ABSTRACT
The word ‘anomie’ has had a strange journey. Coined by Jean-Marie Guyau (1885) as a pun on the Kantian term ‘autonomy’, it was then incorporated by Durkheim into the vocabulary of the infant discipline of sociology. Durkheim’s usage was rediscovered in the thirties at Harvard University. In the sixties it became the name for a ‘measure’ that exemplified prevailing research procedures in American sociology (Besnard 1987). Its career ended in the greatest confusion. In its predominant usage, the word anomie has undergone a complete semantic revolution: its eventual meaning was antithetical to Durkheim’s. Yet the vast majority of those who used the term had simply presumed that the concept had not changed since Durkheim’s day.
