In Dialectics and Decadence, George McCarthy examines the influence of Greek philosophy and literature on the development of 19th-century German social thought, particularly that of Marx and Nietzsche.

In this unique and comprehensive book, George McCarthy examines the influence of Greek philosophy, literature, arts, and politics on the development of twentieth-century German social thought. McCarthy demonstrates that the classical spirit vitalized thinkers such as Weber, Heidegger, Freud, Marcuse, Arendt, Gadamer, and Habermas. With the romancing of antiquity, they transformed their understanding of the modern self, political community, and Enlightenment rationality. By viewing contemporary social theory from the framework of the classical world, McCarthy argues, we are capable of thinking beyond the limits of modernity to new possibilities of human reason, science, beauty, and social justice.

Marx and the Ancients is the first book-length treatment to detail the relationship between classical Greek philosophy and Karl Marx's critique of political economy. From his dissertation on the physics and astronomy of Epicurus and Democritus to his later economic writings, Marx's view of the classical polis left its mark. George McCarthy argues that this forgotten element in Marx's thought helps clarify his positions on ethics and social justice.

Shadows of the Enlightenment sheds light on the deeply political agenda underlying Western science from the so-called “Age of Reason” to the present. George McCarthy uncovers the economic, social, and historical origins of modern science, and illuminates the a priori and innate features which furnish the justifications for the technical domination and control of nature and humanity. The natural sciences were born of a market economy, commercial trade, and industrial production, and were furthermore reflective of the values and institutions of modern capitalism and its class system in the seventeenth century. As such, one of the central roles of Western science has been to legitimate its theoretical imperative to dominate nature and to reorganize human labor for profit, property, and power. Breaking with the medieval scholastic tradition, modern science viewed nature as a reified mechanism which could be mathematically measured, empirically predicted, causally explained, and managed. Nature itself was recast as a dead machine stripped of any inherent meaning or purpose. Ultimately, when applied to the production process, the field of natural science led to scientific management and economic exploitation; and when applied in the academy, particularly to the social sciences, the field of natural science led to the eclipse of reason and the twilight of social theory. Building upon the radical analysis of Marx and Engels, Shadows of the Enlightenment articulates a new liberatory postmodern science and technology grounded in Marx’s theory of social justice, integrating ancient and modern traditions from classical Greece to the French Revolution, from the Paris Commune to the Iroquois Confederacy. In the process, McCarthy invites us to move beyond the falsely mechanistic sense of reality, and to break free from the sense of alienation that binds us all—all in order to make space for dreaming up a substantively democratic society.

Issues important to the philosophy of social science are widely discussed in the American academy today. Some social scientists resist the very idea of a debate on general issues. They continue to focus on behaviorist and positivist criteria, and the concepts, methods, and theories appropriate to a particular and narrow form of scientific inquiry. McCarthy argues that a new and valuable perspective may be gained on these questions through a return to philosophical debates surrounding the origins and development of nineteenth- and twentieth-century German sociology. In Objectivity and the Silence of Reason he focuses on two key figures, Max Weber and Jurrgen Habermas, reopening the vibrant and rich intellectual dispute about knowledge and truth in epistemology and concept formation, logic of analysis, and methodology in the social sciences. He uses this debate to explore the forms of objectivity in everyday experience and science, and the relations between science, ethics, and politics. McCarthy analyzes the tension in Weber's work between his early methodological writings with their emphasis on interpretive science, subjective intentionality, cultural and historical meaning and the later works that emphasize issues of explanatory science, natural causality, social prediction, and nomological law. While arguing for a value-free science, Weber was highly critical of the disenchanted and meaningless world of technical reason and rejected positivist objectivity. McCarthy shows how Habermas attempted to resolve tensions in Weber's work by clarifying the relationship between the methods of subjective interpretation and objective causality. Habermas believes that social science cannot be silent in the face of alienation, false consciousness, and the oppression of technological and administrative rationality and must adopt methodologies connected to the broader ethical and political questions of the day. Drawing deeply on the Kantian and neo-Kantian tradition that contributed to the development of Weber's method, Objectivity and the Silence of Reason demonstrates the crucial integration of philosophy and sociology in German intellectual culture. It elucidates the complexities of the development of modern social science. The book will be of interest to sociologists, philosophers, and intellectual historians.

Detective Sgt. Daniel Warburton is a regular guy, a happy family man with a wife and three kids who enjoys jazz and an occasional glass of wine or two with a cigar. But he also may be the only hope for mankind to be saved from self-destruction. After Daniel is transported to an alien spacecraft, he learns that Earth is on the verge of destruction. He agrees to participate in an experiment on Earth to see if mankind can be saved if physical ailments are healed and innocence is restored. The aliens have selected several volunteers over the centuries, including Jesus Christ. But if the experiment fails this time, Earth will be ostracized by the alliance the aliens represent, and this could result in man's extinction. Daniel must have physical contact with the person he heals and restores. When he returns to Earth, he begins the daunting task of touching millions of people and alters the destructive path that mankind travels. News travels fast about The Healer, Daniel's pseudonym for his work. His notoriety gathers momentum quickly, but not all agree on his goal of a society of health and innocence. His actions draw the attention of detractors and factions that want to stop the experiment, including criminals, religious leaders, and powerful international factions. Yet even after his family is killed, Daniel presses on with his plans, as he feels the fate of his species rests on his shoulders. Discouraged but still hopeful, Daniel travels the world and continues to heal and provide a return to innocence. Despite setbacks and sadness, eventually he finds a way to continue the experiment without negative consequences.

political economy. With this in mind the reader will be taken through three meta-theoretical levels of Marx' method of analysis of the struc tures of capitalism: (1) the clarification of 'critique' and method from Kant's epistemology, Hegel's phenomenology, to Marx' political economy (Chapter One); (2) the analysis of 'critique' and time, that is, the temporal dimensions of the critical method as they evolve from Hegel's Logic to Marx' Capital and the difference between the use of the future in explanatory, positivist science and 'critique' (Chapter Two); (3) and finally, 'critique' and materialism, a study of the complexity of the category of materialism, the ambivalence and ambiguity of its use in Marx' critical method, and the ontological and logical dilemmas created by the Schelling-Feuerbach turn toward materialism in their critique of Hegel (Chapter Three). The critique of political economy is, therefore, examined at the levels of methodology, temporality, and ontology. To what do the categories of political economy really refer when the positivist interpretations of Marx have been shattered and 'critique' be comes the method of choice? What kind of knowledge do we have if it is no longer "scientific" in the traditional sense of both epistemology and methodology? And what kind of applicability will it have when its format is such as not to produce predictive, technical knowledge, but practical knowledge in the Greek sense of the word (Praxis)? What be comes of the criterion of truth when epistemology itself, like science, is