Anomie: Encyclopedia II - Anomie - Anomie as social disorder

Anomie - Anomie as social disorder

The word, which can also be spelled anomy, has also been used to apply to societies or groups of people within a society, who suffer from chaos due to lack of commonly recognized explicit or implicit rules of good conduct, or worse, to the reign of rules promoting isolation or even predation rather than cooperation.

Friedrich Hayek notably uses the word anomy with this meaning.

Anomy as a social disorder is not to be confused with anarchy. The word 'anarchy' denotes lack of rulers, hierarchy, and command, whereas 'anomy' denotes lack of rules, structure and organization. Many opponents of anarchism claim that anarchy necessarily leads to anomy; however, almost all anarchists will argue that hierarchical command actually creates chaos, rather than order (e.g., see the Law of Eristic Escalation).

As an older variant, the Webster 1913 dictionary reports use of the word anomy as meaning "disregard or violation of the law".

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Anomie as social disorder", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki