Prof Dr Gorm Harste

Gorm Harste is associate professor of political science at Aarhus University. He is expert in European state building and his books in includes Law and Intersystemic Communication: Understanding “Structural Coupling”

He was born 1955, is a Danish sociologist, political scientist and philosopher. Educated in political science and philosophy from Aarhus University and in European studies from the University of Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. Employed at the Department of Political Science and Government at Aarhus University and has since 2015 been associated with the research program LUMEN on Lutheran Mentality in Nordic Cultures. His research areas consist of societal theory and political theory of European state formation. The emphasis is on historical sociology and on grand theories from Immanuel Kant and G.W.F. Hegel over Émile Durkheim and Max Weber to Niklas Luhmann, Jürgen Habermas, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. Since 1999, he has been compiling a lack of sociological theory of war, which is presented in the main work Critique of the Reason of War – A Perspective on Self-Referential Systems from the 11th-21st Centuries, published in 2016. The focus on grand theories is particularly evident in The Habermas – Luhmann Debate from 2021. Gorm Harste has from 1987 – 1999 been coordinator in interdisciplinary Nordic research networks such as Nordic Summer University and NorFa, and has since 2001 been director of conferences at Interuniversity Center in Dubrovnik, Croatia specializing in the application of Luhmann’s systems theory. In 1996-7, Gorm Harste was an adviser to the French-led research group at the UN, which later led to the Paris Agreement