Anomie is a state of social instability that happens when society’s norms and values break down or become unclear.
The term, coined by sociologist Émile Durkheim, describes how people can feel disconnected, purposeless, or uncertain about what’s right or expected. It often emerges during times of rapid change or inequality, when the usual moral guidelines no longer hold society together.
Key Takeaways
- Definition: Anomie describes a state of normlessness when society’s rules, values, and expectations lose their power to guide behavior, leaving individuals feeling adrift or disconnected.
- Origins: The concept was introduced by sociologist Émile Durkheim in the late 19th century and later expanded by Robert Merton to explain deviant behavior in modern societies.
- Causes: Anomie arises during periods of rapid social change, inequality, or cultural conflict, when established norms no longer fit new realities.
- Effects: People experiencing anomie may feel purposeless, isolated, or frustrated, while societies may see higher levels of deviance, unrest, or moral confusion.
- Examples: Economic recessions, technological disruption, or breakdowns in community life can all produce anomic conditions where shared meaning and cohesion decline.
Durkheim’s Concept of Anomie
Émile Durkheim took the term anomie from the Greek for “without law”, or normlessness.
He treated it as a social fact: a feature of how a society is organised, not a state of any one person’s mind. Its effects show up in suicide, crime, and economic conflict.
Modern societies feel it most during rapid change.
Durkheim traced this distress to a claim about desire itself. Unlike an animal’s appetite, which biological need naturally limits, human wants for wealth or status have no built-in ceiling.
Society normally sets that ceiling. It does so through custom and shared expectation, fixing what a person can reasonably hope for. Rapid change removes this ceiling before a new one forms, so desire runs ahead of what circumstances can supply.
Main Features of Anomie
Anomie has four main features, each tied to the weakening of social norms:
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Loss of Shared Values: Anomie happens when society’s “collective consciousness” (the shared norms, values, and beliefs that unite people) becomes weak. When this moral glue fades, individuals become less connected and more self-focused.
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Lack of Moral Guidance: In times of change, old rules may no longer make sense, but new ones haven’t yet formed. This can leave people feeling lost, anxious, or unsure how to behave.
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Weak Social Control: When shared values fade, society struggles to control behaviour. Durkheim believed that moral rules act like a “protective cocoon,” limiting our desires. Without them, people’s wants become unlimited, leading to dissatisfaction and disorder.
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Rise of Self-Interest: Without strong moral guidance, individuals tend to put their own interests first, caring less about how their actions affect others.
Why Does Anomie Occur?
Durkheim believed anomie arises when societies go through rapid social or economic change, such as during industrialisation or urbanisation.
These shifts disrupt traditional ways of life and moral expectations.
1. The Shift to Modern Society
Durkheim compared two types of social unity, mechanical and organic solidarity:
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Mechanical solidarity: In traditional societies, people share similar work, values, and beliefs.
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Organic solidarity: In modern societies, people perform very different roles and depend on each other through complex divisions of labour.
This transition can cause temporary instability, a period of confusion and “normlessness”, until new norms develop.
2. Rapid Change and Instability
Anomie tends to appear during periods of sudden change, when society’s rules can’t keep up.
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Institutional Strain: When technology or industry changes quickly, traditional norms become outdated before new ones are fully established. This creates “normative confusion.”
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Weakened Institutions: As people move to cities, families and religious institutions lose some of their influence, reducing moral guidance.
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Growing Individualism: Modern societies encourage competition and personal success, often at the expense of community and cooperation.
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Social Uncertainty: Times of war, economic crisis, or sudden prosperity can all cause instability and confusion about values.
The Division of Labour and Its Abnormal Forms
Durkheim’s first sustained treatment of anomie appears in his doctoral thesis, The Division of Labour in Society (Durkheim, 1893/1984). He argued that a growing division of labour is not a threat to social cohesion but its chief modern source.
As people depend on each other’s different skills, this interdependence can generate a new, organic solidarity. That balance can break down two ways.
The anomic division of labour happens when economic life expands and specialises faster than the rules of fair exchange and contract can keep pace. Interdependence then produces friction rather than cooperation.
The forced division of labour happens when people are sorted into jobs by inherited privilege rather than by their own ability. The resulting inequality feels imposed, not earned.
Durkheim pointed to the industrial and commercial crises of his own era as symptoms of the anomic form. Sudden slumps, over-production, and bitter conflict between capital and labour were typical.
