ABSTRACT
By the late 1960s, moral panics were developing into a constitutive element of the state in both Britain and the United States. Taking aim at such vague but durable targets as threats to law and order, moral panics become longer lasting and more enveloping than in the past. As moral panics became more comprehensive, any significant dissent from prevailing or condoned views could easily be associated with one or another ill-defined threat and hence derogated as “subverting the general interest.”
