Anomie

Abstract

Anomie, which MeSH classifies under social behavior, is a condition of normative breakdown—a state in which the shared rules that regulate conduct lose their grip. The concept spans three nested levels of analysis that are best treated together rather than as rivals: a societal account of deregulated social order (Durkheim), a structural account of the strain between cultural goals and legitimate means (Merton and institutional-anomie theory), and a psychological account of anomie as a measurable individual state, often called anomia (Srole, Seeman, and recent social-identity work). A worked example develops Merton's adaptation typology, an illustrative institutional-balance index, and the scoring of an anomia scale, and three interactive demonstrations let the reader manipulate each.

Keywords: anomie, normlessness, social behavior, strain theory, alienation

Few ideas have travelled as far across the social sciences as anomie. A sociologist invokes it to describe a society whose regulating norms have weakened; a criminologist uses it to explain why certain social structures generate pressure toward crime; a social psychologist measures it as a state of mind in which an individual feels that rules no longer hold and the future cannot be trusted. The word keeps its shape across these uses—a failure of normative regulation—while the unit of analysis shifts from the society to the social structure to the person.

What makes anomie a problem worth cognitive psychology's attention is that its most consequential form is a psychological one. A society's norms do not act on conduct directly; they act through what individuals perceive, expect, and believe about the order around them. Anomie becomes anomia—a subjective sense of normlessness, powerlessness, and distrust—and that state can be measured, related to behavior, and traced to the social conditions that produce it. Separating the societal condition from the individual experience, and both from the structural strain that links them, is where the science of anomie earns its keep.

What Anomie Is

Anomie, in the broadest usable sense, is a condition in which the norms that regulate conduct have weakened, become inconsistent, or lost their hold on individuals. The term entered social science with Émile Durkheim, who used the French anomie—literally a state of being without law—to name what happens to a society when rapid change outruns the moral rules that once matched aspiration to opportunity (Durkheim, 1984; Durkheim, 1951). The definition is deliberately about regulation rather than any particular act: anomie says that the rules are failing, not which behavior follows.

That neutrality matters, because the word is used at three different scales that are easy to conflate. At the societal scale, anomie is a property of a collective—a deregulated social order in which collective norms no longer constrain individual appetite. At the structural scale, it is a feature of the relation between a culture's valued goals and the legitimate means it provides for reaching them: when the goals are pressed on everyone but the means are not, the resulting strain is anomic (Merton, 1938). At the individual scale, anomie becomes anomia—a subjective state in which a person experiences the social order as unpredictable and its rules as void (Srole, 1956). The three can diverge: a society can be structurally anomic while a given person feels perfectly anchored, and an individual can feel anomic in an otherwise well-regulated world.

In the Medical Subject Headings vocabulary, Anomie is a descriptor filed under Social Behavior and, on a second branch, under social conditions. The placement is partly an indexing artefact—anomie denotes the absence of effective social regulation rather than a behavior people perform—but it captures something real: anomie is defined entirely by reference to the norms that govern social conduct, and it is studied as the condition under which social behavior comes unmoored from them. The remainder of this article takes the three scales in turn and shows how they connect without reducing to one another.

Anomie and Cognition

The study of anomie is organised by a distinction between the level at which normlessness is located—the society, the social structure, or the individual mind—and the mechanism by which it produces its effects. Durkheim's anomie is a property of collectives; Merton's is a property of the fit between culture and structure; the social psychologist's anomia is a property of persons. The levels are not rivals but a causal chain: societal and structural deregulation are the conditions under which individuals come to experience, and act on, a sense that the rules no longer hold. One recurring source of confusion is that Durkheim's own term shifted across his writings, from a narrow economic dérèglement to a broader moral deregulation (Meštrović & Brown, 1985). The sections below work up the levels—from societal deregulation, through structural strain, to the individual state—and connect each to the cognition it requires.

