SOC 201 Chapter 11: Chapter 11.10
Document Summary
The american sociologist robert merton rediscovered durkheim"s ideas about anomie in the late 1930s. Merton was not particularly interested in the problem of suicide, but he suspected that durkheim"s conception of anomie might help us to understand other forms of deviance. Merton continued in durkheim"s footsteps by focusing on structural strain as a cause of deviance. But merton applied the concept of anomie more broadly than durkheim had. Durkheim had implicitly assumed that once society completed its transition from preindustrial to industrial, anomie would go away. From his twentieth-century perspective, however, merton realized that anomie was not about to go away; indeed, as far as merton was concerned, anomie is built into the structure of modern society. Merton refocused the meaning of anomie to make it speak more directly to twentieth-century society.
