Anomia

Anomia in Durkheim's Thought

In the social sciences, anomia has been a key concept in the development of modern empirical sociology. It is normally associated with the work of émile Durkheim (1858–1919), the French sociologist who introduced the concept in his early sociological masterpieces, The Division of Labor (1893) and Suicide (1897). In his sociological perspective, anomia was no longer related to the rule of law; thus, it lost its original legal content and was instead defined as the absence of norms (legal rules just being one class of social norms). One of the major tenets of Durkheimian sociology is that a theoretical explanation of social agency must be given in terms of social causal factors and not on the basis of psychological conditions. In fact, one can say that the major contribution of Durkheim to the foundation of modern sociology has been the possibility of grounding the explanation of social action on purely social variables. In the famous Durkheimian formula, presented in Chapter 5 of Rules of Sociological Method (1895), social facts must be explained by other antecedent social facts. In relation to anomia, this thesis implies that the absence of norms is not a subjective psychological condition of the agent but an objective feature of the social structure or, in strictly Durkheimian terms, of the collective life.

The first references to anomia by Durkheim appear in The Division of Labor, his doctoral thesis at the University of Bordeaux. In this early work, referring to the social causes of the division of labor as a phenomenon typical of modern industrial society, Durkheim elaborates on the “abnormal” forms of this phenomenon, one of these forms being the “anomic division of labor.” [Page 82]In his ensuing famous essay Suicide, in which Durkheim put forward a plausible sociological explanation of the apparently purely psychological phenomenon of disposing of one's own life, he characterized a type of suicide that he called “anomic.” This type occurs in the case of major social crises (e.g., an economic crash)—that is, structural phenomena that invalidate previous regulations to such a degree that some agents are incapable of coping with the radical ambiguity of the ensuing state of normlessness, and thus they take their own life in a supreme act of “anomic suicide.” The common factor of both the anomic division of labor and the anomic suicide is the dissolution of social integration, the underlying social phenomenon that is manifested in the absence of norms. The reformist stance of Durkheim vis-à-vis the major political and social issues of his time is a reflection on how it were possible to confront trends toward anomic forms of social life in a secularized and functionally differentiated modern society.

...