ABSTRACT
The history of the concept of anomie takes us, in this chapter, away from the intellectual world of Western Europe, to the American context. This transition has major and far-reaching consequences for the development of anomie theory. The change of intellectual climate is so drastic that the apparently fragmentary outlook of the new field of sociology on one side of the Atlantic acquires a unitary character, when compared with the sociological outlook on the other side. It is in relation to American sociology that European sociology acquires a distinctive identity, just as it is in comparison with the European outlook that American sociology can be characterized as having certain specific qualities.
