Breaking down the question
The command word is "critically examine", so description alone will not suffice. You must set out how each thinker conceptualises anomie, compare the two accounts, and appraise their strengths and limitations. The pairing of Durkheim and Merton is deliberate: Merton borrows the term but transforms its meaning, so the comparison is the heart of the answer.
Be precise about the shift. For Durkheim, anomie is a condition of normative deregulation — a breakdown or absence of moral limits on desire. For Merton, anomie is a structural strain between culturally prescribed goals and the legitimate means of reaching them. The Merton on functions and reference groups theme and the anomie concept entry together anchor the discussion.
The critical dimension asks you to weigh each formulation — Durkheim's for its explanatory reach and vagueness, Merton's for its precision and its class and cultural blind spots.
How to approach it
Open by noting that anomie is a bridging concept between the individual and society, and that Durkheim coined it while Merton recast it, so the two must be treated in sequence and then compared.
Set out Durkheim's usage in "The Division of Labour" and "Suicide" — anomie as normative deregulation, especially in times of rapid change and unbounded aspiration. Then present Merton's reworking — anomie as the disjunction between goals and means, with his five modes of adaptation. Compare the two on the axis of culture versus structure.
Devote the closing movement to critique: the strengths and weaknesses of each, so the "critically" is earned, before a synthesising verdict.
Model answer
Anomie is one of sociology's most productive concepts precisely because it was given two distinct meanings by its two great exponents. Émile Durkheim coined it to name a pathology of moral regulation, while Robert Merton borrowed the word and refashioned it into a theory of structurally induced deviance. Examining the two accounts together reveals both the fertility of the idea and the different problems each thinker was trying to solve.
For Durkheim, anomie denotes a state of normlessness or normative deregulation, in which society fails to provide adequate moral limits on individual desires and conduct. In "The Division of Labour in Society" he identified the anomic division of labour, arising when rapid economic change outpaces the growth of the moral rules needed to regulate new interdependencies, leaving relations between functions unregulated. In "Suicide" he developed anomic suicide, which occurs when sudden disturbance — economic boom as well as slump — dislocates the accustomed scale of expectations. Human desires, Durkheim argued, are potentially limitless and can be held in check only by an external moral force; when that regulation weakens, aspiration becomes boundless, satisfaction impossible, and the individual is left in a torment of unattainable desire. Anomie for Durkheim is thus a property of the collective moral order, a deficit in the collective conscience, most acute in periods of rapid social transition.
Robert Merton, in "Social Structure and Anomie", retained the word but relocated its cause. For him anomie is not a general absence of norms but a specific strain built into the culture and structure of a society. Every society defines culturally approved goals — in America, monetary success — and prescribes legitimate institutional means for reaching them. Anomie arises when the culture places overwhelming emphasis on the goals while the social structure denies large sections of the population effective access to the legitimate means. The resulting disjunction between goals and means generates strain, and deviance becomes a normal response to an abnormal situation. Merton mapped five modes of individual adaptation: conformity (accepting both goals and means); innovation (accepting goals but adopting illegitimate means, as in crime); ritualism (abandoning the goals while clinging to the means); retreatism (rejecting both, as with vagrants and addicts); and rebellion (replacing both with new goals and means). Anomie thus becomes a middle-range theory of the distribution of deviance across the social structure.
The comparison is instructive. Both treat anomie as a social rather than individual condition, locating the source of deviance in society rather than in the person, and both link it to the mismatch between desire and its regulation. But the emphasis shifts decisively. Durkheim's anomie is a failure of regulation — too few limits on aspiration — whereas Merton's is a failure of opportunity — a structural gap between what people are taught to want and what they are permitted to achieve. Durkheim's account is cultural and moral; Merton's is structural and, implicitly, a critique of unequal opportunity.
A critical examination exposes the limits of each. Durkheim's concept is powerful but imprecise: "normlessness" is difficult to operationalise and measure, his notion of naturally infinite desires requiring external restraint is contestable, and the argument verges on treating a well-regulated status quo as the norm of health. Merton's reformulation is more testable but narrower. It concentrates on innovation and material success and explains utilitarian crime well, yet it accounts poorly for non-utilitarian or expressive deviance, assumes a value consensus around a single goal that plural societies may lack, and neglects the group and subcultural dimension that later writers such as Cohen and Cloward and Ohlin supplied. Both, moreover, share a broadly consensual assumption that critics from the conflict tradition reject, arguing that the goals and means themselves reflect the interests of dominant groups.
Taken together, Durkheim and Merton offer complementary rather than competing insights. Durkheim illuminates the moral dislocation of societies in rapid transition; Merton illuminates the patterned strain of stratified societies of opportunity. The concept's endurance lies in this very flexibility: read as normative deregulation it explains the anomic condition of modernity, and read as goals-means disjunction it explains the social distribution of deviance. A critical appreciation holds both meanings in view rather than collapsing one into the other.
Examiner's perspective
Examiners reward candidates who keep the two meanings distinct. The commonest error is to treat Merton as merely elaborating Durkheim, missing that he shifts the cause of anomie from deregulation of desire to blockage of opportunity. Stating this contrast — cultural-moral versus structural — precisely is the surest way into the top band.
The "critically" in the question must be visibly answered. Strong scripts appraise each account: Durkheim's reach against its vagueness, Merton's testability against its neglect of expressive and subcultural deviance, and the shared consensual assumption that conflict theorists challenge. Accurate deployment of Merton's five modes of adaptation and of Durkheim's anomic suicide and anomic division of labour demonstrates textual command, while a synthesising verdict that treats the two as complementary shows the maturity examiners look for.