Figure 1

Three Nested Levels at Which Anomie Is Located

Table 1

Major Theories of Anomie Across Levels

Durkheim: anomie as social deregulation

The concept begins with Durkheim's problem of social order. In The Division of Labour in Society he argued that the growing specialisation of modern economies could, when it outran the moral rules needed to coordinate it, leave the parts of society ill-matched and their relations unregulated—an anomic division of labour (Durkheim, 1984). In Suicide he gave the idea its sharpest form: when sudden prosperity or sudden ruin disrupts the normative ceiling on what people may reasonably want, aspiration becomes limitless, limitless aspiration cannot be satisfied, and the resulting anomic suicide rises (Durkheim, 1951). The common thread is regulation. For Durkheim human desires have no natural limit; only society, through its norms, sets achievable bounds on them, and anomie is what follows when that regulating function fails. Careful readers have noted that Durkheim's own usage drifted—his earlier dérèglement was closer to a specific derangement of the economic sphere than to the sweeping moral vacuum later writers made of it (Meštrović & Brown, 1985).

Merton: strain between goals and means

Robert K. Merton transformed anomie from a condition of deregulation into a theory of social structure. In Social Structure and Anomie he observed that a culture can press a set of success goals—in the American case, monetary success—on all its members while distributing the legitimate means of reaching them, chiefly education and good jobs, highly unequally (Merton, 1938). The mismatch is anomic: the goals are universal but the approved routes are not, so those cut off from the routes face pressure to reach the goals some other way. Merton derived five modes of adaptation from whether a person accepts or rejects the cultural goals and the institutional means—conformity, innovation, ritualism, retreatism, and rebellion. Innovation, accepting the goal of success while rejecting the legitimate means, is the adaptation that yields crime. The typology makes the theory concrete: deviance is not a failure of the individual so much as a predictable response to a particular structural position. Demo 1 reconstructs Merton's typology and lets the reader read off each adaptation from the two accept/reject choices.

From strain to institutions

Merton's structural strain was elaborated in two directions. The first kept the focus on opportunity: Richard Cloward argued that access to illegitimate means is as unequally distributed as access to legitimate ones, so the form deviance takes depends on which illegitimate opportunities a structural position opens (Cloward, 1959). Albert Cohen pushed the account past its original emphasis on the lone calculating actor, insisting that anomie theory also had to explain how deviant norms are produced and sustained collectively in interaction (Cohen, 1965). The second direction, institutional-anomie theory, asked why the United States should press monetary success so relentlessly in the first place. Steven Messner and Richard Rosenfeld answered that when the economy dominates a society's institutional balance of power—penetrating and devaluing the family, the school, and the polity that would otherwise restrain the pursuit of success—the cultural pressure toward success by any means is left unchecked, and anomic pressure rises (Messner & Rosenfeld, 1994). The theory has been given a careful conceptual statement and tied back to Durkheim's and Merton's roots (Bernburg, 2002), and tested against the classic strain account using cross-sectional data (Baumer & Gustafson, 2007). Demo 2 makes the institutional-balance idea concrete with an illustrative index of economic dominance.

Anomia: the individual state

The structural theories say when a society or a position is anomic; they do not say how anomie feels or how to measure it in a person. Leo Srole supplied the missing individual-level construct, coining anomia for the subjective counterpart of anomie and building the first short scale to measure it—five statements tapping the sense that community leaders are indifferent, that the social order is unpredictable, that life is meaningless, and that the future cannot be counted on (Srole, 1956). Melvin Seeman then placed normlessness within a broader map of alienation, distinguishing five logically separate dimensions—powerlessness, meaninglessness, normlessness, isolation, and self-estrangement—of which normlessness, the expectation that socially unapproved means are required to reach one's goals, is anomie proper (Seeman, 1959). Herbert McClosky and John Schaar added that anomy is not merely a reflection of one's social position but is sustained by cognitive and personality factors that impede a person's learning of the society's norms (McClosky & Schaar, 1965). Michael Konty later argued that the individual-level mechanism is a relative tilt toward self-interested over other-regarding values—microanomie—which predicts deviance better than the classic measures (Konty, 2005). Demo 3 reconstructs a Srole-style anomia scale and scores it.

