Professor George E. McCarthy is an American and Irish philosopher/sociologist who teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century European philosophy, classical and contemporary social theory, ethics and social justice, philosophy and sociology of science, and critical political economy at Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio. He holds a B.A. in philosophy from Manhattan College (1968), an M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy from Boston College (1972), and an M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from the Graduate Faculty, New School for Social Research (1979). He also studied progressive and Marxian economics at the New School with Professors David Gordon and Stephen Hymer. At a particular early stage in his academic career, there was a time (1971-1972) when he was enrolled simultaneously in two different universities, in two different graduate programs, in two different academic disciplines -- Philosophy and Sociology -- in two different cities, in two different states, while he was also under federal indictment, prosecution, and trial at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan, New York City for military draft refusal and moral resistance to the Vietnam War. And, in between these two American graduate school experiences, he spent two years studying the critical social and political theory of the Frankfurt School at the University of Frankfurt and the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt/Main, Germany (1973-1975).

           Earlier at Manhattan College in the mid-nineteen sixties he received an unusual classical education in the Great Books Liberal Arts Program whose readings went from the primary texts of the ancient to the modern classics. During the first year of study he took the four required courses each semester for all enrolled students in the Literature, Art, Philosophy, and History of Classical Greece and Rome in which he read Plato and Aristotle; Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, Pericles, and Livy; and Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes. During the second year he repeated these same four area subjects for Medieval Europe. His third and fourth years continued this same approach and course listing with their emphasis on the primary texts for Modern and Contemporary European authors. In addition to these four required courses each semester for four continuous years, he also took three years of language courses and classes to fulfill his declared major in philosophy. After his formal education, McCarthy would then spend a good portion of his academic career searching the classical foundations and horizons of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European Social Theory and Continental Philosophy and raising the crucial question of why the modern authors of these theories would return to the Ancients for their creative inspiration, insight, and direction. From this perspective, his main educational goal is to reunite these lost humanistic traditions by rediscovering the Ancient Classics and integrating them with Political Economy and Critical Sociology. Therein lies the true foundation of Classical and Contemporary European Social Theory.

           Academic Experience, Study, and Research in Germany: McCarthy has been a DAAD Research Fellow (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität (University of Frankfurt) and the Institut für Sozialforschung in Frankfurt am Main. He has also been a guest research professor at the Geschwister-Scholl-Institut für Politikwissenschaft at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, the Katholische Sozialwissenschaftliche Zentralstelle in Mönchengladbach, and the department of Philosophie und Erziehungswissenschaft-Humanwissenschaften at the Gesamthochschule, Universität Kassel, Germany. In 1994-1995, he was a Senior Fulbright Research Fellow in Germany. In the spring of 2000 he received the National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Teaching Professorship in Sociology at Kenyon College. More recently, he has been the recipient of a twelve-month National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship (2006-2007) for his project, "Aristotle and Kant in Classical Social Theory," which examined the relationship between nineteenth-century European social theory and Greek and German philosophy.

