anomie
Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th 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.
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.
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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.
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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
Note
The word 'anomie' comes from a Greek word meaning "lawlessness".