No shared rules made this interdependence feel fair.
He treated reducing inherited inequality as a precondition for organic solidarity to replace the older, mechanical kind. A division of labour that is merely complex, without also being just, stays pathological.
Either failure, on its own, can stop a complex society from achieving real solidarity.
Anomie and Suicide
Durkheim famously explored anomie in his study Suicide (Durkheim, 1897/1951). He argued that suicide rates are influenced by social forces, not just personal unhappiness.
He identified anomic suicide, which occurs when people’s lives are disrupted by sudden change and they lose their sense of moral direction.
Anomic suicide tends to rise:
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During economic downturns: when people lose jobs, income, or status.
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During economic booms: when rapid success or social mobility disrupts familiar routines and expectations.
In both cases, people experience a breakdown in their social ties and limits on desire, leading to frustration and hopelessness.
As Durkheim put it, “The bond attaching people to life slackens because the bond attaching them to society is itself slack.”
Durkheim also described a smaller-scale form: domestic, or conjugal, anomie.
The abrupt loss of a stable marriage, through divorce or bereavement, removes a source of everyday regulation. It strips away limits on a person’s habits and desires much as a national economic crisis does for a whole society.
Anomic suicide is only one of four types in Durkheim’s wider theory. He organised suicide’s causes along two dimensions. One is social integration, the strength of a person’s bonds to a group. The other is social regulation, how far shared norms check and direct their desires.
Too much or too little of each produces a different type:
- Egoistic suicide: too little integration. Weak ties to family, religion, or society leave a person detached from any wider purpose.
- Altruistic suicide: too much integration. The group’s demands, including self-sacrifice, override self-preservation.
- Anomic suicide: too little regulation. Sudden change leaves desires and circumstances out of step, with no new expectations in place.
- Fatalistic suicide: too much regulation. Oppressive control leaves a person feeling their future is blocked entirely.
Durkheim’s evidence for the egoistic type came from official European statistics. Suicide rates were higher among Protestants than Catholics, and higher among unmarried than married adults. They were lower during wartime, which he read as a sign of heightened national solidarity.
Durkheim discussed fatalistic suicide only briefly. His main illustration was an enslaved person, or anyone whose whole life an inflexible, oppressive authority dictates.
Official Suicide Rates Depend on How Deaths Are Counted
Douglas (1967) argued that an official suicide rate partly reflects how officials classify ambiguous deaths. Recent figures show how counting rules move a rate.
In England and Wales, the published rate depends on how deaths are counted:
- By year of registration: 11.3 in 2023 and 11.4 in 2024, per 100,000 people aged 10 and over.
- Timing: only 38.7% of the suicide deaths registered in 2024 had occurred in that year.
- By year of occurrence: 10.4 for 2023. The Office for National Statistics describes this rate as fairly stable from 2018, when it was 10.7.
On 26 July 2018, the standard of proof for a suicide conclusion fell from the criminal standard to the civil standard. That is the balance of probabilities.
The statistics office concludes this likely increased the number of deaths registered as suicide. It also affects comparison over time (Office for National Statistics, Suicides in England and Wales: 1981 to 2024; released 3 October 2025).
This illustrates Douglas’s principle without confirming his mechanism. One national rule change is not the local, stigma-shaped discretion he described. The gap between 11.3 and 10.4 is a timing effect, not a classification one.
The figures cannot show whether coroners in different religious or national settings classify ambiguous deaths differently. That is the comparison Suicide depends on.
Merton’s Strain Theory of Anomie
Merton’s Strain Theory is one of the most important explanations of why people break rules or commit crime (Merton, 1938).
It comes from the functionalist perspective in sociology, and it builds directly on the work of Émile Durkheim.
Merton argued that deviance and crime are not simply about bad people. They arise from the way society itself is organised.
The Basic Idea
Merton suggested that most societies, especially modern capitalist ones, encourage everyone to pursue the same goals: wealth, success, and happiness. Not everyone has the same access to the legitimate ways of achieving them, though.
This mismatch creates strain.
People still want success, because society teaches them to want it. When they can’t achieve it through approved routes like education and hard work, they may turn to other, less legitimate means.
In short:
Society tells people to “dream big”, but not everyone gets a fair chance to make those dreams come true.
From Durkheim to Merton: Rethinking Anomie
Durkheim used anomie to mean normlessness: society’s rules and values break down, leaving people lost or disconnected.