           His main educational goals are: (1) to investigate the philosophical foundations of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European social theory with a special focus on the integration of the Ancients (Ancient Hebrews, Hellenes, and Hellenists) and the Moderns (German Romantics, Idealists, Historians, and Critical Materialists); (2) to help rediscover the nature of sociology as an empirical/historical and practical/ethical science; (3) to reintegrate Philosophy, History, and Political Economy back into a Critical Social Theory; (4) to expand the nature of 'social science' beyond traditional quantitative and qualitative methods to include the full range of critical social science, including interpretive and hermeneutical science ( Hermeneutische Wissenschaft or verstehende Soziologie), cultural science (Kulturwissenschaft), historical science (Geschichtswissenschaft or sociology of social institutions and structures), human or moral science (Geisteswissenschaft), historical materialism (political economy), dialectical or critical science (Kritische Wissenschaft: immanent critic of the values, logic, and dialectic of capital), and depth hermeneutics (Tiefenhermeneutik: neo-Freudian analysis), while rejecting the methodology of the natural sciences: positivism, empiricism, critical rationalism, naturalism, and nominalism; (5) to develop a critical social theory that incorporates classical and contemporary European social theory -- philosophy, history, and political economy -- into a comprehensive theory of social justice; (6) to integrate the vision and ideals of philosophy with the structures and historical reality of economic and social theory; (7) to expand quantitative and qualitative methods while liberating them from the narrowness of analytic philosophy and positivism (scientism and naturalism); and (8) to interpret Marx's labor theory of value, abstract labor, surplus value, and exchange value, as well as his theory of the structural contradictions (Widersprüche) and economic crises of capitalism in his later writings, not as part of a theory predicting the inevitable breakdown of the economic system, but as a critical theory of ethics and social justice. The main goal of these eight points in education and scholarship is to revive the spirit of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European social theory and their classical horizons at a time when we are witnessing the decline and "eclipse of reason" in the American academy. Higher education has been turned into a technical and specialized education business and corporate structure with a corresponding split between the humanities and the social and natural sciences. The result has been a narrowing and shallowing of disciplines without theoretical imagination, creativity, and critical insight. Important ethical, historical, and theoretical questions are no longer capable of being considered due to the limited range of issues under discussion within the various disciplines themselves. Theory within sociology, along with epistemology, methodology, and metatheory, is being reduced to a peripheral and unnecessary afterthought of literature review.

          More specifically, Marx's goal is to draw the connections between Ancient philosophy and the Greek polis and Modern social theory and political economy in order to reconfigure and reinterpret Aristotle's major works Nicomachean Ethics (Philosophy: human excellence, happiness (Eudaimonia), and the good life of moral and intellectual virtue (Arete) from courage, moderation, and wisdom to friendship and citizenship) and The Politics (Sociology: institutions and structures of political economy, moral economy, and political democracy) for the modern age. This rewrite will take the form of joining together Ethics, Social Theory, and Social Justice. The main academic goal behind this effort is to fuse the intellectual horizons (Horizontverschmelzung) of Philosophy and Sociology, Ethics and Social Theory, Virtue & Natural Law and Political & Economic Democracy, and Social Justice and Social Science, thereby creating a critical and dialectical discipline or Science with Heart (Herz: ethics, virtue, and moral/social principles) and Spirit (Geist: politics, reason, social institutions, and empirical/historical research). The future of a democratic, egalitarian, and just society within a moral economy is open to those who can dream with critical insight and practical vision, while also looking back to the Ancients for inspiration, compassion, and hope (Griechensehnsucht).

           Technically, unlike Aristotle, Marx did not write an initial or early work devoted entirely to ethics, but his early writings joined Ancient Ethics and Modern Political Economy in his focus on the centrality of human excellence, virtue (moral and dignified life and social justice), practical human activity, and creative moral and political action/work (Praxis). Marx took the idea of a virtuous life and the essential happiness of moral existence from Aristotle and combined it with the world of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century "Creative Subjectivity" found in epistemology, moral philosophy, art, and economics. That is, he borrowed from the Romantic poetry of art, beauty, and creativity and the Kantian and Hegelian idealism of the constitution theory of truth (transcendental and phenomenological subjectivity) and morality (categorical imperative and social ethics). To these central themes he added the importance of modern economics and the virtue and value of human labor, industrial and agricultural production, political rights and democratic polity, and economic cooperatives of equality, freedom, and collective sharing of material wealth (French socialism). To Aristotle's ethics and politics, Marx added the crucial importance of the social, practical, and moral value & virtue of human labor in modern industrial society. Human physical, mental, and spiritual labor helped to provide the moral, political, and material foundations for human excellence, happiness, and the good life. And where Aristotle began his Nicomachean Ethics with the moral virtues of love, compassion, and friendship among family, friends, and citizens to establish the foundations and integrity of the Athenian polis and democracy, Marx focused instead in his Early Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 on the nineteenth-century values and virtues of artisans, co-workers, and co-creators and their collective moral responsibilities of economic cooperation and mutual sharing within both the workplace and the polity. In the end, however, they both completed their works with the ethical dreams of Ancient and Modern democracy and the possibilities for the historical realization of humanity's essence as moral and social beings -- the realization of virtue, excellence, and happiness in political economy.