analysis of a complex interaction between a fact, an audience, and the media, French sociologists of the years 2010-2020 substitute the dismantling of a manipulation enterprise. This is not without consequences.
First of all, the initial fact is hidden, it loses its importance, or is reduced to fake news (the expression "a debatable fact", for example, is mind-boggling. But it is very much in the spirit of 2017: in January of that same year, Kellyanne Conway, advisor to American President Donald Trump, spoke of "alternative facts").
Then the public is reduced to a passive position, that of credulity or, from a Marxist perspective, alienation. Its opinion thus loses all meaning of its own.
Finally, the importance given to the figure of the "entrepreneur" (a term mobilizing the dual register of the capitalist enterprise and the society of the spectacle) and to his political agenda goes hand in hand with a fairly flexible vision of the characteristics required to be classified under this label. One would expect Enoch Powell or his modern equivalents, but instead comes across Christophe Guilly and Laurent Bouvet. However, these authors are in no way "panic entrepreneurs", but intellectuals participating in the public debate. They consider, contrary to the hypothesis of a simple "moral panic" implying the alienation of those it concerns, that it is the reasoned and highly cultural choices of the actors that guide their behavior. And that these choices can be explained by intrinsic reasons, and not as being the product of an irrational panic produced by a press or malicious agents.
This collection of texts thus sees a doubling of the disqualifying use of the concept of moral panic. It disqualifies both the public (necessarily manipulated and easily prey to identity panic) and the academic or intellectual personalities who try to explain its behavior and concerns (these personalities become the acolytes of the entrepreneurs of identity panic). In terms of the epistemology of the social sciences, the denaturing of the concept forged by Stanley Cohen here leads to an impasse. Social reality is doubly evacuated, once as a fallacious construction, a second time as the object of an illegitimate analysis.[12].
Thus, Stanley Cohen's concept is no longer used to describe social facts, but to disqualify the opponent in intellectual or academic controversies. It is not surprising that in the current great controversy over "wokism" in the academic world, the motif of moral panic reappears regularly. In an article published in 2022 on the website The Conversation, the Canadian researcher Francis Dupuis-Déri thus reduces the criticism of wokism to the expression of a "fear". It would therefore not be a criticism, but an affect, a simple passion.[13]. In his essay Panic at the University[14], he takes up this line of argument by denouncing "exaggerations and lies", as well as "a manipulation that confines the mind and hinders intellectual curiosity, academic freedom and the development of knowledge". His essay presents itself as a "deconstruction of reactionary propaganda", which here again signals a certain distance from axiological neutrality: the phraseology of essayists contaminates academic discourse. Such a shift is not isolated. In his work La Panique woke. Anatomie d'une offensive résistance r�actionnaire[15], political scientist Alex Mahoudeau analyzes how the term woke "is today used pejoratively to attack any form of commitment against discrimination." "Any" form of commitment? Seriously?
It is time to conclude. The militant uses of the concept coined by Stanley Cohen and its progressive denaturation in the field of social sciences respond to each other. Those who today evoke a "moral panic" do so in a very recognizable configuration: designation of an actor with an agenda and influence (the "reactionary"), disqualification of his discourse (whose aim is to panic good people), pronounced tendency to evacuate social reality (academic wokeness does not exist, the identity fact does not deserve so much attention), disqualification of public opinion (which, deep down, "does not exist", Bourdieu said in 1972, the year of the first edition of Folk Devils and Moral Panics).
Stanley Cohen's work was part of a sociology of deviance, in which academic research took on the mission of calming the debate, of reducing a dramatized vision of deviance to a more modest social reality, which it tried to understand and bring to light. The sociologists who today denounce "moral panics" have a very different perspective. They substitute a neo-Marxist denunciation of the alienation of the people led astray by panic entrepreneurs for the complexity of the interactions in which social emotions arise. Most of them allow a very politically marked phraseology to show through: on the one hand, "struggles", on the other, "reaction". Where the sociology of deviance sought to reaffirm a common space in a spirit of tolerance, they denounce the deviance of their intellectual and political adversaries. The notion of moral panic thus undergoes a complete reversal. Designed to shed light on social facts, it is now used to cover them up. Forged to restore the common, it is now used to exclude from civic discussion a whole series of social actors and institutions whose speech, reduced to affects, is struck with illegitimacy.
