Thomas A. McCarthy

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Thomas McCarthy (born 1940) is John Shaffer Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at

imperialist thought, and particularly on their interweaving in theories of progress
and development.

Critical theory

The phrases "

Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin
; the preeminent representative of the second, post-World War II generation was Jürgen Habermas, who began his academic career as Adorno's assistant. The third generation of critical theorists, to which McCarthy belongs, was from the start rather more international in its makeup, and more global in its outlook.

McCarthy's contribution to this tradition of thought comprises, first, further development of its philosophical and methodological underpinnings, particularly on issues surrounding the putative

American Pragmatism
; and third, application of the critical-theoretical perspective so developed to issues of racism and imperialism, which had been relatively undertheorized in the work of the first two generations. These contributions, together with his general editorship of the series "Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought" (MIT Press, c. 100 volumes), and his graduate training of some two dozen members of the fourth generation of critical theorists, are the grounds upon which McCarthy is generally held to be a founding member of the American branch of critical, social and political theory.

Race and empire

In the first decade of the present millennium, in a series of articles and papers that culminated in a book on Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development (Cambridge UP, 2009), McCarthy turned his attention to the ideologies of race and empire that generally accompanied the rise of the West, and to the particular versions thereof that were integral to shaping American culture and society. His organizing theme is that ideas of sociocultural development—civilization, progress, modernization, etc. -- have been the principal lens through which the relations of the West to the rest of the world have been viewed. Through that lens, differences have appeared to be hierarchically ordered along various lines, from talent and temperament to morals and aptitude for self-government. McCarthy develops this theme by examining both racial theories of difference—from Kant, through social Darwinism, to the cultural racism of the present—and universal histories of cultural development that underwrote imperialism and neoimperialism. He concludes that despite the depredations and dangers of ideologies of progress, we have no alternative in a rapidly globalizing world but to rethink our conceptions of development so as to accommodate the multiple modernities now taking shape, without however, renouncing the aspiration to unity-in-difference for which there is no sensible substitute.

Selected bibliography

References

  1. ^ "UCD President's Office: Thomas McCarthy". www.ucd.ie. Retrieved 2020-06-17.
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