For a political economy of moral panics

Introduction: Small Beer

Like all social science, moral panic analysis develops through an iterative process. Engagement with conceptual and theoretical analysis has to be complemented by examination of empirical evidence. Thus an incursion into exploring moral panics as a form of moral regulation (Critcher, 2009) was followed by a reversion to case studies, on this occasion contrasting the recent 21st-century furore over binge drinking with an apparent equivalent: the gin drinking craze in early 18th-century London (Critcher, 2011).

The gin craze was chosen to give an historical perspective. It also turned out to be one of the first truly modern moral panics in Britain, in the sense that it was not motivated by political or religious interests, involved campaigning by moral entrepreneurs independently of government, and consciously used the press as an instrument of propaganda (Lemmings, 2009). Alongside it appeared a developing concern about street crime (King, 2003). The gin craze, which prompted eight acts of Parliament between 1729 and 1750, was much more of a fully-fledged moral panic than binge drinking. Binge drinking stalled as a moral panic partly because of the equivocal status of folk devils. Mostly ordinary young Britons, many of them middle-class students, they were hard to demonize except in the abstract and even harder to take effective action against. Mass arrests of otherwise respectable young people for being drunk and disorderly would be a public relations disaster for the police and divert valuable resources.

So binge drinkers were subjected to a lot of verbal criticism and vilification but little direct control. Legislation passed to deal with the problem, including the Licensing Act of 2003, exonerated brewers and retailers (Plant and Plant, 2006). Granted the extended licensing hours it sought, the industry was not called to account for having deliberately encouraged the binge drinking it now claimed to lament. It was not alone in condoning binge drinking. Many local councils had quite explicitly aimed to encourage the 24-hour city, with the provision of entertainment and the proliferation of drinking places central to urban regeneration. If political economy encompasses ‘the relations between politics and economics’ (Caporaso and Levine, 1992: 8), then this was a prime example.

Three hundred years before binge drinking, the story of gin had been propelled by a parallel set of interests (Warner, 2002). For example, the landed interests which dominated parliament had a vested interest in the use of surplus grain to make alcohol, specifically gin. Thus legislation was aimed at the – often poor and female – street sellers, never at the brewers themselves. These laws were unenforceable. In the absence of a modern police force, constables were unable or unwilling to apply the law – and were often attacked if they did so. The parallels do not end there. Both issues involved deregulation, of the brewing industry in the 18th century and the retail industry in the 21st century. Each campaign fitted the established definition of moral regulation as when ‘some people act to problematise the conduct, values or culture of others and seek to impose regulation upon them’ (Hunt, 1999: 1). In both cases, critics objected to drunkenness in public, to women being as involved as men, and to the general abandonment of restraint.

There were, of course, differences as well as similarities: media, government and the criminal justice system were much less developed in the early 1700s than 300 years later. Government drove the binge drinking issue whereas it responded reluctantly to gin craze campaigning. And there were more differences of this and other kinds. But conceptually the similarities were intriguing. They raised the question of whether a dimension of political economy can be found in other kinds of moral panic.

The political dimensions of all moral panics are indisputable. They become matters of public debate. They enter into the general political process and have identifiable political outcomes in the form of legislation or administrative enforcement. By contrast, the economics of moral panics are scarcely recognizable. Moral panics do not appear to become part of an economic debate, enter into the financial process, or have any kind of economic outcome. It is recognized that some claims makers will profit from action on the problem they seek to publicize, but usually the profit is not personal, and is measured mainly in increased resources characteristically allocated by government.

Thus far, moral panics are political but not economic. However, economic dimensions may be present even if subordinate to political dimensions. Yet these are rarely transparent. There may be moral panic issues where economic considerations are present but in the background. Migrant workers are usually good for the economy if not for the polity. Commercial interests exert influence on issues related to the mass media but their moral regulation depends more on constitutional issues than economic considerations. Terrorism has indirect economic implications for international trade. Other issues which feature frequently as moral panics – illegal drugs, child abuse, street crime – can be very profitable but not legitimately so.

Alcohol appears as the exception which proves the rule, that economic interests are not usually an important influence on moral panics. Of course, the argument could be reversed. Perhaps there are issues which might have become moral panics but the economic power and status of those involved precludes such a development. Consider fraudsters and speculators. Using the examples of identity theft and investment fraud, Michael Levi (2009) has investigated why white-collar crimes rarely become the focus of moral panics, even when they jeopardize the entire financial system. Among the factors he identifies as crucial is the hidden nature of such crime, which cannot be visualized dramatically. Perpetrators are too varied to be easily identified as a group of folk devils. There are no moral entrepreneurs mounting campaigns against such malefactors. It is not in the interests of enforcement agencies to suggest that matters are out of control. The media are constrained by legal factors, the costs of unravelling complex crimes and their lack of interest in issues which do not stir the emotions of the public. Governments anxious to protect the interests of business seek narrow solutions in enhanced regulatory powers. Above all, white-collar crime is perhaps not seen as threatening the moral order of society and white-collar criminals are too powerful to be cast as villains. ‘Almost by definition, economic power, prestige and respectability serve as a barrier to entry into the folk-devil status, certainly over the longer term’ (Levi, 2009: 50).

