Stanley Cohen
Der Kriminologe Stanley Cohen (*1942 in Johannesburg, Südafrika, gest. 7.1.2013), war Mitbegründer der European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control und Begründer zahlreicher Konzepte in der (kritischen) Kriminologie.
Der emeritierte Professor für Soziologie an der London School of Economics war vor allem für das Konzept der Moral Panics in seinem 1972 erschienenen Buch "Folk Devils and Moral Panics" bekannt geworden.
Cohen war auch Mitbegründer der National Deviancy Conference (auch: National Deviancy Symposium; 1968).
Von ihm stammen auch die bekannten Texte "Visions of Social Control (1985) und "States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering" (2001).
Leben
Nach dem Studium der Soziologie und der Sozialarbeit an der University of Witwatersrandkam Cohen 1963 nach London, wo er als Sozialarbeiter tätig war, bevor er promoviert wurd (Ph.D. an der London School of Economics). 1967 wurde er Lecturer an der University of Durham, 1972 Professor der Soziologie an der University of Essex.
1980 ging er mit seiner Familie nach Israel, wo er als Direktor des Kriminologischen Instituts der Hebrew University of Jerusalem mit Menschenrechtsorganisationen kooperierte.
1996 ging er nach England zurück und wurde Martin Wright Professor of Sociology an der LSE.
1998 wurde er fellow der British Academy und erhielt Ehrendoktorate der University of Essex und der Middlesex University (2003, 2008).
2009 war er der erste Empfänger des Outstanding Achievement Award der British Society of Criminology.
Tony Platt über Stanley Cohen
Dear Friends,
Pasted below is a personal reflection on Stan sent to me and written by Tony Platt:
A MAN WALKS INTO A CHURCH ....
I’m in England for almost three weeks. Sandwiched between my brother’s 60th birthday party and David (Edgar’s) 60th birthday party, I get to play in London and visit old friends, as well as friends getting older. I was looking forward to reconnecting with Stan Cohen. We were both part of the 60’s radical criminology movement, though from different perspectives and sites. Political sectarianism kept us – well, me – in different revolutionary camps. We’re not personally close, but with the collapse of the New Left in all its permutations, we are now on the same side, even on the Israeli Question, which usually divides Jews in the Diaspora. I’ve always appreciated his intellectual work and his activism, the two intimately connected. We are about the same age; and we’ve both moved about a lot during our careers.
When I was an undergraduate at Oxford in 1960, he was studying at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. While he was in transit from South Africa to England in 1963, I was leaving my homeland for grad school in Berkeley. For a while he was teaching in southern California in radical Santa Barbara; my activism cost me my job at Berkeley and, luckily, landed me a job until retirement at a local state college. Stan was an important figure in post-60s radical sociology, best known for helping us to understand how “moral panics” fuel law and order campaigns against “muggers” and “wayward teens.”
He’s been a committed public intellectual all his life, battling apartheid in South Africa and Thatcherism in England. He tried without success for several years to bore from within Israel (at Hebrew University, 1979-1995) against its militarist state. Since 1997, he’s lived in England, teaching and helping to nurse his wife through a chronic illness to her death from cancer. Now he’s the sicko. He’s been ill for several years with Parkinson’s and various other maladies. Not too long ago, he had spinal problems and was in hospital for a few weeks, immobilized, unable to move his legs. He was “reet poorly,” as they used to say in Manchester when I was a kid – a euphemism for “at death’s door.”
A couple of years ago when he took early retirement because of health reasons, his friends organized a conference and book of essays in his honor. When I told a friend that I was planning on seeing Stan, he said, “You better steel yourself. He’s not in good shape.” But when I called Stan at home, he said, “Let’s meet at my office at LSE.” He’s only been “back at work” a few weeks, coming in once a week to teach a class on “Crimes of the State” to visiting NYU undergraduates. (I doubt if they’ll like what he has to say about Israel.) It is something of a shock to see Stan. Sitting in a chair, he moves continuously like a marionette pulled by hidden strings until he finds a comfortable position. This only happens some days, though his body is usually in pain. Not surprisingly he has trouble, he says, with memory and finding the right words. Don’t we all?
But there’s nothing wrong with his mind or his politics. One of his most recent essays is a blistering critique of the fawning complicity and self-induced myopia of Israeli intellectuals (“The Virtual Reality of Israeli Universities,” Independent Jewish Voices, January 2008).He is now writing a new introduction to the second edition of his book, States of Denial. And despite his physical limitations, he’s into teaching again, trying to jump-start overly compliant students. Stan takes me out to a local café for coffee and we slowly walk the bustling neighborhood. He’s hoping that exercise will ward off another surgery. Our conversation turns personal, to our families, and our losses.
Close to Covent Garden he takes me into his favorite men’s shop, J. Simons, where he buys stylish American jeans and a shirt, and reminisces about working as a teenager in his immigrant father’s clothing store in Johannesburg. He encourages me to buy a vintage 50s jacket that I spot but, for now, resist. Life is still up for grabs. Stan also tells me about his partner, who is “a Ph. D. student, Swedish, thirty years younger, beautiful.” Some people object to the liaison, he tells me. To hell with them, I reply, and he laughs. Another reason they get on so well is that she also has a chronic illness. Which reminds him to tell me the first of several jokes. He’s a lovely storyteller, skilled at peppering his conversation with parables.
