Definition
Anomie is a sociological term for a condition in which the norms that ordinarily regulate behaviour have weakened, blurred, or failed to keep pace with social change. The result is uncertainty about what counts as acceptable conduct and what one can legitimately want.
Emile Durkheim introduced the term in the late nineteenth century to describe rapid industrial societies in which traditional moral frameworks no longer matched lived experience. Robert Merton later recast it in mid-twentieth-century American sociology as a structural mismatch: the culture trumpets shared goals such as material success, but the institutional means of reaching them are unevenly distributed.
Why it matters
How it works
For Durkheim, periods of rapid economic change or sudden prosperity loosen the moral regulation that previously matched people's wants to their circumstances. Desires escape any settled measure and frustration follows, with elevated rates of suicide and disorder. The mechanism is not poverty as such but a gap between aspiration and any stable account of what is enough.
Merton sharpens the structural reading. American culture, he argued, preaches the goal of material achievement to everyone but channels access to legitimate means very unequally. Where goals and means do not line up, individuals adapt in patterned ways: most still conform, some innovate by reaching the goal through illicit routes, some ritualistically follow the rules without believing in them, some retreat from both, and some rebel by substituting new goals and new means. Each adaptation is a sociological category, not a verdict on character.