So one role of political economy is to preclude some people and activities from becoming the object of moral panics. Issues which might become moral panics never do because the political and power structures are too firmly enmeshed to permit it.

But political economy may also contribute less to individual moral panics than to the whole context which reproduces moral panics on a regular basis. And, of course, that is the same context for the continuous process of moral regulation, of which moral panics are an extreme form.

These ideas can be tested against the work of theorists who have set out to portray this context in its widest sense. Some of these, well known to most of us, have pursued the idea of the culture of fear. Our interest is in what they have to say about the political and economic forces which seek or manage to shape society’s moral preoccupations. There would seem to be a set of concerns common to these theorists. We can therefore ask how they define the culture of fear and where they see most evidence of it; when and why it first appears; who is most implicated in its formation and what their motivations are; how the culture of fear is constructed and disseminated; and how it impacts upon social policy and on public perceptions.

There are now several types of writing on the culture of fear. One text, for example, examines it from a philosophical point of view (Svendsen, 2008). Another looks at it as a phenomenon in political science, driving electoral politics in the United States (Robin, 2004). Yet another (Bourke, 2006) takes an historical perspective. Selected here are those works which focus on the topics and dynamics of fear most relevant for moral panics. Four such have been published in the last fifteen years. From the US we have Glassner (first published in 1999) and Altheide (2002); from the United Kingdom, Furedi (first published in 1997) and Bauman (2007). The overall aim is to assess whether their arguments are supportive of a political economy of the culture of fear as forming a context for the ongoing process of moral regulation and the sporadic outbreak of moral panics.

Glassner: Afraid of the Dark

Barry Glassner formulates his own two basic questions as ‘Why are Americans so fearful lately, and why are our fears so often misplaced?’ (2009: xxvii). Yet for a basic definition of the culture of fear we will look in vain. Otherwise, Glassner operates in what is familiar moral panic territory. His list of the ‘wrong things Americans worry about’ includes recognizable issues: crime, drugs, minorities, teen moms, killer kids, mutant microbes, plane crashes, and road rage. He is positive that Americans fear such things unduly, without specifying when or why this first became evident.

For Glassner, there are three crucial groupings promoting the culture of fear: ‘politicians, advocacy groups, and marketers continue to blow dangers out of proportion for votes, ratings, donations and profits’ (2009: xii). Such groups construct fear through a few well-worked but effective stratagems.

Statements of alarm by broadcasters and glorification of wannabe experts are two telltale tricks of the fearmongers’ trade…others as well: the use of poignant anecdotes in place of scientific evidence, the christening of isolated incidents as trends, depictions of entire categories of people as innately dangerous. (2009: 208)

The major effect of fear is that we are led to misrecognize real problems in order to support simplistic solutions which often worsen the problem they are supposed to tackle. The population at large endorses fear because it offers an emotional outlet. ‘From a psychological point of view extreme fear and outrage are often projections’ (2009: xxxiv). What is being projected is an unease or guilt about our inability to solve social problems. Scares of all kinds are best understood as an ‘oblique expression of concern about problems that Americans know to be pernicious but have not taken decisive action to quash’ (2009: 209) like poverty, ill health or violence.

In a journal article, Glassner makes an additional argument not in his main book. Here he argues that fears are constructed to provide protection against other, more unmanageable or inconvenient fears. This explains why people tend to accept ‘large scale constructed fears – what some sociologists call moral panics’ (1999b: 302). The concentration on a narrow range of fears actively disguises other sources of fear. Satanic scares disguise problems of domestic abuse; stories about war veterans running amok disguise the problem of understanding the (first) Gulf War; stories about teen mums disguise the problem of lone mothers.

Glassner’s account quite clearly identifies the quest for power and money as the drivers behind those who construct and maintain the culture of fear. A range of groupings seek to maximize their own benefits by exploiting people’s insecurities, offering distorted versions of social problems which distract attention from the real reforms required. Traces of a political economy appear in this account of the culture of fear. What is less clear is how recently and for what reason this culture of fear came into being. Our second American author is more precise about that and other factors.

Altheide: Entertaining Fear

Unlike our other authors, Altheide carefully defines the ‘discourse of fear’ as ‘the pervasive communication, symbolic awareness, and expectation that danger and risk are central features of the effective environment or the physical and symbolic environment as people define and experience it in everyday life’ (Altheide, 2002: 2). Fear is mobile, able to alight on any defined problem, but some are staples: crime, drugs, gangs, and immigrants, even better if all interrelated. Violence always prompts fear, as do some health issues, often potentially fatal diseases such as AIDS or cancer. But usually what we fear most is what other people may do to us or our neighbourhood.

Fear is part of human experience and integral to most religions, but contemporary fear is qualitatively different.

