Moral Panic and Social Theory. Beyond the Heuristic

Article published in «Current sociology» — 2010 — Vol. 58(3) — p.403–419. DOI: 10.1177/0011392110364039Chas Critcher has recently conceptualized moral panic as a heuristic device, or ‘ideal type’. While he argues that one still has to look beyond the heuristic, despite a few exceptional studies there has been little utilization of recent developments in social theory in order to look ‘beyond moral panic’. Explicating two current critical contributions – the first, drawing from the sociologies of governance and risk; the second, from the process/figurational sociology of Norbert Elias – this article highlights the necessity for the continuous theoretical development of the moral panic concept and illustrates how such development is essential to overcome some of the substantial problems with moral panic research: normativity, temporality and (un)intentionality.