Harry F. Dahms

American sociology professor

Harry F. Dahms is Professor of Sociology, co director of the Center for the Study of Social Justice and co chair of the Committee on Social Theory at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. Dahms also is an associate editor of Basic Income Studies and Soundings. An Interdisciplinary Journal, and was a founding member of the editorial boards of The 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 has remained. Since 2022, he has been a member of the AI Tennessee Initiative taskforce. Dahms' primary research and teaching areas are theoretical sociology (social, sociological, and critical theory), planetary sociology, globalization, political economy, social inequality, sociology of film (with emphasis on the science fiction genre), artificial intelligence, and social justice. He is the editor of Current Perspectives in Social Theory, and director of the International Social Theory Consortium (ISTC).

Dahms obtained his master's degree in sociology, economics, and statistics in 1986 from the University of Konstanz, Germany (where he worked for and was supervised by Ralf Dahrendorf and attended several seminars by Albrecht Wellmer) and his PhD in sociology in 1993 from The New School for Social Research in New York, for a dissertation entitled "The Entrepreneur in Western Capitalism: Schumpeter's Theory of Economic Development." While at the New School, he was supervised by Arthur J. Vidich and advised by Andrew Arato and José Casanova and also enrolled in seminars taught by Richard Bernstein, Robert Heilbroner, Agnes Heller, Eric Hobsbawm, Guy Oakes, and Claus Offe. He taught at Florida State University in Tallahassee from 1993 to 2004, and was a visiting professor affiliated with the Center of European and North America Studies at the University of Göttingen, Germany (fall semester 1999 until fall semester 2000) and in the Department of Sociology at the University of Innsbruck, Austria (summer semester 2011 and 2012), where he also taught regular compact seminars between 2010 and 2019).

Dahms's 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 of Marx and Weber, in particular, as foundations for a dynamic theory of modern society, he starts out from the proposition that it is only from the perspectives of “globalization” (including the debates about restructuring, transnational corporations, and neo imperialism) and planetary sociology that the contradictions and paradoxes of modern society can be disentangled, at the intersection between identity structure and social structure. The spectrum of his theoretical reference points reaches from the critical theory of the Frankfurt School at one end especially Theodor W. Adorno and Jürgen Habermas to Joseph Schumpeter's social theory of capitalism, at the other, but also includes many other social theorists, philosophers, and social scientists, including Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Max Weber, Eduard Heimann, Talcott Parsons, Darko Suvin, Lawrence Hazelrigg, Nancy Fraser, and Amy Allen. In modern society, a particular kind of social order fused with a specific type of social processes into an inherently irreconcilable set of force fields fraught with many different types of tensions that maintains stability by devising mechanisms designed to contain the destructive power of myriad contradictions, in the process continually deepening those contradictions. The consequence 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 meaning—socially, culturally, and politically.

Senior Level Excellence in Teaching Award, 2021, College of Arts & Sciences, University of Tennessee. Albert Salomon Dissertation Award, The New School, 1993.

"Social Theory's Burden: From Heteronomy to Vitacide (or, How Classical Critical Theory Predicted Proliferating Rackets, Authoritarian Personalities, and Administered Worlds in the Twenty First Century)," in Society in Flux: Two Centuries of Social Theory (Current Perspectives in Social Theory, vol. 37; Bingley, UK: Emerald, 2022), ed. by Harry F. Dahms. “Critical Theory, Sociology, and Science Fiction Films: Love, Radical Transformation and the Socio Logic of Capital,” in Daniel Krier and Mark Worrell (eds. ), Capital in the Mirror: Critical Social Theory and the Aesthetic Dimension (Albany, NY: SUNY Press; 2020): 231 301. “Adorno’s Critique of the New Right Wing Extremism: How (Not) to Face the Past, Present, and Future,” disClosure: a journal of social theory, 29(1), 129 179. Ecologically Unequal Exchange Environmental Injustice in Comparative and Historical Perspective: Environmental Injustice in Comparative and Historical Perspective, co edited with R. Scott Frey and Paul K. Gellert (Palgrave, 2019)
The Vitality of Critical Theory. Emerald, 2011. Nature, Knowledge, and Negation (ed.). Current Perspectives in Social Theory, 26, Emerald, 2009. No Social Science Without Critical Theory (ed.). Current Perspectives in Social Theory, 25, Emerald, 2008. Globalization Between the Cold War and Neo Imperialism (Special Volume Editor). Current Perspectives in Social Theory, 24, Elsevier/JAI, 2006. Transformations of Capitalism: Economy, Society and the State in Modern Times (Editor). London: Palgrave, and New York: NYU Press, 2000.