52 Durkheim insisted that the growing division of labor found in in­dustrial societies led to what he called anomie. Please, explain what Durkheim meant and what sociologists call anomie.

Durkheim calls anomie, a term that refers to a condition of relative normlessness in a whole society or in some of its component groups. Anomie does not refer to a state of mind, but to a property of the social structure. It characterizes a condition in which individual desires are no longer regulated by common norms and where, as a consequence, individuals are left without moral guidance in the pursuit of their goals. Durkheim talked about anomic division of labor and anomic suicide, which are abnormal , or pathological, situations. In order to fully understand Durkheim’s concept of anomie, we need to look at his theory on a good society.

II Durkheim's Theory on Anomie

Durkheim mentioned the concept of anomie in The Division of Labor and Suicide (Durkheim, 1897). He introduced this concept in The Division of Labor when he first compared the moral order of traditional and modern societies and refined it in Suicide.

Anomie is defined as a state of "normlessness." Typically, it is a state of moral deregulation resulting from a period of social change, when existing rules, habits, and beliefs no longer hold and alternatives have yet to arise. There is great potential for anomie of this sort in contemporary U.S. science, caused by specialization, technical innovation and the attendant obsolescence of skills, the changing organizational culture of academic science, new goals and bases for legitimating scientific research, and a changing relationship between performance and reward. Under anomic circumstances, behavior is only vaguely guided by shared rules and values.

The concept anomie was used by early sociologists to describe changes in society produced by the Industrial Revolution. The demise of traditional communities and the disruption of norms, values, and a familiar way of life were major concerns of nineteenth-century philosophers and sociologists. For sociologists, anomie is most frequently associated with Emile Durkheim, although others used it differently even during his lifetime.

Durkheim used the French word anomie, meaning "without norms," to describe the disruption that societies experienced in the shift from agrarian, village economies to those based on industry. Anomie is used to describe a state of society, referring to characteristics of the social system, not of individuals, although individuals were affected by this force. Increasingly, this term has taken on a more social psychological meaning. This is not to say that it no longer has uses consistent with the initial definition, but its meaning has been broadened considerably, at times consistent with Durkheim's usage, at times at substantial variance with it.

There are, no doubt, sociologists who cringe at any expanded usage of this and other concepts, but the fact of the matter is that we have no more control over its usage than Thomas Kuhn (1970) has over abominable uses of the concept "paradigm," or than computer engineers have over those who say "interface" when they mean "meet with." Although we cannot completely stop the misappropriation of such terms as anomie we can be careful that sociological extensions of anomie are logically derived from their early uses.

53 As one example of this emphasis, Durkheim (1947, original edition 1912) developed a fundamental thesis to help understand all forms of society through intensive study of the Arunta, an Australian tribe. He focused on the functions that religion performed for the Arunta and underscored the role that group life plays in defi ning what we consider religious. Durkheim concluded that, like other forms of group behaviour, religion reinforces a group’s solidarity.

54 Weber taught his students that they should employ Verstehen (pronounced “fehr—SHTEH—ehn), the German word for “understanding” or “insight,” in their intellectual work. He pointed out that we cannot analyze much of our social behaviour by the kinds of objective criteria we use to measure weight or temperature. To fully comprehend behaviour, we must learn the subjective meanings people attach to their actions—how they themselves view and explain their behaviour. For example, suppose that a sociologist was studying the social ranking of students at a high school. Weber would expect the researcher to employ Verstehen to determine the signifi cance of the school’s social hierarchy for its members. Th e researcher might examine the eff ects of athleticism or grades or social skills or physical

appearance in the school. She would seek to learn how students relate to other students of higher or lower status. While investigating these questions, the researcher would take into account people’s emotions, thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes.

55 Karl Marx argued that history could be understood in dialectical terms as a record of the inevitable of materialism. Marx's theory, which he called "historical materialism" or the "materialist conception of history" is based on Hegel's claim that history occurs through a dialectic, or clash, of opposing forces. Hegel was a philosophical idealist who believed that we live in a world of appearances, and true reality is an ideal. Marx accepted this notion of the dialectic, but rejected Hegel's idealism because he did not accept that the material world hides from us the "real" world of the ideal; on the contrary, he thought that historically and socially specific ideologies prevented people from seeing the material conditions of their lives clearly. Marx's analysis of history is based on his distinction between the means of production, literally those things, like land and natural resources, and technology, that are necessary for the production of material goods, and the social relations of production, in other words, the social relationships people enter into as they acquire and use the means of production. Together these comprise the mode of production; Marx observed that within any given society the mode of production changes, and that European societies had progressed from a feudal mode of production to a capitalist mode of production.

Marx believed that this cycle of growth, collapse, and growth would be punctuated by increasingly severe crises. Moreover, he believed that the long-term consequence of this process was necessarily the empowerment of the capitalist class and the impoverishment of the proletariat. He believed that were the proletariat to seize the means of production, they would encourage social relations that would benefit everyone equally, and a system of production less vulnerable to periodic crises. In general, Marx thought that peaceful negotiation of this problem was impracticable, and that a massive, well-organized and violent revolution was required. Finally, he theorized that to maintain the socialist system, a proletarian dictatorship must be established and maintained. Marx held that Socialism itself was an "historical inevitability" that would come about due to the more numerous "Proletarians" having an interest in "expropriating" the "bourgeois exploiters" who had themselves profited by expropriating the surplus value that had been attributable to the proletarians labor in order to establish a "more just" system where there would be greatly improved social relations.