George E. McCarthy became National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Teaching Professor of Sociology in 2000. He has been a Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) Research Fellow at the University of Frankfurt and the Institute for Social Research, Frankfurt am Main, a guest professor at the Geschwister-Scholl-Institut für Politische Wissenschaft at the University of Munich, a Senior Fulbright Research Fellow in philosophy and sociology at the University of Kassel, Germany, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellow. McCarthy's courses at Kenyon College focus on ethics and social justice, political and social theory, philosophy and sociology of science, German social thought and Greek philosophy/literature, and American political economy. His major area of concentration is nineteenth- and twentieth-century German social theory: Marx, Weber, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Gadamer, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and Habermas.

Education

M.A., Ph.D. Boston College (Philosophy)
M.A., Ph.D. New School for Social Research (Sociology)
B.A., Manhattan College (Major: Philosophy)

Selected Publications

Marx's Critique of Science and Positivism: The Methodological Foundations of Political Economy (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988)

Marx and the Ancients: Classical Ethics, Social Justice, and Nineteenth-Century Political Economy (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1990)

Eclipse of Justice: Ethics, Economics, and the Lost Traditions of American Catholicism (with Royal Rhodes, Orbis Books, 1992)

Marx and Aristotle: Nineteenth-Century German Social Theory and Classical Antiquity, editor (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1992)

Dialectics and Decadence: Echoes of Antiquity in Marx and Nietzsche (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1994)

Romancing Antiquity: Critique of the Enlightenment from Weber to Habermas (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1997)

Objectivity and the Silence of Reason: Weber, Habermas, and the Methodological Disputes in German Sociology (Transaction Publishers, 2001)

Classical Horizons: The Origins of Sociology in Ancient Greece (State University of New York Press, 2003)

Dreams in Exile: Rediscovering Science and Ethics in Nineteenth-Century Social Theory (State University of New York Press, 2009)

Marx and the Ancients , Chinese translation Ma-ke-si yu Gu Ren: Gudian Lunli, Shehui Zhengyi, yu 19 Shiji de Zhengzhi Jingzi xue, trans. by Wennan Wange Part of the series "Marx and the Western Tradition" (Shanghai, China: East China Normal University Press, 2011)

Justice Beyond Liberalism (with Royal Rhodes, Humanities Press, forthcoming)

Courses Taught

SOCY 102: Social Dreamers: Marx, Nietzche, and Freud
SOCY 222: Economy and Society: Profits and Poverty in the Welfare State
SOCY 242: Science and Society: Nature, Ecology, and the Crisis of Reason
SOCY 243: Social Justice: the Ancient and Modern Traditions
SOCY 361: Classical Social Theory
SOCY 461: German Social Theory: The Romancing of Antiquity