Anomy A reader writes taking me to task for allowing
the SPECTATOR to launch a new with-it word- chiliastic. I see what he means, but on the whole I'm unabashed. Just as this year's fashions are the only way of killing last year's, new with-it words are the only means of ousting old with-it words, which are infinitely worse.
Not that chiliastic is all that new in modish circles anyway: Tony Crosland was using it to explain Labour's apparent predilection for Opposition in (I think) 1960. I'm told that the really new with-it word for 1966 is anomie— literally, rulelessness: the condition in which the individual ceases to feel constrained by the traditional guidelines of behaviour in society (social conventions, parental pressures, religious disciplines and so on) but puts nothing new in their place. This is held to be one of the basic explanations of the increase in misery, crime and frustration in our affluent society.
But why the French anomie, when there's a perfectly good English word, anomy? The fact that Durkheim was the first to use it in its modern sociological context is neither here nor there. What was good enough for Dr. Johnson is good enough for Britain's social scientists.
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