Durkheim's Concept of Anomie: When Social Norms Break Down
Anomie is Émile Durkheim's term for a society in which shared norms weaken, leaving people without clear limits on what they should want and how to pursue it.
Anomie is a condition in which a society's norms, the shared rules that set what people should want and how they may pursue it, have become weak or unclear. The French sociologist Émile Durkheim used the term in The Division of Labour in Society (1893) and developed it in Suicide (1897). He argued that rapid social change, especially sudden booms and crashes, can leave people without a stable sense of limits.
What does anomie mean?
The word comes from the Greek anomia, meaning lawlessness or the absence of law. For Durkheim it did not simply mean crime or disorder. It meant a gap between what a society encourages people to desire and the rules that tell them what is reasonable to expect.
Durkheim thought human wants have no natural limit. A person who wants more money, status or comfort will keep wanting more unless something sets a boundary. Norms supply that boundary. They tell people which goals are open to them, what a fair reward looks like, and when to stop. When norms weaken, the boundary is gone, and desire has nothing to press against.
Why do norms break down?
Durkheim pointed to sudden change. In Suicide he discussed economic crises, when wealth collapses and the old expectations of a career or a trade stop working. He also discussed sudden prosperity, when expectations rise faster than people can satisfy them. In both cases the familiar rules for what is enough stop working, and people are left without a guide.
His evidence came largely from official statistics collected in several European countries. He used them to argue that a social condition, not only individual character, shapes patterns in human behaviour. The argument was controversial then and remains debated, but it changed how sociologists think about the link between society and individual lives.
Where does anomie fit among Durkheim's ideas?
In Suicide, anomie is one of four social types Durkheim described. They differ in two respects: how strongly people are bound into groups, and how strongly those groups regulate them. The four are:
- Egoistic: weak ties to groups, so people are left largely on their own.
- Altruistic: very strong ties, in which the individual is subordinated to the group.
- Anomic: weak regulation, so norms fail to set limits on desire.
- Fatalistic: excessive regulation, in which a person's future is blocked by rules they cannot change.
Durkheim's point was that too little regulation and too much regulation can both leave people in difficulty. Anomie is the first of these failures, and it is the one that follows sudden change.
How did later sociologists change the idea?
In 1938 the American sociologist Robert K. Merton reworked anomie in an influential essay, "Social Structure and Anomie." Merton's version treats anomie as a strain. When a culture pushes everyone toward the same success goals, but some people lack legitimate means to reach them, deviance becomes more likely. Merton's form of the idea is widely used in criminology.
Other scholars moved in a different direction. Some treat anomie as a feeling of meaninglessness rather than a social condition, which is closer to a psychological idea. Critics say that Durkheim's term is vague and hard to measure, which is one reason some sociologists prefer more specific terms.
How is anomie studied today?
Researchers have tried to measure anomie with survey questions about whether people feel the rules are clear, whether they trust institutions, and whether their goals seem worth pursuing. These measures are useful but imperfect, because a survey captures what people say about their lives rather than the norms themselves. The study of these patterns therefore depends on fieldwork as much as on statistics. A researcher who wants to know how people understand a broken rule often has to observe daily life, as in ethnography, where people's own accounts of the rules are recorded.
Norms also work inside small groups. Kinship systems, for example, hold rules about marriage, obligation and inheritance that people learn from childhood. When those rules change suddenly, the strain can be as sharp as in any economic crisis. The same logic applies to creative destruction in markets, where old jobs and routines disappear faster than new ones form.
Anomie remains useful because it names a specific problem. A society can have plenty of wealth and freedom and still have people who feel that the old rules no longer tell them what to aim for.
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anomie anthropology social structure sociology