Anomie and the Moral Regulation of Reality: The Durkheimian Tradition in Modern Relief

Anomie is one of the few uniquely sociological concepts (Parsons 1968). Yet it continues to be shrouded in conceptual difficulty (Shoham and Grahame 1982). Doubts revolve around the identification and measurement of anomie and its status outside of individuals, independent of individuals, with phenomenal and behavioral consequences for individuals (Schacht 1982; Seeman 1982). Our purpose in this paper is to address this confusion by way of clarification, to locate anomie as an empirically available phenomenon, and to recover anomie theory from the classics and put it to work on behalf of recent trends in sociological theory. We begin in the first section with a reading of Durkheim's sociology which leads us to the conclusion that anomie as moral deregulation is simultaneously the withdrawal of reality and of the possibility of objective experience. In the second section we review recent developments in sociology, specifically a broad area that hangs together loosely as reality construction theory, with special attention to ethnomethodology. We shall argue that reality withdrawal amounts to trouble in the social production of reality. In the third section we probe three empirical examples of anomie as we have formulated it and describe the consequences anomie necessarily has for the individual. Finally we conclude with a discussion of the misgivings concerning anomie theory cited above and how our reformulation addresses these misgivings.