Book review: Aristötle with an Umlaut:George E. McCarthy, Dreams in exile: Rediscovering science and ethics in nineteenth-century social theory New York: State University of New York Press, 2009. vii, 374 pp. ISBN 978—1—4384—2587—0 (hbk)
Abstract
Book review Aristötle with an Umlaut George E. McCarthy, Dreams in exile: Rediscovering science and ethics in nineteenth-century social theory New York: State University of New York Press, 2009. vii, 374 pp. ISBN 978—1—4384—2587—0 (hbk) SAGE Publications, Inc. 201010.1177/1468795X10379679 © The Author(s) The Author(s) KenSmith Buckinghamshire New University, UK In Dreams in Exile, George E. McCarthy, National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Teaching Professor at Kenyon College, Ohio, USA, presents a detailed synthesis of the classical origins of nineteenth-century sociological theory. After schol- arly accounts of Aristotle and Kant’s general philosophy – but especially Aristotle on social justice and Kant on critical theory – McCarthy shows just how much Marx, Weber and Durkheim’s social theory owes to this classical heritage. The author presents this book (p. 5) as a companion volume to his earlier Classical Horizons: The Origins of Sociology in Ancient Greece (2003), but in fact Dreams in Exile can usefully be read in its own right. Where his earlier book ‘examined the biographical, historical, academic, scholarly, and theoretical evidence connecting the moderns to the ancients’ (p. 5), the new work, claims to consider a different set of questions: … what is the impact on sociology of