Anomie

If the world of consumer culture strikes the reader as one of perpetual flux and indeterminate movement, a world that has lost the moorings that bound traditional civil society to conventional morality, or a world in which there appears to be no consensus on behavioral norms or foundational values, then it might seem reasonable to suggest that contemporary consumer culture is anomic, that it is without norms, and that it inspires in the subject a profound sense of dislocation and disorientation.

This concept of anomie, used in many interesting and innovative ways throughout our intellectual history (see Orru 1987), is primarily associated with the rather bleak but highly perceptive writing of French sociologist Émile Durkheim, whose work at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries enabled sociology to break free from other disciplines in the humanities and establish itself as a peculiarly “modern” area of study. Durkheim died at the age of 59 in 1917, but the passage of time has not rendered his work obsolete, and his influence can still be detected in many cutting-edge areas of contemporary sociological inquiry. His work on individuality, social solidarity and historical change is once again salient as we find ourselves locked in an era that has seen an upsurge in individualism and egoism and a marked decline in forms of community and collectivism. Indeed, cast against our postmodern and depoliticized academic landscape, some of Durkheim's writings seem oddly radical and decidedly out of sync with the dominant ethic of “freedom” and individualism that shapes contemporary social life in the West. The emphasis he places on social solidarity and the harmful effects of unrestrained individualism are once again beginning to find significant intellectual support, and this is particularly true of his work on anomie.

It is far easier to define anomie etymologically than semantically. Anomie comes from the Greek anomia, which means the absence of rules or norms (see Orru 1987). Sociologists tend to define the concept as “normlessness,” but in Durkheim's original work, the concept is deployed in a much more ambiguous way. According to Stjepan Mestrovic and Helene Brown (1985), it is worth noting that Durkheim may have used anomie as a means of communicating “derangement” rather than “normlessness,” a far more provocative form of social implosion that can be linked directly to immorality and suffering. By analyzing contextual discussion, we can, however, identify key themes in Durkheim's use of the concept of anomie.

In The Division of Labor in Society, Durkheim is concerned with the crucial historical shift from mechanical to organic solidarity as industrialized mass production and an increasingly complex division of labor began to transform economy and society. In these times of social upheaval, it became increasingly difficult for the individual to be successfully incorporated into collective forms of moral and behavioral regulation; and, as the capitalist project continued, anomie became a feature of a mass society struggling to maintain forms of social solidarity and restrain the problematic forms of individualism that it inevitably produced.

In Suicide, Durkheim uses the concept in a similar vein to convey a sense of dislocation from the collective norms and values of industrial society. This dislocation threatened the well-being of the individual and challenged society's ability to reproduce itself in a productive and positive manner. For Durkheim, the industrial society of organic solidarity was failing to ensure that individuals felt committed to the collective consciousness and that they saw themselves as active and productive constituents of that society. A lack of consensus on norms and values leads to ineffectual moral and behavioral regulation of what Durkheim believed was the insatiable nature of human wants and desires.

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