Harry F. Dahms is Professor of Sociology and co-chair of the Committee on Social Theory at theUniversity of Tennessee - Knoxville.[1] Dahms also is an associate editor ofBasic Income Studies andSoundings. An Interdisciplinary Journal, and was a founding member of the editorial boards ofThe Newfound Press (an imprint of the University of Tennessee Libraries), as well as of Anthem Studies in the Political Sociology of Democracy, on whose board he continues to be. Since 2022, he has been a member of the AI Tennessee Initiative task force.
Dahms' primary research and teaching areas are theoretical sociology (social, sociological, and critical theory),[2][3][4] planetary sociology,globalization,political economy,social inequality,sociology of film (with emphasis on the science-fiction genre),artificial intelligence, andsocial justice. He is the editor ofCurrent Perspectives in Social Theory,[5] and director of the International Social Theory Consortium (ISTC).[6]
Dahms obtained his master's degree in sociology, economics, and statistics in 1986 from theUniversity of Konstanz, Germany, where he worked withRalf Dahrendorf as research and teaching assistant and attended several seminars byAlbrecht Wellmer. Dahms obtained his PhD in sociology in 1993 atThe New School for Social Research in New York; the title of his dissertation was "The Entrepreneur in Western Capitalism: Schumpeter's Theory of Economic Development." Arthur J. Vidich was Dahms' dissertation supervisor, andAndrew Arato andJosé Casanova were committee members. Dahms also enrolled in seminars taught byRichard Bernstein,Robert Heilbroner,Agnes Heller,Eric Hobsbawm, Guy Oakes, andClaus Offe.
Dahms started teaching atFlorida State University in Tallahassee in fall 1993 and has been at the University of Tennessee - Knoxville since fall 2004. He was a visiting professor affiliated with the Center of European and North America Studies at theUniversity of Göttingen, Germany (October 1999 until December 2000) and with the Department of Sociology at theUniversity of Innsbruck, Austria (summer semester 2011 and 2012), where he also taught regular compact seminars between 2010 and 2019).[7]
Dahms' research and teaching pertains to the tensions in the modern age between economic change, on the one hand, and politics, culture and society, on the other. Interpreting the contributions ofMarx andWeber, in particular, as foundations for a dynamic theory of modern society, he starts out from the proposition that the contradictions and paradoxes of modern society must be located within the field of tensions between “globalization” and planetary sociology, at the intersection between identity structure and social structure.[8]
The spectrum of his theoretical reference points ranges from the critical theory of theFrankfurt School at one end - especiallyTheodor W. Adorno andJürgen Habermas - toJoseph Schumpeter's social theory ofcapitalism, at the other, but also includes many other social theorists, philosophers, and social scientists, includingGeorg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,Max Weber,Eduard Heimann,Talcott Parsons,Darko Suvin,Lawrence Hazelrigg,Moishe Postone, andAmy Allen. In modern society, a particular kind of social order fused with social processes tied to a new economic system combined with ongoing industrialization into an inherently irreconcilable set of force-fields. These force-fields are fraught with many different types of friction that maintains social stability by devising mechanisms designed to contain the destructive power of proliferating contradictions. As a consequence, continually deepening contradictions are viewed by individuals as entirely "normal" features of modern social life. The result is a widening gap between the categories social scientists employ to meaningfully interpret present conditions, and the categories that would have to be developed and deployed to maintain the possibility of knowledge — socially, culturally, and politically.[9]