Worked Example

The logic of anomie becomes concrete in three small exercises, one per level, matching the three demonstrations.

Merton's adaptation typology (structural). Merton derives each adaptation from two binary choices—accept (+) or reject (−) the cultural goals, and accept (+) or reject (−) the institutional means:

- Goals +, means +: conformity — the stabilising, non-deviant case. - Goals +, means −: innovation — pursuing success by illegitimate routes; the adaptation that yields most crime. - Goals −, means +: ritualism — going through the approved motions while abandoning the goal. - Goals −, means −: retreatism — dropping out of both; the rarest adaptation. - Goals and means both rejected and replaced: rebellion — substituting a new goal–means structure.

The four accept/reject cells plus the replace case give Merton's five adaptations. Only one—conformity—leaves both the goals and the legitimate means intact; every other is a form of deviance, which is the theory's central claim. Demo 1 lets the reader toggle the two choices and read off the adaptation.

Institutional balance (structural). Messner and Rosenfeld's argument is qualitative, but it can be made concrete with a deliberately simple index. Let the economy command a share e (from 0 to 1) of a society's institutional strength, leaving 1 − e to the non-economic institutions—family, education, and the polity—that restrain the pursuit of success by any means. Define anomic pressure as the ratio of economic to non-economic strength, A = e / (1 − e):

- Balanced institutions, e = 0.5: A = 0.5 / 0.5 = 1.0 — the economy and its counterweights are evenly matched. - Economy dominant, e = 0.75: A = 0.75 / 0.25 = 3.0 — the economy outweighs the restraining institutions threefold. - Economy hegemonic, e = 0.9: A = 0.9 / 0.1 = 9.0 — restraint has all but collapsed.

The index is illustrative, not a published metric, but it captures the theory's shape: anomic pressure climbs steeply, not linearly, as economic dominance grows, because the restraining denominator shrinks at the same time. Demo 2 plots A against e.

Anomia score (individual). Srole's scale sums a respondent's endorsements of its statements. For a five-item version, the score is the count of items endorsed, from 0 to 5:

- A respondent who endorses 1 of 5 scores 1 — low anomia; the social order still feels regulated and predictable. - A respondent who endorses 3 of 5 scores 3 — moderate anomia. - A respondent who endorses all 5 scores 5 — high anomia; the rules feel void and the future untrustworthy.

Summing binary endorsements is exactly how the classic scale is scored, which is what makes anomie tractable as an individual variable that can be correlated with behavior. Demo 3 presents five Srole-style items and returns the score.

Discussion

Read across its levels, anomie is less a single phenomenon than a causal chain that the social sciences have mapped from different ends. Durkheim worked from the top down, treating anomie as a property of a society whose regulating norms had weakened (Durkheim, 1951). Merton relocated it in the structural relation between a culture's goals and its distribution of legitimate means, turning a diffuse condition into a theory that predicts which social positions generate pressure toward deviance (Merton, 1938). The social psychologists worked from the bottom up, showing that normlessness is a measurable state of the individual mind with its own antecedents and correlates (Srole, 1956; Seeman, 1959).

The levels are easy to mistake for rivals, and much of the field's confusion has come from treating them as such—as if measuring anomia in individuals showed that the societal concept was superfluous, or as if Durkheim's macro-condition made the individual state a mere epiphenomenon. It does neither. A structural theory needs an individual-level mechanism to explain why only some people so positioned actually offend, which is what general strain theory supplies by locating the active ingredient in the negative emotions that strain produces rather than in the strain itself (Agnew, 1992). And an individual-level measure needs a structural theory to explain why anomia clusters where it does. The honest summary is that anomie is real at every level: a societal condition, a structural strain, and an individual state, each the context for the next.

