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 with a minor in political economy from the Graduate Faculty, New School for Social Research (1979). He studied progressive and Marxian economics at the New School with Professors David Gordon and Stephen Hymer. At an 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 (SDNY) in Foley Square, Manhattan, NY, for military draft refusal, based on his moral resistance to the Vietnam War. And, in between these two American graduate school experiences, he spent four months at a Goethe Institute in Blaubeuren and Brannenburg-Degerndorf and 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). In summary, it was during these 10 years after college between 1968 and 1979 that McCarthy attended graduate schools in philosophy and sociology in Boston and New York; received multiple graduate degrees; undertook scholarly research in Frankfurt, Germany; and was tried in a federal district court for refusal to serve in an immoral war of American imperialism and genocide.

           These invaluable experiences provided the foundation for his later professional career with his integration of philosophy, sociology, and political economy and his synthesis of ancient and modern traditions. Classical Greece and the Athenian polity provided the inspiration and dreams for a better ethical and political life in continental social theory, while political economy and history provided the substance and structures for a more critical, concrete, and relevant theory of social justice. Philosophy without social theory and political economy is abstract, empty, and metaphysical -- without relevance and application to historical and social reality, while social theory and political economy without philosophy are meaningless and blind -- without political vision and ethical purpose

           Earlier at Manhattan College in the mid-nineteen sixties he received an unusual classical education in the Great Books Curriculum of the Liberal Arts whose readings went from the primary texts of Greek and Roman antiquity to the modern Continental classics. During the four years of undergraduate training at Manhattan, all students enrolled at the college in the humanities and sciences were required to take four courses each semester in History, Philosophy, Literature, and Art in addition to two other classes usually in language and their academic major. During his first year of study, he took the four required courses focusing on Classical Greece and Rome. In these classes he read Plato and Aristotle; Herodotus and Thucydides; and Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes. His first experiences and classes as a young undergraduate student were in reading about the philosophical discoveries and differences between Socrates and Plato, Aristotle's reflections in the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics (Aristotle's lecture notes) on the ethics and politics of the good and virtuous life within the ideal and best forms of government; the Trojan War and exciting and romantic adventures of Odysseus throughout the Mediterranean as he returned home to the island of Ithaca; the Persian War and the battles of Thermopylae and Salamis; the Peloponnesian War between Sparta and Athens and Pericles's funeral oration about the need to protect and preserve Athenian democracy; the tragedies and comedies of classical Greece; and the exquisite and enrapturing beauty and grace of the Athenian Parthenon and Greek sculpture and art. Later in the second semester of his first year his attention turned to Roman philosophy, literature, history, and art. During the second year he repeated these same four subject areas for Medieval Europe. His third and fourth years continued this same approach and course listings with their emphasis on the primary texts for Modern and Contemporary European authors respectively. In addition to these four required courses each semester for four continuous years, he also took three years of German language and two years of additional Continental Philosophy classes in his major. This resulted in students at Manhattan College taking on average six courses per semester. The academic emphasis was clearly on Continental philosophy, history, and culture. At the time, there were very few social science courses offered at the college and they were usually connected with the business school since they were not considered part of the liberal arts tradition.

           Having received an exciting and unforgettable classical education at Manhattan College in the sixties, his later scholarly inquires into modern sociology, political economy, and history were always grounded in the political vision, aesthetic creativity, and classical horizons of the democratic polity of ancient Athens from the Pnyx and the discursive Assembly to the heights of the Acropolis and the overwhelming beauty of the Parthenon, and from the funeral oration of Pericles during the Peloponnesian War with Sparta to the funeral oration of Marx after the execution of the last citizens of the Paris Commune at the Communards' Wall in the Pere Lachaise Cemetery. The classics help us overcome the disenchanted blindness and dark shadows of Enlightenment reason and capitalist society in order to hope and dream of alternative social possibilities for a better future and more humane and compassionate society. The ultimate goal of education is not to produce formal and technical utility, but to encourage students and faculty to imagine and dream -- to create Beauty in art, ethics, and politics.

