ABSTRACT

At the end of Visions of Social Control, Stan Cohen quotes a parable by Saul Alinsky, the radical American community organiser. It poses a tragic dilemma (Cohen 1985: 236). A fisherman sees a body floating downstream, and jumps in to rescue it. The same thing happens a few minutes, later, and then again, and again. When a tenth body floats down, the fisherman ignores it and starts running upstream. ‘Where are you going?’ shouts an observer, ‘why aren’t you rescuing that poor man?’ The fisherman replies that he’s going to find out how to stop these people getting pushed into the water in the first place.