Exploring the continuing relevance of Policing the Crisis

The article argues for the continuing relevance of Policing the Crisis , recently republished in a second edition with an unaltered main text but with a new Preface and Afterwords. It explores four reasons for this claim, two methodological, two theoretical. It starts by demonstrating how the methodological principles informing PTC - a concrete starting point, critiquing existing explanations and an essentially ethnographic approach to data - enabled a novel understanding of moral panics as symptomatic of a crisis of hegemony - a finding that still remains unique in moral panic literature. It then shows how the theoretical notions of conjuncture and the 'exceptional' or 'Law-and-Order' state were used to understand the development of the crisis of hegemony during the 1960s and into the 1970s. These methodological and theoretical ideas were then briefly deployed to show how they remain helpful in thinking about the present, neo-liberal moment.