This often happens during rapid change, such as industrialisation or economic crisis. Merton read the problem differently.
For Merton, the problem was not that norms had disappeared. People simply could not live up to them.
Society still tells everyone what they should want, but it does not give everyone equal access to the legitimate ways to get there.
This tension between the goals we are taught to value and the limited means available to achieve them is what Merton called strain.
Goals and Means: The Source of Strain
Merton described two key parts of this social system:
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Cultural Goals: the things society encourages us to strive for, such as wealth, success, power, and happiness.
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Institutionalised Means: the socially approved ways to achieve these goals, like education, employment, and hard work.
When people can’t reach these goals through legitimate means, strain builds up.
They still feel the pressure to succeed but may resort to deviant or criminal behaviour to get there.
For example, someone might deeply value financial success (goal). If they are denied fair opportunities for education or employment (means), they may turn to theft or fraud instead.
The Five Ways People Adapt
Merton identified five modes of adaptation to explain how people can respond to this tension.
| Mode of Adaptation | Cultural Goals | Approved Means | Example or Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Conformity | Accept | Accept | Most people follow the rules — they pursue success through education and work. |
| 2. Innovation | Accept | Reject | People still want success but use illegitimate ways to get it — e.g. theft, fraud, or drug dealing. |
| 3. Ritualism | Reject | Accept | People give up on big goals but keep following the rules — e.g. a worker who goes through the motions with no ambition. |
| 4. Retreatism | Reject | Reject | People drop out of both goals and means — e.g. drug users or the homeless who withdraw from society’s expectations. |
| 5. Rebellion | Replace | Replace | People reject existing goals and means and replace them with new ones — e.g. revolutionaries or radicals seeking to change the system. |
Merton believed these adaptations explained why some people conform while others deviate. The cause was not individual weakness but the pressures built into society.
Strain, Social Class, and Crime
Merton used his theory to explain why working-class and poorer people are often overrepresented in crime statistics.
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The working class are taught the same goals as everyone else (to be successful and make money) but have fewer opportunities to do so legitimately.
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When they fail to reach success through accepted routes, illegitimate means (like theft or drug dealing) can seem more realistic or rewarding.
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Over time, these alternative routes to success may become normalised within subcultures, so that deviant behaviour feels less wrong.
Merton’s key point was that criminals share the same goals as everyone else. They just take different, often illegal, paths to reach them.
Why Merton’s Theory Still Matters
Even though Merton developed his ideas in the 1930s, they remain highly relevant.
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Poverty and inequality: His theory helps explain why crime often increases in times of economic hardship, when people feel shut out from legitimate success.
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Modern consumerism: Today, society still pressures people to acquire money, possessions, and status. When the system blocks fair access to education or good jobs, strain and resentment grow, leading some toward deviant or criminal solutions.
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Media influence: Constant images of wealth and consumption can increase strain, because they raise expectations that many people cannot realistically meet.
Later Developments
Merton’s ideas inspired later sociologists to refine and extend the theory:
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Cloward and Ohlin (1960): Developed Opportunity Theory, showing that access to illegitimate opportunities (like criminal networks) also affects the type of deviance people turn to.
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Robert Agnew (1992, 2006): Created General Strain Theory (GST), expanding the idea beyond economic failure. He argued that strain can also come from emotional stress, such as loss, rejection, or bullying, which can also lead to deviance.
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Messner and Rosenfeld (2012): Developed institutional-anomie theory, arguing that crime rises where the economy dominates family, education, and politics. Bernburg (2002) traced its roots to Durkheim.
Crime, Deviance, and the Functions of Anomie
Durkheim’s account of anomie has a second, less familiar half. He also argued that crime and deviance are a normal, even useful, feature of every society.
Crime as a Normal, Functional Feature of Society
Rule-breaking persists in every kind of society Durkheim studied. He reasoned that it must serve some positive social function, or it would not persist at all.
Durkheim even suggested that a hypothetical “society of saints” would still end up treating minor faults as serious deviance. Some threshold of moral boundary-marking, he argued, is a structural necessity for any society.
Deviance can provoke social change. It draws attention to an unjust or outdated law and can help bring about reform.
A serious offence can also produce social integration, when shared outrage draws a community together in condemnation of the act. This effect is especially visible when the victims are seen as particularly vulnerable.
Trial and public punishment matter too. They reassure a community that its moral order is real and actively defended.
