ABSTRACT
The year 2002 marked the publication of the third edition of Stan Cohen’s Folk Devils and Moral Panics, the thirtieth anniversary of a book first published in 1972. Moral panic is a concept of great theoretical power and resonance. It is one of the few terms coined by sociologists which has entered the language; it is, however, a term often evoked casually and unthinkingly, and as a consequence can easily lose meaning and usefulness. Stan Cohen’s classic analysis of moral panic is by far the most sophisticated rendition of the concept, and the study itself and the new edition of Folk Devils and Moral Panics remind us of the continued importance of its contribution to deviancy theory. It is a richly analysed text of much greater complexity and subtlety than many of the summaries and studies of moral panics which have followed it, and it reads today with as great impact as it did in the early 1970s.
