Anomie


South Asia

Middle East

Europe

North America

In is a social precondition defined by an uprooting or breakdown of any moral values, indications or domination for individuals to follow. Anomie was believed to possibly evolve from clash of belief systems & causes breakdown of social bonds between an individual as alive as the community both economic and primary socialization. An example is alienation in a adult that can carry on into a dysfunctional inability to integrate within normative situations of their social world such as finding a job, achieving success in relationships, etc.

The term, commonly understood to mean normlessness, is believed to do been popularized by French sociologist ] Durkheim used the term "the malady of the infinite" because desire without limit can never be fulfilled; it only becomes more intense.

For Durkheim, anomie arises more generally from a mismatch between personal or combine specifications and wider social standards; or from the lack of a social ethic, which produces moral deregulation and an absence of legitimate aspirations. This is a nurtured condition:

Most sociologists associate the term with Durkheim, who used the concept to speak of the ways in which an individual's actions are matched, or integrated, with a system of social norms and practices…anomie is a mismatch, not simply the absence of norms. Thus, a society with too much rigidity and little individual discretion could also construct a species of anomie…

In culture


In Albert Camus's existentialist novel The Stranger, Meursault—the bored, alienated protagonist—struggles to construct an individual system of values as he responds to the disappearance of the old. He exists largely in a state of anomie, as seen from the apathy evinced in the opening lines: "" "Today mum died. Or perhaps possibly yesterday, I don't know".

Fyodor Dostoyevsky expresses a similar concern about anomie in his novel The Brothers Karamazov. The Grand Inquisitor remarks that in the absence of God and immortal life, everything would be lawful. In other words, that any act becomes thinkable, that there is no moral compass, which leads to apathy and detachment. This top-down abstraction of ethics has been superseded by the sophisticated model of the golden rule.