Current Directions

The most active front is the measurement and psychology of anomie as a perceived state. A large cross-cultural program has re-examined what anomie scales actually measure, arguing that perceived anomie has two components—a sense that the social fabric is breaking down (a collapse of trust and of moral standards) and a sense that leadership is failing—and validating this structure across many countries (Teymoori et al., 2016). On that footing, a psychological analysis recasts anomie as a group-level perception with identifiable consequences for how people think and act, rather than a purely sociological abstraction (Teymoori et al., 2017). A striking line of results connects this perceived anomie to economic conditions: experimentally and cross-nationally, higher economic inequality raises the sense that society is breaking down, which in turn increases the wish for a strong leader to restore order (Sprong et al., 2019). The broader social-identity program situates these findings in an account of how inequality erodes the shared identities and trust on which a society's political and social vitality depend (Jetten et al., 2021). Together this work is pulling anomie back toward cognitive and social psychology, where it began as Srole's individual-level construct, while keeping its connection to the macro-conditions that produce it.

Common Misconceptions

Anomie means a complete absence of norms.

Anomie is better understood as a weakening or inconsistency of normative regulation than a literal void. Durkheim's point was that society fails to set achievable limits on aspiration, not that every rule vanishes; conflicting or unenforced norms produce anomie just as missing ones do (Durkheim, 1951; Meštrović & Brown, 1985).

Anomie and anomia are the same thing.

They name different levels. Anomie is a condition of a society or social structure; anomia is the individual's subjective experience of normlessness. The distinction, due to Srole, is what lets anomie be measured in persons and related to behavior; a structurally anomic society need not make every member feel anomic (Srole, 1956; Seeman, 1959).

Strain theory says poverty causes crime.

Merton's claim is about the mismatch between universal goals and unequally distributed legitimate means, not about absolute deprivation. A rich society that presses monetary success on everyone while restricting the approved routes to it can be more anomic than a poor one with modest, widely attainable goals (Merton, 1938; Messner & Rosenfeld, 1994).

Anomie is a relic of classical sociology with no modern use.

Perceived anomie is an active research variable. Contemporary work measures it cross-culturally and links it to economic inequality and political attitudes such as the wish for a strong leader, showing the construct is alive in current social and political psychology (Teymoori et al., 2016; Sprong et al., 2019).

Glossary

Alienation.

A broad family of estrangements from one's social world; Seeman mapped it into five dimensions—powerlessness, meaninglessness, normlessness, isolation, and self-estrangement—of which normlessness is anomie at the individual level.

Anomia.

The subjective, individual-level counterpart of anomie: a measurable state in which a person perceives the social order as unpredictable and its rules as void. Coined and first scaled by Srole.

Anomie.

A condition of normative breakdown in which the shared rules regulating conduct weaken, conflict, or lose their hold; defined by reference to regulation rather than to any particular behavior.

Cultural goals.

The success objectives a culture holds up as worth striving for—in Merton's America, monetary success; the universal half of the goals–means mismatch that generates strain.

Dérèglement.

Durkheim's French term for a derangement or deregulation of appetite; the narrower, more economic reading of anomie that some scholars argue was his original meaning.

General strain theory.

Agnew's individual-level reformulation in which strain produces negative emotions—anger, frustration—that drive deviant coping; the affect, not the strain itself, is the active ingredient.

Illegitimate means.

The unapproved routes to success whose availability, Cloward argued, is as unequally distributed as that of legitimate means, shaping the form deviance takes in a given position.

Innovation.

Merton's adaptation of accepting the cultural goal of success while rejecting the legitimate means; the mode most associated with crime.

Institutional-anomie theory.

Messner and Rosenfeld's account in which the economy's dominance over family, education, and the polity weakens institutional restraint and raises anomic pressure toward crime.

Microanomie.

Konty's individual-level mechanism: a relative elevation of self-enhancing over self-transcending values, which predicts deviance and offers a cognitive reading of anomie.

Normlessness.

Seeman's dimension of alienation defined as the expectation that socially unapproved means are required to reach valued goals; the dimension that corresponds to anomie proper.

Rebellion.

Merton's adaptation of rejecting both the existing goals and means and substituting a new goal–means structure; the only mode that seeks to change the social order rather than adapt to it.

Retreatism.