It’s the magnitude and nature of fear that is different today. It seems that fear is everywhere. It is as though fear is attached to many activities and issues, and if it is not attached, it is not far removed from them. (2002: 175)

The older type of fear, which he terms parallel fear, was attached to specific issues or threats and thus tended to be localized, momentary and individual. By contrast, the new type of fear, termed non-parallel fear, is general, pervasive and unfocused. And we have some idea when this happened.

Altheide generates empirical data which identifies the expansion of the discourse of fear. The occurrence of the word fear and its derivatives in a number of American news media increased significantly between 1985 and 1994, especially in headlines. Characteristics of the period explain why this happened then.

Cultural and political contexts contributed to the emergence of fear as a perspective that pervades everyday life. A massive expansion of electronic media outlets (e.g. cable TV, videotape rentals, the Internet) overlapped historically with unprecedented consumer growth and Gross National Product, the decline of ‘real’ international threats (e.g. the fall of the Soviet Union), and conservative political agendas that used crime and especially drug-related issues to claim legitimacy. The discourse of fear became a key perspective for selecting, organizing, and presenting materials that were consistent with the entertainment formats of popular culture in secular society. (2002: 179)

However, the political and economic context which favoured the rise of the discourse of fear was not its primary cause. That distinction lies elsewhere. ‘I argue that the mass media and popular culture are the most important contributors to fear’ (2002: 6). These institutions are accorded enormous cultural power. Popular culture, for example, is heavily consumed and highly valued by its audience. It projects role models and personal styles. It favours ways of seeing the world and establishes its own hierarchy of credibility. Out of this mix of popular culture and mass media emerges a discourse of fear.

I argue that a discourse of fear is one key area that has been cultivated for decades by the entertainment media and formal agents of social control alike…the routine display of numerous statements, images and anticipations of fear provides a cultural and cognitive baseline of experience for more and more society members. A discourse of fear offers a conceptual elaboration for a process through which numerous messages resonating with fear can be circulated, recast, and institutionally promoted through public policies, media reports, popular culture and cognitive frameworks. (2002: 40)

Other influences cannot match the media in importance. Conservative political movements do seek to exploit fear but the real driver is culture, conditioned by economic imperatives. Entertainment formats sell, so are wanted by producers and consumers alike. Extended into the news, such formats eschew analysis and understanding for drama and emotion.

Key to the media formatting of fear is the ‘problem frame’ which suits the demand for entertainment. The problem frame has a distinctive narrative structure and trades in universal moral meanings. It focuses on disorder and ensures that news has cultural resonance for the audience: ‘The problem frame characteristics are part of a format organized around a narrative that begins with a general conclusion that something is wrong, and the media know what it is’ (2002: 49).

According to Altheide, modern society is more able to communicate fear because it has pervasive and centralized means of communication whose entertainment formats utilize fear. Other news imperatives reinforce the resort to fear discourses, especially overreliance on official news sources, on striking visual images and on identification with victims of all kinds.

In his view, the relentless nature of fear messages is bound to affect the way we see the world and others within it. It affects how social problems are perceived, even by front-line agencies. Moreover, the discourse of fear is self-perpetuating. Producers, sources and audiences collude in endorsing the problem frame. ‘Part of the difficulty is that the problem frame has been so successful, the formulae are readily available, and producers and consumers share and prefer the evocative and visual media formats’ (2002: 191). In such circumstances we all reinforce each other’s tendency to give in to fear, which we both loathe and celebrate, so that ultimately ‘people embrace fear, enjoy it, and even play with being a victim’ (2002: 191).

Altheide’s argument is complex. The culture of fear is a product of the American media system. As that system and especially its news outlets expanded in the 1980s, news production became highly competitive. The drive was on to make news exciting and entertaining. The solution was the problem frame, with its simplistic assumptions, familiar formats and easy solutions. The effect is to identify and cast out those held responsible for inducing fear amongst the majority population. The symbolic environment thus created feeds upon itself so that fear becomes an expected, anticipated and even welcomed experience of encountering the mass media. There is a version of political economy here, one rooted in the media environment. Economics is if anything the dominant partner but exploitation of news media by formal agents of social control indicates a political dimension. The culture of fear is the outcome of the interaction of the politics and economics of news and entertainment media – recognizably a political economy perspective.

Furedi: A Torrent of Abuse

For Furedi the culture of fear is about risk as ‘the free-floating dynamic of fear is promoted by a culture that communicates hesitancy and anxiety towards uncertainty and continually anticipates the worst possible outcome’. We are encouraged to ‘approach human experience as a potential risk to our safety’ (2006: 5).

Three distinctive characteristics mark the culture of fear. First is the increased moralization of harm; there has to be somebody to blame for the misfortunes we experience. Second is the overwhelming emphasis on safety, discouraging even minor risks: ‘the evaluation of everything from the perspective of safety is a defining characteristic of contemporary society’ (2006: 15). Third is a new narrative about adverse events. Risks should be managed for us; where they are not, we are cast as helpless victims likely to be traumatized by our exposure to harm, so requiring professional help to cope.

