Durkheim observed the same process at work as had Marx and Engels, but Durkheim believed that rather than giving rise to new, atomized-but-liberated agents, this atomization created social pathologies. He coined the term “anomie” to describe this phenomenon. To Durkheim, anomie was a social condition that caused a breakdown of moral values and an uprooting of individuals from their communities. Durkheim believed that anomie was the condition that gave rise to epiphenomena such as the rise in the suicide and homicide rates.

Recently, political scientist Patrick Deneen has dusted off this old tradition. Much has been made of the fact that in his book Why Liberalism Failed, Deneen blamed liberal ideology for the social pathologies we see in Western societies today. What has been less discussed in Deneen’s book is his frequent implication that this liberal ideology is an outgrowth of international capitalism itself. “The global market,” Deneen writes, “displaces a variety of economic subcultures, enforcing a relentless logic of impersonal transactions.” It is hard not to read sentences like this as indicating that it is the capitalist machine and its globalizing tendencies that produce social liberalism, and not vice versa.