Merton's adaptation of rejecting both the cultural goals and the legitimate means, withdrawing from the pursuit altogether; the rarest of the five modes.

Ritualism.

Merton's adaptation of abandoning the success goal while rigidly keeping to the approved means; going through the motions without the aspiration.

Social behavior.

Action directed at or shaped by other members of one's species; the MeSH parent category under which anomie is filed, as the condition under which social behavior comes unmoored from its norms.

Strain theory.

Merton's account in which pressing universal success goals on a population with unequal access to legitimate means generates anomic pressure toward deviant adaptations.

Key Researchers

Robert Agnew

(Emory University). Criminologist whose general strain theory reworked the anomie tradition at the individual level, locating the drive toward deviance in the negative emotions that strain produces rather than in blocked opportunity alone. ORCID

Émile Durkheim

(1858–1917) (University of Paris). Founding sociologist who introduced anomie, in The Division of Labour in Society and Suicide, to name the deregulation of collective norms that follows rapid social change. Wikipedia

Jolanda Jetten

(University of Amsterdam). Social psychologist whose social-identity analyses connect economic inequality to perceived anomie, distrust, and the erosion of the shared identities on which social and political vitality depend. ORCID

Robert K. Merton

(1910–2003) (Columbia University). Sociologist who recast anomie as a theory of social structure in Social Structure and Anomie, deriving the five modes of adaptation from the mismatch of cultural goals and legitimate means. Wikipedia

Steven F. Messner

(University at Albany, SUNY, Emeritus). Sociologist and co-originator of institutional-anomie theory, which explains anomic pressure as the product of the economy's dominance over a society's other institutions. Google Scholar · Wikipedia

Richard Rosenfeld

(1948–2024) (University of Missouri–St. Louis). Criminologist and co-originator of institutional-anomie theory, past president of the American Society of Criminology, whose work tied anomie to the institutional structure of the American dream. Wikipedia

Melvin Seeman

(1918–2020) (University of California, Los Angeles). Social psychologist whose five-dimensional analysis of alienation located normlessness—anomie at the individual level—within a precise conceptual map. Wikipedia

Leo Srole

(1908–1993) (Columbia University). Sociologist who coined anomia and built the first individual-level anomia scale, making anomie a measurable state of the person and anchoring the Midtown Manhattan Study. Wikipedia

Frequently Asked Questions

What is anomie?

Anomie is a condition in which the norms that regulate conduct have weakened, become inconsistent, or lost their hold on individuals. It was introduced by Émile Durkheim to describe societies whose moral rules no longer match aspiration to opportunity, and it is defined by the failure of regulation rather than by any particular behavior that follows.

What is the difference between anomie and anomia?

Anomie is a property of a society or social structure; anomia is the individual's subjective experience of that normlessness. Leo Srole introduced anomia and the first scale to measure it, which is what lets researchers treat anomie as a state of the person—one that can be correlated with behavior—rather than only as a feature of the collective.

What is Merton's strain theory?

Robert Merton argued that a culture can press success goals on everyone while distributing the legitimate means of reaching them unequally. That mismatch is anomic, and Merton derived five adaptations to it—conformity, innovation, ritualism, retreatism, and rebellion—from whether a person accepts or rejects the goals and the means. Innovation, chasing success by illegitimate routes, is the one most associated with crime.

What is institutional-anomie theory?

Developed by Steven Messner and Richard Rosenfeld, it explains why some societies press monetary success so relentlessly. When the economy dominates the other institutions—family, school, and the polity—that would otherwise restrain the pursuit of success by any means, those restraints weaken and anomic pressure toward crime rises. It is a structural extension of Merton.

Is anomie the same as being alienated?

Not quite. Anomie corresponds to one dimension of alienation. Melvin Seeman distinguished five dimensions of alienation—powerlessness, meaninglessness, normlessness, isolation, and self-estrangement—and it is normlessness, the sense that unapproved means are needed to reach one's goals, that maps onto anomie proper.

Can anomie be measured?