Kingsley Davis (1937) extended this logic to a striking case: prostitution, though widely stigmatised, could act as a “safety valve”. It channelled certain demands in a way that paradoxically helped stabilise the family system it seemed to threaten.
The Limits of the Functionalist Reading
Durkheim was clear that this reading has limits. Too much crime signals that too many people have stopped following shared norms, putting social order itself at risk.
Too little crime can be just as telling. It can signal an overbearing system of control, since Durkheim believed a society needs some criticism and rule-breaking in order to adapt.
Sutherland’s (1940) work on white-collar crime raises a related challenge.
Many damaging or unethical practices among the wealthy and powerful are less likely to be defined, detected, or prosecuted as crime at all.
Power plays a part here. People with social and economic power can shape which acts the law captures in the first place. This pattern is known as the social construction of crime.
Marxist critics press a related point. They argue that Durkheim’s picture of shared moral consensus understates the class conflict built into capitalist societies.
Anomie itself sits at the destabilising end of this balance. It names the moment when the normal level of deviance a society can absorb has been exceeded, not merely tested by isolated rule-breakers.
Causes of Anomie
Durkheim and Merton both used anomie to explain how social structure and culture interact to shape behavior.
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For Durkheim, anomie results from rapid social change and weakened moral bonds.
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For Merton, it emerges when cultural ideals of success collide with structural barriers that prevent people from achieving them legitimately.
In both views, anomie represents a loss of moral direction and social cohesion. That loss helps explain why crime, deviance, and feelings of alienation often rise during times of inequality and transformation.
Durkheim’s View: Rapid Change and Weakened Solidarity
Durkheim saw anomie as a result of large-scale social disruption.
He believed it was most likely to occur during periods of rapid social change, when societies transform faster than their moral order can keep up.
1. From Traditional to Modern Society
Durkheim argued that anomie arose as societies shifted from mechanical solidarity, typical of small, traditional communities, to organic solidarity, characteristic of modern industrial life.
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Mechanical Solidarity: In traditional societies, people shared similar jobs, beliefs, and values, which created strong social bonds and a powerful sense of unity.
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Organic Solidarity: In modern industrial societies, people depend on each other through a complex division of labor, but they no longer share the same experiences or beliefs.
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The Transition: As people move from close-knit communities to impersonal urban life, moral ties weaken, and individuals begin to feel disconnected from a shared moral code.
2. The Erosion of Social Control
Industrialization and urbanization weakened the traditional institutions that once provided guidance and discipline.
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Weakened Institutions: Families, religious groups, and local communities, once key sources of moral teaching, lost much of their influence.
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Urban Impersonality: City life replaced intimate, face-to-face relationships with impersonal and fragmented interactions, reducing shared values and collective responsibility.
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Ineffective Norms: When social control weakens, people no longer agree on right and wrong. Crime and conflict rise, which in turn further undermine moral order.
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Rise of Individualism: Modern societies encourage personal success and self-interest, which can weaken community bonds and promote moral confusion.
3. Cultural Lag and Technological Change
Durkheim also recognized that technological and social progress can outpace moral and institutional development.
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Norm Confusion: When new technologies or social roles appear faster than moral rules adapt, a cultural lag forms, creating uncertainty about appropriate behavior.
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Material vs. Moral Change: While material progress accelerates, moral institutions evolve more slowly. This mismatch often fuels social tension, inequality, and a sense of purposelessness.
Merton’s View: Strain Between Goals and Means
Robert Merton expanded Durkheim’s idea to explain why individuals break rules in modern capitalist societies.
His strain theory reframed anomie as a tension between cultural goals and the legitimate means to achieve them.
1. The Gap Between Aspirations and Opportunities
In Merton’s model, anomie occurs when people are taught to desire success but lack fair opportunities to achieve it through accepted channels.
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Cultural Goals: Society encourages everyone to pursue wealth, success, and happiness (the “American Dream”).
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Blocked Opportunities: Yet not everyone has equal access to quality education, stable jobs, or fair wages.
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Resulting Strain: This mismatch creates frustration and alienation, leading some individuals to seek alternative, often deviant, paths to reach their goals.
2. Economic Pressure and Inequality
Modern consumer culture intensifies this strain by glorifying wealth and possessions.
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Consumerism: Media and advertising reinforce the idea that happiness depends on money and material goods, making financial success a moral expectation.
