417605

CMCXXX10.1177/1741659011417605CritcherCrime Media Culture

Article

For a political economy

of moral panics

Crime Media Culture

7(3) 259275
The Author(s) 2011
Reprints and permission:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1741659011417605
cmc.sagepub.com

Chas Critcher1

Abstract
A case is made for a political economy of moral panics and moral regulation. After a brief
discussion of the political economy of alcohol regulation, the focus shifts to the culture-of-fear
thesis. Four writers (Glassner, Altheide, Furedi and Bauman) are interrogated for what they have
to say about the culture of fear. Examined are its definition and manifestations; its historical
genesis; its key agents and their motivations; how the culture of fear is constructed and
disseminated; and its implications for governmental action and public attitudes. Six propositions
are identified as constituting a consensus about the political economy of the culture of fear: (1) a
safer society produces paradoxically more fear; (2) this fear is different from previous types of fear;
(3) fear is symbolically constructed; (4) the media and popular culture are vital to sustaining fear;
(5) fear distorts and misrecognizes social realities; (6) fear generates hostility to outsiders. Such
a perspective revisits the original project of radical criminology. It is argued that moral panics
and moral regulation analysis should be informed by the adherence of political economy to the
importance of historical change, seeing society as a totality, insisting on morality as a focus and
position, and through a sustained commitment to praxis.

Keywords
culture of fear, moral panics, moral regulation, political economy

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 21stcentury 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

Swansea University, UK
Email: charles@critcher.f9.co.uk

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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.

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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 societys 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

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(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 tradeothers 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.
Glassners 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 peoples 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.

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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.
Its 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 alikethe routine display of numerous statements, images and anticipations of fear provides a cultural and cognitive baseline of

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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 others
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).
Altheides 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).

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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 societys sense of
risk (2006: 60). The media reflect rather than construct the culture:
the medias 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 extraparliamentary methods. Other groups provoking Furedis wrath include much of the liberal middle
class: therapists and social workers, health and safety officers, lobbyists for childrens 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

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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 Baumans 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)

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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 states 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: 1213, original emphases)

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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.
Baumans 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.
1The 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

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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).
2This 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.
3The 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.

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4Traditional 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 whats 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. Journalisms 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.
5The 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

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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.
6A 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.
7The 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

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and cultural life. This much is not in doubt (Glynn and Booth, 1998). Less clear is how such
changes registered in peoples perceptions of themselves and others. Giddenss (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. Baumans 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 devianceor elseto 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.

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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 Hunts (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 Valverdes 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 Sayers original formulation of moral regulation (1985). They did mostly emphasize the role of the state as the major
agency through which capitalisms 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.

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