           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. Herein lies the true foundations of Classical and Contemporary European Social Theory. From this perspective, his main educational goal was to show how modern social theory reunited these lost humanistic traditions by rediscovering the ancient classics and integrating them with British political economy and anthropology, German and French social theory and philosophy, the German historical school of economics, and German, French, and British romantic poetry. For example, in the nineteenth century, Marx, after studying at the universities of Bonn and Berlin and writing a dissertation on the philosophy of nature of Democritus and Epicurus, combined the German romanticism of Schiller, Goethe, and Heine, the British romanticism of Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, the British classical economics of Smith, Malthus, and Ricardo, the idealism of Kant, Hegel, and Schelling, and the socialism of Rousseau, Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Proudhon with the beauty, creativity, and democracy of classical Greece to be able to imagine and dream about a better political and economic life beyond liberalism and capitalism in his comprehensive theory of social justice. And it is in this theory of social justice that he examined the nature of civil/legal, workplace, political, economic, distributive, and ecological justice based on the ideals and institutions of the following historical examples: (1) classical Athenian democracy; (2) the universal political rights of the citizen in the French Constitutions of 1791, 1793, and 1795; (3) the Paris Commune of 1871; and (4) the Iroquois Confederacy and the Great League of Peace. Today in the twenty-first century, it is the critical task of social theorists to expand and develop these ideals to reflect the historical and structural transformations of contemporary society in various countries. The ultimate goal of empirical and historical research is to examine the actual institutional changes in political economy that have been attempted in one way or another in European and Nordic countries to implement some form or elements of true democracy and socialism based on the above mentioned principles and ideals.

           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 at the University of Kassel. 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 of the unconscious mind), 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. McCarthy has attempted to integrate these goals in his ten published books mainly in the area of 19th- and 20th-century German social theory, with another forthcoming, and three translated works in either Chinese or Japanese. For him, teaching and publishing are dialectically interrelated and interdependent since they reinforce, reinvigorate, and support each other. Scholarship and classroom presentations, book outlines and lecture notes, and the love for the ancients and the moderns are intimately bound together, since in the end, one teaches one's books.

           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, content analysis, research summary, and a perfunctory history of ideas. Theory is reduced to a quantitative and naturalistic analysis of theoretical texts, themes, and ideas that abandon critical hermeneutics, intellectual history, and philosophical traditions. In the process, theory is reified into a scientific data base that loses all meaning and relevancy. Classical and contemporary social theory becomes irrelevant to the examination of society as a whole, since its sole purpose is to precipitate a scientific study of society; the connections between sociology and the humanities are lost, as well as the profound questions of Continental Social Theory.

           More specifically, Marx's goal was 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 took the form of joining together Ethics, Social Theory, and Social Justice. The main academic goal behind this effort was 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: social ethics, political community, social institutions, and justice). With their help this approach created a hermeneutical method of interpretation of classical and modern texts by which great ancient and modern writings in social theory, politics, economics, and ethics were read and interpreted within and through the traditions that gave them birth and identity. With their help and the fusion of the ancient and modern theorists, it became possible to dream of a future democratic, egalitarian, and just society within a moral economy. It became possible to creatively dream with critical insight and practical vision while also looking back to the Ancients for inspiration, compassion, and hope (Griechensehnsucht). These ideas can best be expressed in a summary of McCarthy's academic interests and writings in the following areas of research: (1) Aristotle's theory of the Athenian democratic polity as the primary and best constitution in Classical Greece; (2) the connections between Marx's early writings on philosophy and his later works on democracy and political economy as reflecting the connection between Aristotle's Ethics and Politics); (3) Marx's ideal political economy in the form of social justice; and (4) Marx's debt to Moses and the Prophets of the Old Testament, Apostles and Followers of the Way in the New Testament, philosophers of classical Greece, and medieval Schoolmen for his critical understanding of communalism, democracy, and social justice.

