A personal or wider social condition in which individuals or society at large no longer identify with or feel guided by customary norms and values. In individuals, the concept embraces extreme despair, and a sense of alienation from society, which may lead to suicide. Society at large is said to be anomic when its members no longer agree on a fundamental normative and moral order. The term was introduced by Durkheim in 1897. He considered the condition to be one cause of suicide, indicating the importance of social factors to psychiatric illness.
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Anomie, in contemporary English, means a condition or malaise in individuals, characterized by an absence or diminution of standards or values. The contemporary English understanding of
the word anomie can accept greater flexibility in the word "norm", and some have used the idea of normlessness to reflect a similar situation to the idea of anarchy.
Anomie as individual disorder
The nineteenth century French pioneer sociologist Durkheim borrowed the word from the french philosopher Jean-Marie Guyau and used it in his book Suicide (1897), outlining the causes of suicide to describe a condition or malaise in individuals, characterized by an absence or diminution of standards or values (referred to as normlessness), and an associated feeling of alienation and purposelessness.
Robert King Merton also adopted the idea of anomie to develop Strain Theory, defining it as the discrepancy between common social goals and the legitimate means to attain those goals.
Anomie in literature and film
In Albert Camus's existentialist novel The Stranger, the protagonist Meursault struggles to construct an individual system of values as he responds to the disappearance of the old.
More recently, the protagonist of Martin Scorsese's film Taxi Driver, the protagonist of the film Office Space, and the protagonist of the novel Fight Club, written by Chuck Palahniuk (and later made into a film), could be said to suffer from anomie.
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