ABSTRACT
More than thirty years since its publication in 1983, Geoffrey Pearson’s Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears remains both required reading for sociologists, criminologists and historians and a vital point of reference for those rare media commentators willing to acknowledge the historical roots of street crime, disorder and violence in Britain’s cities. 1 Working back from the wave of riots that spread from London to Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham during the summer of 1981, Pearson showed how preceding generations of Britons had all seen themselves as uniquely troubled by lawlessness and disorder. Each generation had invoked mythical ‘golden ages’ in the past, with conservative social commentators across decades and even centuries issuing remarkably similar complaints about the corrosive influence of popular culture on the young, accompanied by recurring pleas for harsher punishments.
