Kinneging earned his PhD with the highest honors on October 1, 1994 with an English dissertation entitled "Aristocracy, Antiquity and History - Classicism in Political Thought", later published by Transaction Publishers. The book criticizes the standard literature on Modernity, by pointing out that remnants of classical wisdom - e.g. the ethics of honor - stayed with us for much longer than commonly thought. The book emphasizes Romans over Greeks. Following the trail of Herbert Butterfield ("The Whig Interpretation of History"), Kinneging rejects the teleological study of the past.