Stanley Cohen

Who they are

Cohen was born in Johannesburg on 23 February 1942 and died in London on 7 January 2013. He studied sociology and social work at the University of the Witwatersrand, moved to London in 1963 and worked as a social worker. He took a PhD at the London School of Economics on social reactions to juvenile delinquency, submitted in 1969. After lecturing at Enfield College and at Durham University, he was Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex from 1972 to 1980. He then directed the Institute of Criminology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. After returning to England in 1996 he held the Martin White chair of sociology at the LSE until he retired in 2005, and founded its Centre for the Study of Human Rights. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1998. These biographical details come from a secondary encyclopaedia entry.

His later work moved from deviance to atrocity and denial. States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering (2001) takes the normality of denial as its central theme. A 2011 article asked, in its title, "Whose side were we on? The undeclared politics of moral panic theory", a reminder that the concept he built has been argued over, including by himself.

Key papers

Cohen, S. (Ed.) (1971). Images of Deviance. Penguin.

Cohen, S. (1972). Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers. MacGibbon and Kee. The vault has not read this book and knows it through secondary summaries and the work built on it. Contemporaneous reviews list other publishers for early printings, so a publisher should be checked against a copy before it is stated.

Cohen, S. (1985). Visions of Social Control: Crime, Punishment and Classification.

Cohen, S. (2001). States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering.

Key ideas

The folk devil. A panic needs a face. The group at the centre is a real subculture, held to stand for something rotten in the society that reacts to it.

Amplification. In summaries of his study, the clashes between mods and rockers at English seaside towns in the mid-sixties were minor. National reporting exaggerated them, reporters went to the next holiday expecting more, police patrolled more heavily and arrested more youths, and the two groups came to define themselves against each other. The reaction was one of the things producing the behaviour it described.

Attribution. The phrase has a rival claimant. Jock Young's The Drugtakers appeared in 1971, and secondary accounts describe the concept as introduced by the two men at about the same time. This site records Cohen as the standard source with Young named alongside, and does not claim a sole coiner.

See Moral Panic for the five tests Goode and Ben-Yehuda later added, and the objection from McRobbie and Thornton that his model assumes a media world that no longer exists.

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