The culture of fear encompasses otherwise diverse topics, such as environmental issues like climate change; food contamination issues like mad cow disease; and child abuse issues like paedophilia. All evoke the central idea of abuse which ‘has become one of the most distinctive features of contemporary Western culture’ (2006: 82). About when it became so distinctive Furedi is largely vague, although he notes that fear of crime first became evident in the 1970s. The trajectory of fear is attributed to ‘the diminished importance attached to subjectivity’ (2006: 175).

Furedi observes that the culture of fear is played out in the media and related organizations; how they ‘pick and choose what constitutes a risk underlines the social dynamic behind the formation of risk consciousness’ (2006: 16). And yet, he does not seek to blame media practices or structures for the culture of fear; they ‘amplify or attenuate but do not cause society’s sense of risk’ (2006: 60). The media reflect rather than construct the culture:

the media’s preoccupation with risk is a symptom of the problem and not its cause. It is unlikely that an otherwise placid and content public is influenced into a permanent state of panic through media manipulation. (2006: 60)

Not the media, nor politicians, nor social control agencies, are primarily to blame for the culture of fear. The responsibility belongs to consumer activists who are ‘the main beneficiaries of the politics of fear’ (2006: 179). These groups are intricately networked with media and political elites. They include the Consumers Association and Greenpeace, whom he singles out for a lengthy diatribe. They misuse evidence, cause panic, cast people as potential victims, and resort to extra-parliamentary methods. Other groups provoking Furedi’s wrath include much of the liberal middle class: therapists and social workers, health and safety officers, lobbyists for children’s rights, almost anybody using the terminology of victims and abuse.

In arguing that the culture of fear operates essentially through the language of abuse, Furedi is, in effect, tracing a discursive shift. The coping autonomous individual is converted, as a result of exposure to risk or abuse, into a damaged dependent victim, requiring our pity and therapeutic intervention. The culture as a whole has abandoned the rational terms of the Enlightenment for the emotional terms of the culture of fear.

All this distorts the assumptions guiding policy and habit. For example, the prevailing risk discourse about children not only affects social work practice but also our daily surveillance of children which is increasingly designed to protect them from largely imagined or remote dangers.

Why this culture of fear has taken hold with the public is discussed by Furedi most explicitly in relation to the fear of crime. Crime, he argues, has always been with us. There is no evidence that it is worse now than it was in the past. The question therefore is why crime is so feared in contemporary society. The answer is in the cultural milieu where risk, uncertainty and suspicion are rife. Informal social relations and the norms which governed them have declined while social isolation has increased. Changes in the labour market promote individual rather than collective advancement: ‘dislocation and the weakening of social institutions has accentuated the tendency for society to fragment’ (2006: 74). People who are insecure feel threatened so become suspicious and fearful of others. The result is a ‘diminished sense of individual control’ where life experiences and other people are increasingly viewed as unpredictable and thus risky. The culture of fear has taken hold.

In a separate work, Furedi (2005) applies his argument directly to what he sees as the collapse of politics as a form of public life. Some groups do exploit the culture of fear but they have not constructed it. The source remains the decline of Enlightenment ideals. What we would call moral regulation is defined as the ‘infantilization of the public’, subject to behaviour management as a political project. The great political questions are no longer about capitalism and socialism but about who will see the need to inaugurate a second Enlightenment to save us all from fear and dependency.

Furedi sidelines politics and economics. The main thrust of his argument is cultural. The culture of fear is a construction of a society which has lost its nerve and abandoned any positive notions of human progress and competence. The consequent loss of any sense of control encourages the view that we are likely to be abused or victimized by those around us, whom we increasingly view with suspicion and fear. The only way to undermine this culture of abuse is a cognitive effort to recover the ideals of the Enlightenment and reassert the possibility of autonomous human action as against passive victimhood. Unlike our other authors, Furedi attributes no blame to claims makers, politicians, or even the mass media. It is an argument with virtually no sense of social or political structure. Our dilemmas are all of our own making. Politics or economics, much less their combination, do not come into it. If Furedi is right, the whole idea of a political economy of moral panics is a non-starter.

Bauman: Putting the Frighteners On

Superficially Bauman’s publication (2006) Liquid Fear would seem the most relevant to any consideration of the culture of fear. Indeed, that book does attempt to formulate the key questions about fear, to define their parameters, and to seek continuities with the concerns of intellectuals past and present. But it is the later (2007) Liquid Times which gives properly sociological answers to the questions about the nature and significance of contemporary fears. So that is the text taken here to be the clearer statement and the one closest to other writings on the culture of fear.

Bauman is less interested in formally defining the nature of fear or anxiety than establishing its roots: ‘The most harrowing contemporary fears are born of existential uncertainty’ (2007: 93). He also stresses its destruction of the trust on which human interaction normally rests.