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Structural Inequality: When people cannot reach these goals through legal or accepted means, they may feel shame, anger, or resentment, especially if they face poverty or discrimination.
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Coping Through Deviance: According to Merton, people adapt in different ways: innovating (e.g., committing crimes), ritualizing rules without meaning, retreating from society, or rebelling to create new norms.
Examples of Anomie
The concept of anomie helps explain why people and societies can lose their sense of direction during times of rapid economic instability or social change.
In modern contexts, anomie can appear in two main ways:
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Durkheim’s focus: shared moral values break down, leaving people unsure how to act.
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Merton’s focus: individuals feel strain because social barriers block them from reaching culturally valued goals.
Below are some examples of how anomie appears in today’s world.
Anomie Caused by Economic Instability
Economic upheaval often creates strain (in Merton’s sense) and weakens the collective moral order (in Durkheim’s sense).
When financial systems fail, or people lose faith in the fairness of opportunity, many experience confusion, frustration, and loss of purpose.
Economic Crises and Downturns
Periods of economic hardship vividly show how anomie arises when people lose the means to achieve success through legitimate channels.
1. The 2008 Great Recession:
The global financial crisis that began in 2008 caused widespread job losses and economic insecurity.
- Loss of Legitimate Means: Many people could no longer meet society’s expectations of success through hard work and stable employment.
- Family Strain: Families faced increased stress due to unemployment, debt, and housing instability.
- Deviant Adaptation: Research shows that property crime often rises during recessions, supporting Merton’s idea that people sometimes turn to illegal or “innovative” ways to meet economic goals when legitimate paths are blocked.
2. Consumerism and Riots:
Merton’s concept also explains unrest linked to deprivation and inequality.
Modern societies teach people to value money and material goods as symbols of worth, yet opportunities to achieve these goals are unequal.
The 2011 riots in London and Manchester, for instance, were interpreted by some sociologists as a reaction to consumerist values combined with blocked opportunities. This was an expression of anomie in action.
Work Stress and Social Isolation
Even in wealthy nations, rapid economic and technological changes can lead to personal instability and emotional strain.
1. Worker Stress and Suicide:
In highly developed economies, such as France, rising workplace stress and suicide rates have been linked to feelings of powerlessness and alienation.
In rapidly changing societies, people often face uncertainty and pressure to constantly adapt. These conditions foster personal forms of anomie.
2. Homelessness as Retreatism:
Merton described some individuals as “retreatists” who reject both society’s goals (like wealth) and its approved means (like employment).
Homelessness often reflects this condition.
People in this situation may experience deep alienation and loss of self-worth, feeling cut off from the norms that once gave life meaning.
Anomie Caused by Rapid Social and Cultural Change
Durkheim’s version of anomie focused on macro-level change: the breakdown of shared norms during modernization, globalization, and cultural transformation.
Modernization, Globalization, and Fragmented Identity
Modern societies are diverse and fast-changing, which can weaken shared values and make moral life more uncertain.
1. Cultural Lag:
Technological innovation often advances faster than moral or legal systems can adapt.
For example, while technology allows for nationwide digital health records, social beliefs about privacy and data use may lag behind, creating moral tension and confusion.
2. Weakening of Traditional Institutions:
As families, religious groups, and local communities lose influence, people gain personal freedom, but also lose the moral anchors that once guided behavior.
This makes deviance and disagreement more likely.
3. Postmodern Fragmentation:
In today’s globalized, postindustrial world, identities are fluid and uncertain.
The rapid pace of change, driven by consumerism and constant online connection, gives people freedom. It can also leave them feeling aimless, disconnected, and without clear values.
Institutional Breakdown: Family and Law
When core social institutions like the family and legal systems weaken, anomie deepens.
1. Family Instability:
As historian Francis Fukuyama observed, the shift toward service economies and individualism since the mid-20th century has eroded trust and social stability.
Rising divorce rates and absent parenthood have been linked to feelings of alienation and higher rates of youth delinquency.
These trends suggest that weakening family structures reduce the moral guidance once provided by stable kinship networks.
2. Erosion of Legal Authority:
Widespread law-breaking can indicate that existing laws no longer align with social values.
In the early 1990s, mass protest against Britain’s “Poll Tax” led to civil disobedience so widespread that the law had to be repealed.
Durkheim argued that such reactions can sometimes renew social solidarity, as citizens unite to demand fairer norms and restore moral balance.
