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 readings about the philosophical discoveries and differences between Socrates and Plato in The Symposium and The Republic, 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; Homer's epic poetry of the Iliad and Odyssey detailing the Trojan War and the exciting and romantic adventures of Odysseus throughout the Mediterranean as he returned home to Penelope and the island of Ithaca; Herodotus's The Histories of the Persian War and the battles of Marathon, Thermopylae, and Salamis; Thucydides's The History of 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, art, and history with special emphasis on the writings of Polybius and Livy on the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage and the battles of Cannae and Zama with the generals Hannibal and Scipio Africanus and Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. 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 Karl 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 knowledge and technical skills, but to encourage students and faculty to imagine and dream -- to create Beauty in art, ethics, and politics and in the fashion of Aristotle to integrate philosophy and ethics with political economy and history. That is, to integrate social dreams and imagination with the concrete reality of social institutions and political structures as in Aristotle's lecture notes in the Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, and The Athenian Constitution where he integrated virtue (ethics) and happiness and the good life (eudaimonia) with the ideal form of a democratic and constitutional Polity (politeia) for the Athenian polis. Note: the two other forms of possible ideals of government mentioned by Aristotle in his lectures at the Lyceum in Athens included Monarchy and Aristocracy which were accepted for many years as Aristotle's true political ideals. However, more recently these apparent ideals were understood as part of Aristotle's use of the Socratic and dialectical method beginning with an initial acceptance of them as political ideals; followed by a detailed clarification of their inner inconsistencies and contradictions; and then later rejected as legitimate possibilities of governance. The purpose of this method was to set up, highlight, and then expand upon his actual ideal of a democratic Polity that would later become so essential in the writings of Marx and his view of the socialist polis. For more on this topic, see below in the first essay.

           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.