We can say that the modern variety of insecurity is marked by a fear of human maleficence and malefactors. It is shot through by suspicion towards other humans and their intentions and by a refusal to trust the constancy and reliability of human companionship, and it derives in the last account from our inability and/or unwillingness to make that companionship durable and reliable, and thus trustworthy. (2007: 57, original emphasis)

The symbolic figure which most interests Bauman is the asylum seeker but similar targets include criminals, sexual abusers and the dangerous classes in general. Other signs of our insecurities emerge in the precautions we take around food, health or sex, and measures for self-protection such as gated communities, SUVs, even martial arts classes.

For Bauman, the culture of fear emerges from the confluence of five major societal changes. First is the ‘liquidity of social forms’ (hence the title of the book). Liquidity means impermanence, ‘a condition in which social forms (structures that limit individual choices, institutions that guard repetitions of routines, patterns of acceptable behaviour) can no longer (and are not expected) to keep their shape for long’ (2007: 1). Second, the nation state is weakened because politics and economics are increasingly globalized so beyond its control. Third is the erosion of community, so that society becomes a network of individuals rather than a structured whole. Fourth, for individuals and organizations any kind of long-term planning becomes impossible in a situation of such permanent insecurity. Fifth, the responsibility for coping with change is passed to individuals who are required to be self-sufficient. Though these factors produce a new kind of common culture, their underlying causes are economic and political. Economic deregulation and the shrinkage of the state engender a ‘mood of precariousness’.

Bauman is very precise about the genesis of anxiety in the 1970s. In that decade the postwar settlement of a welfare state, full employment and a confidence in the future was displaced. We encountered ‘the brave new worlds of erased or punctured boundaries, information deluge, rampant globalisation’ and increased inequalities and tensions between the global North and South. All this disrupted the old order. That is why the 1970s can now be seen ‘as a genuine watershed in modern history’. Its effect was to overturn ‘extant life wisdoms’ demanding a ‘thorough revision and overhaul of life strategies’ (2007: 49).

This new order Bauman sees as the latest manifestation of the inherently unstable system of capitalism which breeds insecurity. The state historically managed fear by creating a web of welfare and legal rights which protected against adversity, while the nature of capitalism led workers to forge their own independent forms of solidarity. But trades unions and labour movements weaken as the welfare system is dismantled. The state abandons its role in providing security and instead offers safety: ‘an alternative legitimation of state authority and another political formula for the benefits of dutiful citizenship are currently being sought in the state’s promise to protect its citizens against dangers to personal safety’. Protection is offered from ‘threats of a paedophile on the loose, of a serial killer, an obtrusive beggar, a mugger, stalker, poisoner, terrorist’ (2007: 15, original emphasis) or, most symbolically threatening of all, the illegal immigrant.

Fear is open to exploitation: ‘the capital of fear can be turned to any kind of profit, commercial or political’ (2007: 12). Bauman rarely mentions the media but implicates them in the construction and dissemination of fear.

And so it is personal safety which has become a major, perhaps, the major selling point in all sorts of marketing strategies. ‘Law and order’ increasingly reduced to the promise of personal (more to the point bodily) safety has become a major, perhaps the major selling point in political manifestos and electoral campaigns; while the display of threats to personal safety have become a major, perhaps the major asset in the ratings war of the mass media, constantly replacing the capital of fear and adding even more to the success of both its marketing and political uses. (2007: 12–13, original emphases)

More interested in political processes than policy outcomes, Bauman still notes that policies based on fear dehumanize some (asylum seekers) while demonizing others (terrorists). Fear, argues Bauman, is self-perpetuating; policies which appear to assuage it are likely to increase it still further.

Fear results from uncertainty but is rarely directed at the abstract forces and anonymous groupings which have destabilized daily life. Instead, ‘we seek substitute targets on which to unload the surplus existential fear that has been barred from its natural outlets’ (2007: 11, original emphasis). In particular, we are unable or unwilling to confront the powerful so find the powerless a better target for our fear. We cannot identify or locate global elites so pick on scapegoats like refugees who ‘hapless and helpless, are a clearly visible, sitting and easy target for unloading the surplus anger, even if they are totally irrelevant to the miseries and fears of more miseries which cause the anger’ (2007: 48).

While citing the fewest empirical examples and showing the least awareness of the moral panic or constructionist frameworks, Bauman provides the most lucid and convincing account of the societal context of the culture of fear. It is, moreover, one which has political economy at its heart; the ultimate shift in the nature of social experience has economic and political causes. The changing nature of state provision from security to safety offers spurious resolution to the ‘existential’ problems of modern living. Media and other markets exploit fear to realize ratings or profits. Bauman’s account sees fear as constructed by cultural and political agents and dependent upon a psychological mechanism of projection. Its roots, however, are to be found in the changing nature of economic and political structures which leave us more and more exposed to whatever may befall us, anxious and fearful for ourselves and of others.

