Anomie is the condition of a society whose norms have weakened or become unclear, leaving individuals without adequate guidance about what to want or how to behave. Developed by Emile Durkheim in the 1890s, it is one of sociology's founding concepts and remains central to how the discipline explains deviance.

Durkheim's starting point was that human desires, unlike animal needs, have no natural limit. Society supplies the limit, through shared expectations about what a person in a given position may reasonably want. When those expectations break down, desire becomes unbounded, and unbounded desire cannot be satisfied. The result is chronic dissatisfaction and, in Durkheim's account, a raised risk of suicide.

He argued the condition arises during rapid change, and, importantly, during sudden prosperity as well as sudden collapse. Both disrupt the correspondence between expectation and circumstance. This counterintuitive claim, that a boom can be as disorienting as a crash, is what distinguishes anomie from simple deprivation.

Emile Durkheim, who developed the concept in the 1890s and used it to argue that suicide, apparently the most individual of acts, follows patterns explicable only at the level of society.
Emile Durkheim, who developed the concept in the 1890s and used it to argue that suicide, apparently the most individual of acts, follows patterns explicable only at the level of society.Credit: Unknown authorUnknown author (Public domain).

Durkheim's 1897 study was a demonstration as much as an argument. By showing that suicide rates were stable within groups and varied systematically between them, according to religion, marital status, and economic conditions, he argued that the most private of acts had social causes, and that sociology therefore had a subject matter of its own not reducible to psychology. The specific findings have been criticised, particularly his reliance on official statistics that were compiled inconsistently and shaped by whether a death was recorded as suicide at all, but the methodological claim established the discipline.

Le Suicide, published in 1897. Its purpose was to establish that social facts explain patterns individual psychology cannot, which is the founding claim of sociology as a discipline.
Le Suicide, published in 1897. Its purpose was to establish that social facts explain patterns individual psychology cannot, which is the founding claim of sociology as a discipline.Credit: Internet Archive, Zyephyrus (Public domain).

Robert Merton reworked the concept in 1938 into something closer to a theory of deviance. In his version anomie is a mismatch between culturally prescribed goals and the legitimate means available to reach them. American culture, he argued, promotes material success as a universal goal while distributing access to education and employment unequally, and the resulting strain produces predictable adaptations: conformity, innovation, which includes crime, ritualism, retreatism, and rebellion.

Merton's version shifted the emphasis from too few norms to a contradiction between them, and it became the foundation of strain theory in criminology, where it remains influential.

The concept is criticised as difficult to measure, since it describes a condition of society inferred from its supposed effects, which risks circularity. Merton's version is criticised for assuming broad consensus on goals, when subcultures may hold different ones entirely, and for predicting more deviance among the poor than is observed while saying little about crime committed by the advantaged. Durkheim's original is criticised for a conservative streak, since it can be read as treating regulation of expectation as inherently good, and disruption of settled hierarchy as pathological.

Industrial-era weaving. Durkheim developed the concept while observing the disruption of established roles and expectations that rapid industrialisation produced.
Industrial-era weaving. Durkheim developed the concept while observing the disruption of established roles and expectations that rapid industrialisation produced.Credit: Illustrator T. Allom, Engraver J. Tingle (Public domain).

The idea remains in active use, applied to post-Soviet transition societies, to communities affected by deindustrialisation, and to debates about social media and comparison, where the mechanism Durkheim described, unbounded expectation without a stable reference for what is reasonable, is invoked frequently. Whether those applications are rigorous or merely evocative is itself part of the criticism.