Yes. Srole's short anomia scale asks respondents to agree or disagree with a handful of statements about the predictability of the social order and the trustworthiness of the future; the score is the count of endorsements. More recent cross-cultural instruments measure perceived anomie as a breakdown of the social fabric and of leadership, validated across many countries.

Does anomie still matter for research today?

Very much. Contemporary social and political psychology treats perceived anomie as an active variable, showing that economic inequality raises the sense that society is breaking down, which in turn increases support for a strong leader. The construct has moved back toward the individual-level psychology in which Srole first cast it.

Does anomie cause crime?

Anomie theories propose that anomic conditions generate pressure toward crime, not that they cause it directly. Structural strain explains which social positions face that pressure; general strain theory adds that the pressure works through negative emotions; and whether a given person offends depends on the coping options and restraints available to them.

References

Agnew, R. (1992). Foundation for a general strain theory of crime and delinquency. Criminology, 30(1), 47–88. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-9125.1992.tb01093.x

Baumer, E. P., & Gustafson, R. (2007). Social organization and instrumental crime: Assessing the empirical validity of classic and contemporary anomie theories. Criminology, 45(3), 617–663. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-9125.2007.00090.x

Bernburg, J. G. (2002). Anomie, social change and crime: A theoretical examination of institutional-anomie theory. The British Journal of Criminology, 42(4), 729–742. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/42.4.729

Cloward, R. A. (1959). Illegitimate means, anomie, and deviant behavior. American Sociological Review, 24(2), 164–176. https://doi.org/10.2307/2089427

Cohen, A. K. (1965). The sociology of the deviant act: Anomie theory and beyond. American Sociological Review, 30(1), 5–14. https://doi.org/10.2307/2091770

Durkheim, É. (1951). Suicide: A study in sociology (J. A. Spaulding & G. Simpson, Trans.). The Free Press. (Original work published 1897)

Durkheim, É. (1984). The division of labor in society (W. D. Halls, Trans.). The Free Press. (Original work published 1893)

Jetten, J., Peters, K., Álvarez, B., Casara, B. G. S., Dare, M., Kirkland, K., . . . Wohl, M. J. A. (2021). Consequences of economic inequality for the social and political vitality of society: A social identity analysis. Political Psychology, 42(S1), 241–266. https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12800

Konty, M. (2005). Microanomie: The cognitive foundations of the relationship between anomie and deviance. Criminology, 43(1), 107–131. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0011-1348.2005.00004.x

McClosky, H., & Schaar, J. H. (1965). Psychological dimensions of anomy. American Sociological Review, 30(1), 14–40. https://doi.org/10.2307/2091771

Merton, R. K. (1938). Social structure and anomie. American Sociological Review, 3(5), 672–682. https://doi.org/10.2307/2084686

Messner, S. F., & Rosenfeld, R. (1994). Crime and the American dream. Wadsworth.

Meštrović, S. G., & Brown, H. M. (1985). Durkheim's concept of anomie as dérèglement. Social Problems, 33(2), 81–99. https://doi.org/10.1525/sp.1985.33.2.03a00010

Seeman, M. (1959). On the meaning of alienation. American Sociological Review, 24(6), 783–791. https://doi.org/10.2307/2088565

Sprong, S., Jetten, J., Wang, Z., Peters, K., Mols, F., Verkuyten, M., . . . Wohl, M. J. A. (2019). “Our country needs a strong leader right now”: Economic inequality enhances the wish for a strong leader. Psychological Science, 30(11), 1625–1637. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797619875472

Srole, L. (1956). Social integration and certain corollaries: An exploratory study. American Sociological Review, 21(6), 709–716. https://doi.org/10.2307/2088422

Teymoori, A., Jetten, J., Bastian, B., Ariyanto, A., Autin, F., Ayub, N., . . . Wohl, M. (2016). Revisiting the measurement of anomie. PLOS ONE, 11(7), e0158370. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0158370

Teymoori, A., Bastian, B., & Jetten, J. (2017). Towards a psychological analysis of anomie. Political Psychology, 38(6), 1009–1023. https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12377