Towards a Consensus: Majorities and Mavericks

This body of work on the culture of fear is not beyond criticism. The geographical and historical scope of the claims remains unclear. Is the culture of fear characteristic of some or all western societies? What independent evidence is there for identifying the 1970s as a period of crucial structural and cultural change? How do we discover if fear is a quality of private as well as public life? Many of these questions may also be asked about the risk society thesis, which in many ways parallels that of the culture of fear. But they will have to await another time because the project here is to compare these writings. This has been done before. Tudor (2003), for example, contrasts the theorization of fear by Glassner with that of Furedi. The focus here is much more narrowly on the elements of political economy. We can now identify a consensus about some of these issues, never unanimous because Furedi is so persistently idiosyncratic. Areas of agreement lend themselves to expression as propositions about the political and economic context of the culture of fear. There are seven of these, listed below with a brief commentary on their implications.

1 The essential paradox is that a society apparently more secure than any before it has produced a pervasive culture of fear.

This starting point is shared with risk theorists. Beck (1992) and Giddens (1991) also set out to explain this paradox but of course do so in the rather different terms of risk. Moreover, despite some superficial correspondence with Bauman, risk theory is anathema to the kind of political economy being advocated here. Its account of social change pays scant attention to capitalist economic forces and even marginalizes the influence of the mass media. Nor do such writers evince much interest in specific moral panics or the general process of moral regulation. Conversely, the moral panic literature has yet to establish points of convergence with risk theory, not helped by those who utilize risk theory in order to invalidate the moral panic framework (Ungar, 2001). Integral to the political economy project should be exploration of the overlap between ideas about the risk society and those about the culture of fear, to establish what it means to claim that ‘a risk society is a culture of fear’ (Svendsen, 2008: 48).

2 This culture of fear is distinctive and qualitatively different from anything which preceded it: more pervasive, more free-floating.

This entails a difficult qualitative judgement. The suggestion is that, while fear is a universal and timeless experience, the late 20th century saw a shift in the form of fear, away from specific fears of known enemies towards generalized fears of enemies as yet unknown or unknowable. This is essentially an historical question and it is therefore significant to find this judgement endorsed by a professional historian taking up the challenge to analyse fear historically. Bourke (2006) stresses the diffuse nature of social anxiety at the end of the 20th century. Dangers seemed both unprecedented and boundless, the source enemies who could not be known. This was a quite different type of fear from that experienced by those who lived through the Second World War or the Cold War which followed it. Such historicization of fear is crucial for the political economy of moral regulation.

3 The culture of fear is primarily a cultural phenomenon: it is to do with how, individually and collectively, we symbolically represent our human environment.

The tension here, well known to analysts of the fear of crime, is the connection between private and public fears. Again the comparison with risk is apposite. It may not be that difficult to demonstrate the existence and nature of fear-ridden or risk-saturated discourses in the public sphere, notably the mass media; but it is less obvious how this affects, or is affected by, everyday practices and consciousness. In a review of the literature, Walklate and Mythen argue that fear of crime has been conceptualized and measured so narrowly that it is difficult to ask the significant question, ‘How do the big mass-mediated fears that we are all made aware of butt up against and intermingle with the routinized tacit fears that underlie everyday experience?’ (Wallklate and Mythen, 2008: 215). Their answer requires a broader approach which tries to incorporate four dimensions of fear: cultural, political, interactional and existential. The cultural encompasses the networks which sustain and reinforce fear. The political identifies how politicians have reconstructed the categories of perpetrator and victim to validate enhanced measures of protection. The interactional refers to the minutiae of daily interactions by which identities of self and other are confirmed. The existential explores how and why individuals might define themselves or their group as being victimized. Fear, then, is multidimensional. The predisposition to panic or the urge to regulate emerge from a complex set of symbolic forms and experiences, but exactly how remains a mystery.

4 Traditional media, mainly news but also entertainment, play a seminal role in the culture of fear, enhanced by changes in the production and consumption of news.

In an empirical study of US news-making processes in local TV newsrooms in the late 1980s, McManus (1994) came to essentially the same conclusions as Altheide. Trends in the culture, technology and regulation of TV news were reinforcing the overridingly commercial logic of US news corporations. The overall impacts were held to be fourfold: that consumers are likely to learn less from news designed to appeal to their fleeting emotions; that consumers may be misled about the nature of their social reality as important issues are marginalized in favour of the trivial and titillating; that sources may become more successfully manipulative of news agendas in both political and commercial spheres; and that audiences become more apathetic about politics as they ‘have accepted an uncontested and increasingly commercial definition of what’s news’ (McManus, 1994: 211).

