John Donne tells us that "no man is an island entire of itself." Individuals who have been forced into insulation have been described as in a state of anomie. The anomic citizen floats unattached, swept by the winds of change, and is disoriented, passive, and helpless. He is not stabilized by the guidance, support, and direction of groups and organizations to which he is linked. His moorings have stretched and he is therefore at sea (Durkheim, 1951). Webster's Dictionary defines anomie as "a state of society in which normative standards of conduct and belief are weak or lacking" and talks of "a similar condition in an individual characterized by disorientation, anxiety and isolation."
The isolation element of anomie is emphasized in portraits of the alienated person, the person who feels abandoned by institutions. He is sought among slum dwellers, blue collar workers, college dropouts, drug users, and nonvoters.1 Very generous characterizations of alienated persons can cover most people. Not so the high end of the scale, which defines acutely experienced abandonment. Alienation in this sense can be measured and described, and has concrete connotations.
Seeman (1959, 1970) for instance, saw the chief symptom of alienation to be powerlessness, which is a feeling that one cannot determine the consequences of one's acts, and a suspicion that one is the pawn of one's environment. The second (related) dimension is meaninglessness, which amounts to being unclear about what one can believe, and about what one can expect. Normlessness borders most closely on the concept of "deviance" in sociology. It means that one must play outside the rules of the game (play dirty) to win. Other connotations of alienation cover such items as not caring, feeling isolated and estranged, and depending on material rewards for incentive. Srole (1956) sums up "anomia" in five items. These proclaim that a person feels that his superiors are indifferent, peers nondependable, the world unpredictable, his fate inhospitable, and his goals unrealizable. Freud and Marx, each in his way, stressed the assumption that alienated individuals are deprived of investment or stake in their work (Jahoda, 1966; Marx, 1964)'
The notion of alienation was implied in Durkheim's own thinking. The term anomie, for Durkheim, described a situation in which the rules of the game of life become inconsistent, but it also dealt with the demoralizing impact of such situations. Durkheim wrote of run-away aspirations and doomed hope, and described nonanomic 'Reprint requests to the author, School of Criminal Justice,