Anomie

Anomie is a social condition where moral values, standards, or guidance for individuals break down or become uprooted. It may develop from conflicts between belief systems and leads to a breakdown of social bonds—both economic and through primary socialization—between a person and their community.

The term is commonly understood as normlessness, but the French sociologist Émile Durkheim, who popularized it in his 1897 book Suicide, never used that word. He first introduced anomie in his 1893 work The Division of Labour in Society, describing it as "derangement," "an insatiable will," and "the malady of the infinite"—since limitless desire can never be satisfied and only grows more intense. For Durkheim, anomie arises from a mismatch between personal or group standards and wider social standards, or from a lack of a social ethic that produces moral deregulation and an absence of legitimate aspirations. He noted that a society with too much rigidity and little individual discretion could also produce a kind of anomie.

History

In 1893, Durkheim used anomie to describe how collective guild labour with homogeneous, redundant skills—what he called mechanical solidarity—could not adapt to evolving societal needs due to its inertia. He contrasted this with organic solidarity, based on differences in constituency and self-regulating behavior, which was sensitive to needed changes.

He argued that organic solidarity and mechanical solidarity could not coexist; when solidarity is organic, anomie is impossible because producers, being near consumers, can easily reckon needs and production regulates itself. Anomie results from a malfunction of organic solidarity after a transition away from mechanical solidarity: if an opaque environment interposes, relations become too rare and intermittent, contact is insufficient, the producer cannot see the market's limits, and production becomes unbridled and unregulated. Durkheim linked this to industrialization—mass-regimentation that could not adapt due to its own inertia, causing disruptive cycles of collective behavior.

In his 1897 suicide studies, Durkheim associated anomie with a lack of norms or norms that were too rigid, but saw these as symptoms caused by a lack of differential adaptation that would allow norms to evolve naturally. He found that Protestant communities had noticeably higher suicide rates than Catholic ones, attributing this to individualism and lack of social cohesion among Protestants, which created poorly integrated society and weaker communal ties. He argued that Catholic faith binds individuals together and builds strong social ties, decreasing the risk of suicide and alienation, and that religion is more important than culture in this regard. He stated that if an individual isolates himself, it is because the ties uniting him with others are slackened or broken, and society is not sufficiently integrated at the points where he contacts it.

In 1938, Robert K. Merton linked anomie with deviance, arguing that discontinuity between culture and structure leads to deviance within society. He described five types of deviance based on acceptance or rejection of social goals and institutionalized means.

Etymology

The term anomie comes from Ancient Greek anomía (ἀνομία, "lawlessness"), from the privative alpha prefix (a-, "without") and nomos (νόμος, "law"). The Greeks distinguished between nomos (law) and arché (starting rule, axiom, principle).

In the original city-state democracy, majority rule was an aspect of arché—a rule-based, customary system that may or may not make laws (nomos). Thus, anomie originally defined anything against or outside the law, or a condition where current laws were not applied, resulting in illegitimacy or lawlessness. The contemporary English understanding allows greater flexibility in the word "norm," and some have used normlessness to reflect a similar situation.