Anomie and Alienation (Durkheim vs. Marx)
Durkheim’s concept of anomie focuses on moral confusion and weakened norms. Karl Marx’s idea of alienation comes from a very different tradition, one that focuses on economic exploitation and the structure of capitalism.
| Concept | Main Thinker | Root Cause | Focus |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anomie | Émile Durkheim, Robert Merton | Breakdown of shared norms and values | Moral and social disorder |
| Alienation | Karl Marx | Exploitation and loss of control over labor | Economic and psychological isolation |
1. Root Causes
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Anomie arises when society changes so rapidly that moral rules and shared values can’t keep up. This can happen during industrialization, urbanization, or times of social upheaval. People lose their sense of moral direction.
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Alienation, on the other hand, happens when workers in a capitalist system are separated from the products of their labor. They are also cut off from control over their work, from other people, and ultimately from their own sense of self.
2. Nature of the Condition
Alienation (Marx):
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Workers are exploited because the capitalist class owns the means of production and profits from their labor.
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Over time, this economic system makes people feel powerless and disconnected from what they create, from coworkers (who become competitors), and from their human potential.
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Alienation can also describe a broader feeling of being controlled by impersonal market forces or systems that seem beyond one’s control.
Anomie (Durkheim/Merton):
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Focuses on moral confusion rather than economic exploitation.
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For Durkheim, anomie occurs when people lose clear moral guidance due to weakened social bonds.
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For Merton, it describes the tension between cultural goals (like success) and blocked opportunities, which can lead to deviance or rebellion.
3. Overlapping Effects
Despite their different causes, both concepts describe disconnection, frustration, and a weakening of social bonds:
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Both can lead to a sense of isolation and meaninglessness.
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Each can also help explain deviant or self-destructive behavior.
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Merton’s theory even links anomie to feelings of alienation, suggesting that when people can’t meet society’s demands, they withdraw, rebel, or lose faith in its values.
Critical Evaluation
Both Émile Durkheim and Robert Merton made major contributions to understanding how social breakdown and inequality can lead to crime.
However, their theories of anomie and strain have also faced strong criticism for being vague, overly structural, and limited in scope.
Criticisms of Durkheim’s Concept of Anomie
Durkheim’s original idea of anomie and its link to deviance has been challenged on several grounds.
1. Vague and Difficult to Measure
Durkheim never clearly defined how anomie could be observed or measured.
It’s unclear exactly why weakened norms would lead specifically to crime, rather than to other forms of social change such as protest or withdrawal. This makes the theory hard to test scientifically.
2. Ignores Individual Choice
Critics argue that Durkheim focused too heavily on society’s structures and not enough on individual meaning and motivation.
He didn’t explain why some people commit crimes while others in the same social conditions do not. This makes his theory feel overly general.
Travis Hirschi’s social control theory later addressed part of this gap (Hirschi, 1969/2017). It locates the answer in each person’s bonds to conventional society: attachment, commitment, involvement, and belief.
3. Overlooks Harmful or “Dysfunctional” Crimes
Durkheim suggested that crime can sometimes serve a positive function by clarifying moral boundaries or strengthening social solidarity.
However, critics point out that some crimes, like rape, child abuse, or domestic violence, have no such function.
These acts are purely destructive and cannot be justified as “useful” to society.
4. Relies on Contested Suicide Statistics
Durkheim’s argument rests on official suicide statistics. Douglas (1967) argued these rates are no neutral count. Coroners, doctors, and religious authorities classify ambiguous deaths differently, shaped by local stigma, doctrine, and the incentives to under- or over-record a death as suicide.
Atkinson (1978) studied how coroners actually reach a verdict and drew the same conclusion. The categories Durkheim treated as given were themselves a social product.
The core claim survives. Suicide is still socially patterned. What weakens is confidence in the fine-grained comparisons between countries and religions that support his four types.
5. Assumes Anomie Is Temporary
Durkheim treated anomie as a passing pathology. A maturing organic solidarity, he expected, would settle into new institutions and rules.
Bauman (2000) challenged this with his idea of liquid modernity. In the most advanced societies, he argued, institutions, careers, relationships, and identities stay provisional and are constantly renegotiated.
On this view, a chronic, low-grade anomie is simply what modern life now feels like. It is not a crisis on the way to a new equilibrium.
