George E. McCarthy became National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Teaching Professor of Sociology in 2000. He has been a research fellow at the University of Frankfurt am Main, a guest professor at the Institute for Political Science 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
M.A., Ph.D. New School for Social Research
B.A. Manhattan College

Selected Publications

Marx's Critique of Science and Positivism (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988)

Marx and the Ancients (Rowman and Littlefield, 1990)

Eclipse of Justice (with Royal Rhodes, Orbis Books, 1992)

Marx and Aristotle, editor (Rowman and Littlefield, 1992)

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

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

Justice Beyond Liberalism (with Royal Rhodes, Humanities Press, forthcoming 2010).

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 Ethics and Social Justice: the Ancient and Modern Traditions
SOCY 361 Classical Social Theory
SOCY 461 German Social Theory: The Romancing of Antiquity