“Talking about Jessica [his girlfriend] reminds me of a joke,” he says. “A man walks into a church, goes into the confessional. The priest asks him why he’s here. ‘I’m an old man and I have great sex every day with my young girlfriend,’ he says. ‘What’s the problem,’ asks the priest, ‘Are you a member of this parish?’ ‘No,’ says the old guy. ‘I’m not even a Catholic, I’m a Jew and I don’t even believe in God.’ So,’ says the priest, ‘Why did you come here to tell me this.’ ‘Because,’ says the man, ‘I’m telling everybody.’” Before I leave, I ask him to sign a copy of the book that has just come out in his living honor, both of us chuckling at the irony. And with that, we say our surprisingly intimate goodbyes. (Tony Platt, 17.02.2008, London).
Publikationen
Cohen, S. (ed) (1971) Images of Deviance Harmondsworth: Penguin Cohen, S. (1971) "Directions for Research on adolescent group violence and vandalism", British Journal of Criminology, 11(4): 319-340 Cohen, S. (1971) "Protest, unrest and delinquency: convergences in labels or behaviour?" Paper given to the International Symposium on Youth Unrest, Tel Aviv 25–27 October Cohen, S. (1972) Folk Devils and Moral Panics, London: MacGibbon and Kee Cohen, S. (1972) "Breaking out, smashing up and the social context of aspiration" In: Riven, B. (ed) Youth at the Beginning of the Seventies, London: Martin Robertson Taylor, L. & Cohen, S. (1972) Psychological Survival: the Experience of Long Term Imprisonment, Harmondsworth: Penguin Cohen, S. & Taylor, Laurie (1976) Escape attempts: the theory and practice of resistance in everyday life ISBN 978-0-415-06500-9 Cohen, S. (1979) "The punitive city: notes on the dispersal of social control", Contemporary Crises, 3(4): 341-363
Cohen, S. (1980) "Footprints in the Sand: A Further Report on criminology and the sociology of deviance in Britain" In: Fitzgerald, M., McLennan, G. & Pawson, J. (eds) Crime and Society: Readings in History and Theory, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul pg.240 Cohen, S. (1982) "Western Crime Control Models in the Third World," in S. Spitzer and R. Simon (eds.), Research in Law, Deviance and Social Control Vol. 4. Cohen, S. & Scull, A. (eds.) (1983) Social Control and the State: Historical and Comparative Essays Oxford: Martin Robertson Cohen, S. (1985) Visions of Social Control: Crime, Punishment and Classification, Polity Press Cohen, S. (1988) Against Criminology, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books Cohen, S. (1988) "Taking Decentralization Seriously: Values, Visions and Policies," in J. Lowman et al. (eds.), Transcarceration: Essays on the Sociology of Social Control, Aldershot: Gower.
Cohen, S. (1990) "Intellectual Scepticism and Political Commitment: The Case of Radical Criminology," Institute of Criminology, University of Amsterdam. Cohen, S. (1991) "Talking about torture in Israel", Tikkun, 6(6): 23-30, 89-90 Cohen, S. (1993) "Human rights and crimes of the state: the culture of denial", Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology, 26(2): 97-115 [edit]2000s Cohen, S. (2001) States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering, Polity Press ISBN 978-0-7456-2392-4 Cohen, S. & Seu, B. (2002) "Knowing Enough Not to Feel Too Much," in P. Petro (ed.) Truth Claims: Representations and Human Rights, Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Downes, D. et al. (eds.) (2007) Crime, Social Control and Human Rights: From Moral Panics to States of Denial, Essays in Honour of Stanley Cohen, Cullompton, Devon: Willan Publishing.
- Blomberg, Thomas G and Cohen, Stanley (2003) Punishment and social control. Aldine de Gruyter, New York, USA. ISBN 0202307018
- Cohen, Stanley (2002) Folk Devils and moral panics: the creation of the mods and rockers. Routledge, London. ISBN 0415267110
- Cohen, Stanley and Seu, Bruna (2002) Knowing enough not to feel too much: emotional thinking about human rights appeals. In: Bradley, Mark and Petro, Patrice, (eds.) Truth Claims: Representations and Human Rights. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, pp. 187-204. ISBN 9780813530529
- Cohen, Stanley (2002) Moral panics as cultural politics: introduction to the third edition. In: Cohen, Stanley, (ed.) Folk devils and moral panics: creation of mods and rockers. Routledge, London. ISBN 9780415267113
- Cohen, Stanley (2001) Memory wars and peace commissions. Index on censorship, 30 (1). pp. 38-48. ISSN 0306-4220
- Cohen, Stanley (2001) States of denial: knowing about atrocities and suffering. Blackwell Publishers, Cambridge, UK. ISBN 9780745623924
- Cohen, Stanley (2000) Manufacturing monsters. Index on censorship, 2000 (5). pp. 36-43. ISSN 0306-4220
- Cohen, Stanley (1999) Moral panics and folk concepts. Pedagogica historica, 35 (3). pp. 585-591. ISSN 0030-9230
- Cohen, Stanley (1988) Against Criminology. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction.
- Cohen, S. (1972) Folk Devils and Moral Panics, London: MacGibbon and Kee
- Cohen, Stanley (ed.) (1971) Images of Deviance. Hammondsworth: Penguin.