Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun Social instability caused by erosion of standards and values.
- noun Alienation and purposelessness experienced by a person or a class as a result of a lack of standards, values, or ideals.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun
Alienation or social instability caused byerosion of standards and values.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun personal state of isolation and anxiety resulting from a lack of social control and regulation
- noun lack of moral standards in a society
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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But in sociology, we use the term anomie, the sense of normlessness that comes just like the spiraling down.
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When it came to alienation, or what he preferred to call anomie, Durkheim was convinced that such shiftlessness—moral isolation, in effect—was caused by an absence of conventions and a rejection of the society that instituted them.
BREAKFAST WITH SOCRATES ROBERT ROWLAND SMITH 2010
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When it came to alienation, or what he preferred to call anomie, Durkheim was convinced that such shiftlessness—moral isolation, in effect—was caused by an absence of conventions and a rejection of the society that instituted them.
BREAKFAST WITH SOCRATES ROBERT ROWLAND SMITH 2010
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This unnatural, inorganic, materialistic way of living, coupled with a marked decline in society's moral and ethical standards -- what the French call anomie -- has created a kind of pathology that produces pain and emptiness, for which addictive behavior becomes the primary symptom and consumption the preferred drug of choice.
Charles Shaw: Viewing Consumer Culture Through the Lens of Addiction 2008
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This unnatural, inorganic, materialistic way of living, coupled with a marked decline in society's moral and ethical standards -- what the French call anomie -- has created a kind of pathology that produces pain and emptiness, for which addictive behavior becomes the primary symptom and consumption the preferred drug of choice.
Archive 2008-04-13 papabear 2008
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Leyburn points out that since the Scotch-Irish were never a "minority," in the sense that their values differed radically from the norms of their areas of settlement, they never suffered the normlessness which Durkheim calls anomie -- the absence of clear standards to follow.
The Fair Play Settlers of the West Branch Valley, 1769-1784 A Study of Frontier Ethnography George D. Wolf
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In his theory of suicide, he highlights the situation of "anomie" to refer to the circumstance of individuals whose relationship to the social whole is weak, and he explains differences in suicide rates across societies as the result of different levels of solidarity and its opposite, anomie.
Archive 2008-01-01 Daniel Little 2008
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If "anomie" exists in Greece today, it is found in the separation between law and democracy and the destruction of any sense of the common good.
The Guardian World News Costas Douzinas 2011
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What the minister, in his ignorance and desperation, called "anomie", political and legal theory examines under the term "civil disobedience".
The Guardian World News Costas Douzinas 2011
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Disobedience is a moral and civic response to governmental "anomie".
The Guardian World News Costas Douzinas 2011
chained_bear commented on the word anomie
"Now if there is one circumstance indisputably involved in the etiology of depression, it is precisely this sense of isolation or, to use the term adopted by Durkheim in his late-nineteenth-century study of suicide: anomie. Durkheim used it to explain the rising rates of suicide in nineteenth-century Europe; epidemiologists invoke it to help account for the increasing prevalence of depression in our own time."
—Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 140
March 14, 2009
bashaba@mail.com commented on the word anomie
ASVAB reffered to as a vaccum
March 7, 2011
qms commented on the word anomie
He publicly calls for sweet amity
While counting a critic an enemy.
He widens each rift,
Unmoored and adrift
And tossed on the billows of anomie.
December 30, 2017