Whose side were we on? The undeclared politics of moral panic theory

Abstract

This paper deals with some hidden political dimensions of moral panic theory. It concentrates on the implications of two related claims about what this battle meant: first, that moral panics are inherently normative and can be categorized as good and bad moral panics (the ones that we study are invariably bad); second, that students of moral panics have to take sides in this normative battle. There are differences in the ways this question was originally posed in the late 1960s and today.