Such tendencies are also appearing in the UK, albeit more slowly. They have been identified by Franklin as

a more general tendency in contemporary journalism, evident in both print and broadcast media, to retreat from investigative journalism and the reporting of hard news stories to the preferred territory of ‘softer’ or ‘lighter’ stories. Journalism’s editorial priorities have changed. Entertainment has superseded the provision of information; human interest has supplanted the public interest; measured judgement has succumbed to sensationalism; the trivial has triumphed over the weighty; the intimate relationships of celebrities from soap operas, the world of sport or the royal family are judged more ‘newsworthy’ than the reporting of significant issues and events of international consequence. Traditional news values have been undermined by new values; ‘infotainment’ is rampant. (Franklin, 1997: 4)

In such contexts, audiences are invited to respond to public events with instant displays of untrammelled emotion. Fear is never far from the surface. Yet public views and action cannot simply be read off from media coverage. Analysts of moral panic and moral regulation need to understand the interpretative work undertaken by news audiences as they encounter the media version of the world and absorb it into their own experience.

5 The culture of fear produces a distorted and disproportionate response to social problems which are as a consequence systematically misrecognized.

The litany of misrepresented social problems on both sides of the Atlantic continues unabated: crime, recreational drugs, immigration, child abuse, media effects. Whether this has deteriorated in the last 40 years may be hard to discern but there has clearly been no improvement, despite all attempts to reveal the mechanisms which repeatedly permit panic responses to spiral out of control. What does seem to be relatively new is the representation of victimhood. ‘The perspective of fear and risk needs victims – without actual or potential victims it loses force. The increase in focus on fear therefore coincides with a corresponding increase in the number of victims’ (Svendsen, 2008: 52). While sometimes, as in terrorism, the threat is posed by adults to adults, often victimhood is mediated by age. The child appears vulnerable to adults, while adults appear vulnerable to ‘feral’ youth. Moral panics always, and moral regulation sometimes, do not simply misunderstand the activities and agents to which they object. The distortion is systematic. The deviant other is constructed as threatening the innocent in ways which suppress questions of power. The cycles of moral panic or moral regulation are now instantly recognizable yet analysis alone appears unable to stall their habitual development.

6 A major consequence of the culture of fear is hostility towards those defined as deviants. A secondary effect is to foster distrust of others, especially strangers.

A barometer of this hostility may be found in attitudes towards minorities, especially recent or prospective migrants. Reviewing survey data, Zick et al. found much evidence of old and new racism in Europe. Southern European countries tend to be most hostile, Scandinavian countries least, with central European countries including the UK in an intermediate position. There is no simple correlation with migrant presence: ‘it is the perceived – and not the actual proportion of immigrants that is the predictor of threat and anti-immigrant opinions’ (Zick et al., 2008: 242). Moreover, such attitudes extend to other kinds of minorities such as the homeless, the handicapped, homosexuals, AIDS sufferers and gypsies. Such attitudes harden whenever the national self-image is seen to be under threat. Zick et al. conclude that ‘the rejection of ethnic and social groups is approaching dangerously high levels in both Western and Eastern Europe’ (2008: 244). A quite different example would be the vitriolic response of the American Right to the election of Barack Obama, where religious and racist discourses converged with conspiracy theories to provide a chilling reminder of how fear can act as a vehicle for extreme political views and actions. Hostility born of fear is at once historically specific, called forth by real changes in society, yet also psychologically unpredictable, likely to veer from one target to another. Specifying how the deviant other is constituted and the line drawn between us and them remains vital to understanding processes of moral panic and moral regulation.

7 The culture of fear seems to have first appeared in the 1970s, to have expanded in the 1980s and 1990s, and become a permanent feature of society since.

This is another historically specific proposition to verify. If the culture-of-fear writers are correct, then during this decade and beyond, significant changes took place in the societies of the US, the UK and possibly beyond, which together induced a culture of fear. We may have to look to modern historians for a full account of these converging features. This will require exploration of those economic, political and cultural developments in the 1970s – more accurately during the late 1970s and early 1980s – which together transformed western societies. Britain was an extreme case. The economy underwent deindustrialization, with financial and later telecommunications services coming to the fore. Labour was required to become more flexible in its terms, conditions and times of work, with cyclical unemployment and part-time jobs becoming permanent features. Politically, the New Right was in the ascendancy, privatizing publicly owned industries and services, deregulating the economy as a whole, curtailing the activities and rights of trade unions and cutting taxes and welfare. Culturally, electronic communication expanded massively, computers and mobile phones appearing alongside multichannel TV and radio. Consumerism was lauded as the main human aspiration; communication and entertainment moved to the centre of economic and cultural life. This much is not in doubt (Glynn and Booth, 1998). Less clear is how such changes registered in people’s perceptions of themselves and others. Giddens’s (1991) version of risk society has a speculative account of this. The destabilization of previously fixed points of reference (family, neighbourhood, education, work) allegedly meant that biographies were now to be constructed by individuals rather than prescribed by their station in life. Hence risk became characteristic of both private and public spheres. A culture of fear could be interpreted as integral to this pattern but the whole picture is currently very sketchy. Yet this is potentially one of the most important aspects of political economy, for it is suggested that changes in economics, politics and culture predisposed institutions and citizens to a diffuse fearfulness likely to affect moral regulation in general and moral panics in particular.

