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).[7]
Work
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.[8]
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.[9]
"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.
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)
Patricia Mooney Nickel (ed.), North American Critical Theory after Postmodernism. Contemporary Dialogues. Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 199-200.
Lauren Langman and Devorah Kalekin-Fishman, "Alienation: Critique and Alternative Futures", in The ISA Handbook in Contemporary Sociology. Conflict, Competition, Cooperation, ed. by Ann Denis and Devorah Kalekin-Fishman. Los Angeles: Sage, 2009, pp. 9-28; here: p. 16.
Planetary Sociology: Beyond the Entanglements of Identity and Social Structure (Current Perspectives in Social Theory, vol. 40), Bingley, UK: Emerald, May 2023)
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