           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 ideals of a virtuous life -- the values, principles, and actions that help citizens realize their potential as true rational human beings -- 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, politics, and defense of the Athenian democratic polity as the best constitution in Classical Greece, 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.

           The following three essays below are only more concise and expanded outlines and summaries of previous writings. They were written mainly during the Covid pandemic (2020-2022): (1) summary of Aristotle's Ethics and Politics and their influence on Marx's humanistic ethic, political economy, and theory of social justice; (2) a chapter-by-chapter outline of the classical traditions -- Ancient Hebrews (Old Testament), Hellenes (Greek philosophy), Hellenists (New Testament), and Hegelians (German Idealism) -- and their incorporation into Marx's social theory; and (3) critical analysis of the epistemology, methodology, metaphysics, and politics of the natural and social sciences and the resulting eclipse and loss of social theory in American positivism (empiricism and rationalism) and sociology (quantitative and qualitative methods). The third essay is part of a larger work and assumes the critique of natural science in phenomenology, existentialism, post-analytic philosophy, American pragmatism, Marxian sociology, and critical theory as it examines the negative and destructive impact of positivism and its scientific model on social science and sociology in particular. The result is a specialization and fragmentation of naturalistic disciplines, reduction of social theory to a narrow scientistic methodology and metatheory, a nominalist loss of substantive and ethical reason, and the inability to develop a holistic and comprehensive theory of modern industrial and neo-liberal society. The result of this evolution of contemporary "scientific sociology" represents a loss of empirical and historical research, a loss of holistic and critical social theory, a loss of the historical and philosophical traditions grounding social theory, and a loss of an evaluative theory of social justice. In positivism, method creates objectivity and truth in both its empirical facts and predictive validation, its scientific experiments and social reality. Positivist science does not reflect reality, but rather, constructs a certain form of reality that makes critical social theory impossible, as well as any serious attempt at intelligently talking about an emancipated society based on the principles of social justice. The result of this approach and reductionist understanding of "science" ends in a "silencing, liquidation, and eclipse of reason" in the academy. In the U.S. academy and the social sciences, Method creates Social Theory, while in the European tradition, esp. German and French social science, it is the theory that creates the various methods of research and science. This explains why social theory in the U.S. disappears as an integrative, holistic, structural, and critical element in contemporary sociology to be replaced by hypothesis construction, scientific experiments, and research summaries. This is the "eclipse and liquidation of reason." Social theory is replaced by a mechanical and formalistic history of ideas as the disenchantment and separation between the humanities and social sciences only widens and the possibility for reflective and critical social change only lessens. Theory is stripped of its classical horizons and traditions; is eclipsed of all substantive and objective reason; and disappears in the form of social amnesia from the American academy. Theory simply becomes an ad hoc addition, an afterthought, an ahistorical and asocial content analysis, or a simple a summary of positivist research and science. But the grand theories of classical and contemporary Continental thought are gone in the grand academic eclipse. All this occurs because of the "objectivity" and demagoguery of formal reason.

Horizons at the End Reflecting on the Beginning: To dream of the future and change it, it is first necessary to creatively remember the classical horizons of the past. Now at the end, the beginning must be recalled and a memory of those who helped start the process of revisiting the classical and critical horizons must be remembered and recognized -- thanks to the early philosophical insights and theoretical scholarship of Erich Fromm, Bertell Ollman, Shlomo Avineri, Herbert Marcuse, and Max Horkheimer and the creative imagination and teaching commitments of William McCormick, Alfred Di Lascia, William Moran, Thomas Blakeley, and Trent Schroyer. Finally, mention should be made of Royal Rhodes with whom McCarthy had team-taught the course Social Justice: The Ancient and Modern Traditions for 36 years ending in the Fall of 2017 (see course outline and syllabus above). Rhodes, who holds an M.A. from Yale Divinity School and a PhD in the history of religion from Harvard University, provided the imaginative and creative inspiration and poetic vision for the course.