These seven propositions actually constitute a coherent account of the culture of fear: its provenance, nature and consequences. This is so, despite the substantial differences between the US and the UK. However, the consensus breaks down when it comes to specifying the nature of the political and economic forces shaping symbolic representation. Bauman is mostly alone in emphasizing the exploitation of the culture of fear by the state as an institution or by political movements, especially ultra-conservatives. Others vaguely acknowledge what he stresses: how changes in the economy, its patterns of production and consumption, tend to the individualization of work, leisure and community which in turn creates anxiety and resentment. This enables Bauman to begin to tackle a series of problems about the balance of political, economic and cultural forces in constructing and maintaining the culture of fear. Bauman’s is the account closest to what is here being advocated as the political economy of moral regulation.

Conclusion: Back to the Future

A programme for the political economy of moral regulation echoes that advocated by British radical criminologists nearly 40 years ago. The New Criminology (1973) concluded with a proposal for a political economy of crime. Their project required them to explain both the deviant action and the reaction to it. There is no such obligation upon us. Social reaction alone is our concern.

The authors claimed to have ‘redirected criminological attention to the grand questions of social structure and the overweening social arrangements within which the criminal process is played out’ (Taylor et al., 1973: 268). They argue that the ‘immediate origins of social reaction’ by the audience to the deviant act requires explanation by ‘social psychology’ while the wider social reaction involves consideration of the state, its laws and their means of enforcement. It is at this point that the need becomes most evident for a model of

the political and economic imperatives that underpin on the one hand the ‘lay ideologies’ and on the other the ‘crusades’ and the initiatives that emerge periodically to control the amount and level of deviance…or else…to remove certain behaviours from the category of ‘illegal’ behaviours. We are lacking a political economy of social reaction. (Taylor et al., 1973: 274, original emphasis)

Essentially the same programme was restated two years later (Taylor et al., 1975) while what is regarded as its attempted realization, Policing The Crisis (Hall et al., 1978), came shortly after.

Inevitably the project was criticized. Downes and Rock (1998) argue that such a model too easily becomes a deterministic account of crime which is skewed by its class bias and cannot adduce evidence for its belief that crime is manipulated by the ruling class to divert attention from social inequalities. The project to construct a political economy of crime foundered for other reasons. Intellectually, it was besieged by feminism and then postmodernism. Politically, it was marginalized by the urge to defend social democratic ideals in the face of the New Right. Personally, it was abandoned by two of its main proponents in favour of a new position of ‘left realism’, accepting crime as a real and destructive problem (van Swaaningen, 1997). When radical criminology was revisited in a 1998 collection edited by Walton and Young, the fragmentation was there for all to see.

However, none of this need detract from the essential thrust of the project, to situate the social reaction to crime in the context of political economy. Mosco (1996) has discussed in detail the nature of political economy. Formal definition proves tricky so he settles for a characterization of political economy as ‘the integration of history, the social totality, moral philosophy, and praxis into the meaning of research and social life’ (Mosco, 1996: 50). The historical perspective centres on social change and transformation, especially epochal shifts in the organization of society. The social totality perspective insists on the interrelation of economics, politics and culture, in contradistinction to academic disciplines which separate them out. The moral philosophy perspective makes moral questions the centre of its empirical concerns and normative statements. Praxis habitually relates theory to practice and is especially directed towards questions of public policy. All four of these are in principle highly applicable to moral panic analysis, which the culture-of-fear writers have begun to apply in practice. Such a project is equally viable for moral regulation. What or who are singled out for moral disapproval is never going to be the outcome of wholly moral judgements. There are bound to be political forces in play and, at least potentially, that is true of economic forces.

This will require some revision of moral regulation analysis. It is not surprising to find little economic analysis in Alan Hunt’s (1999) seminal work on the history of moral regulation because he concentrates mainly on sexual mores where economic interests were at that time illicit. This would of course not be the same today, as is evident in contemporary debates about pornography and sex clubs. It is perhaps more surprising that Valverde’s substantial historical analysis of the moral regulation of alcohol should pay so little attention to the economic factors of brewing and retailing interests, even when discussing the regulation of the trade through licensing. She aimed to ‘study the ways in which moral regulation, fiscal policy, and administrative law were mixed and managed with very little public input’ (Valverde, 1998: 9) – and apparently not much from the trade either. That may have been the historical process or it may be the result of a tendency to extend moral regulation into politics but not into economics.

The effort may be to recover some of the impetus behind Corrigan and Sayer’s original formulation of moral regulation (1985). They did mostly emphasize the role of the state as ‘the major agency through which capitalism’s wider cultural revolution is organized, its key material regulative agency’ (1985: 191). Yet for them this understanding was an extension, not a negation, of the economic system: ‘capitalism is not just an economy, it is a regulated set of social forms of life’ (1985: 191). The challenge is to reinstate exploration of the relations between power, material interests and culture: the political economy of moral regulation.