Erich Goode is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His previous books include The Marijuana Smokers (1970), Collective Behavior (1992), Deviance in Everyday Life (2002), Extreme Deviance (edited with Angus Vail, 2008), Drugs in American Society (7th edition, 2008), and Deviant Behavior (8th edition, 2008). Nachman Ben-Yehuda is Professor of Sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His publications include Deviance and Moral Boundaries (1985), The Politics and Morality of Deviance (1990), Political Assassinations by Jews: A Rhetorical Device for Justice (1993), The Masada Myth (1995), Betrayals and Treason (2001), and Selective Remembrances (edited with Philip Kohl and Mara Kozelsky, 2007).
Moral Panics is more than a classic text in social theory. In this newly updated and enlarged edition, it is an indispensable text for every twenty-first century scholar interested in the social construction and diffusion of fear. Barry Glassner, author of The Culture of Fear Moral panics remains one of the most hotly-debated sociological ideas to have entered the public sphere, so an up-dated version of Goode and Ben-Yehuda's pathbreaking work on this subject is very welcome. The new version is even more enlightening than its predecessor. Kenneth Thompson, Open University