Criticisms of Merton’s Strain Theory
Robert Merton’s version of anomie, known as strain theory, focused on the tension between cultural goals (like success) and unequal opportunities to reach them.
While influential, his theory also has several weaknesses.
1. Limited Scope
Merton’s theory explains economic crimes, like theft, fraud, or robbery, quite well, but it struggles to explain non-economic forms of deviance.
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It doesn’t fully account for crimes motivated by anger, emotion, or power, such as violent assaults, hate crimes, or vandalism.
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Nor does it explain recreational deviance, like joyriding or football hooliganism, which are not directly linked to blocked economic opportunities.
2. Too Focused on Class and Opportunity
Merton’s approach often assumes crime is mainly a response to poverty and blocked ambition in the lower classes.
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It overlooks white-collar and corporate crimes. Their perpetrators already have access to education and legitimate means of success.
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It also assumes that everyone shares the same cultural goals (mainly wealth and material success), but in reality, people hold diverse values. Many professionals prioritize helping others or community service over financial gain.
3. Doesn’t Explain Individual Differences
Merton described several “modes of adaptation” to strain (like innovation, retreatism, ritualism, and rebellion), but he didn’t explain why people choose different paths.
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Why does one person facing unemployment turn to crime, another to substance abuse, and another keep working within the system?
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His suggestion that working-class families might socialize children into deviant behavior feels unsatisfactory to many critics, as it still downplays personal decision-making.
4. Deterministic and Conservative Bias
As a functionalist, Merton viewed deviance as a product of social structure rather than individual agency.
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His theory implies that people’s behavior is largely determined by social pressures, leaving little room for personal choice or creativity.
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Critics also see strain theory as conservative, since it accepts society’s existing goals and values (like material success) rather than questioning them.
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It portrays rebels and radicals as deviants, not as people who might be pushing for positive social change.
Contemporary Research
Recent work has moved away from testing Durkheim’s original four-fold typology directly. Two narrower questions matter more now.
Does large-scale disruption reliably raise anomic distress? Does chronic weak integration still carry the risk Durkheim proposed?
- Aim: to establish whether suicide rates rose during the acute early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, when disruption was at its most severe.
- Method: Pirkis and an international team (2021) gathered official suicide counts from 21 countries and areas, covering January 2019 to July 2020. They used interrupted time-series analysis to compare observed suicides with the number pre-pandemic trends predicted.
- Results: there was no overall rise in suicide. About a dozen locations, including parts of Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan, and the United States, showed a significant decrease.
- Conclusion: suicide rates held steady or fell in the pandemic’s early months, rather than rising as the disruption might predict. The authors called for continued surveillance.
One likely reading: the pandemic’s disruption came bundled with unusually visible collective purpose, such as lockdowns and solidarity campaigns. That may have briefly increased people’s sense of integration even as it disrupted daily life, echoing Durkheim’s own point that suicide falls during wartime.
This finding should be read alongside a separate, more consistent pattern. Chronic social isolation remains a robust suicide risk factor.
Motillon-Toudic and colleagues (2022) screened 2,684 articles and synthesised the 46 that met their criteria.
They concluded that social isolation shows a substantial, consistent link to suicide risk. Family ties were especially protective for elderly and adolescent groups.
Together, the two studies separate two mechanisms a loose use of “anomie” can blur. A chronic deficit of integration remains a robust risk factor. A sudden disruption of regulation does not automatically raise suicide if it comes with a compensating surge in solidarity.
An earlier study tested the economic side of the theory. Chang and colleagues (2013) compared suicide counts in 2009, the year after the 2008 global financial crisis, with the numbers pre-crisis trends predicted. They used official data from 54 countries.
They found roughly 4,884 more suicides than expected, concentrated among men in Europe and the Americas. The largest relative increases came where unemployment rose most sharply.
Set beside the pandemic result, this suggests the mechanism shows most clearly when disruption is economic and individualising, such as job loss without a shared story of common struggle.
References
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Further Reading
- Anomie/Strain Theory
- Sociological theory and criminological research: Views from Europe and the United States
- Featherstone, R., & Deflem, M. (2003). Anomie and strain: Context and consequences of Merton’s two theories. Sociological inquiry, 73(4), 471-489.
- Deflem, M. (1989). From anomie to anomia and anomic depression: A sociological critique on the use of anomie in psychiatric research. Social Science & Medicine, 29(5), 627-634.
