By DEXTER DUGGAN
Developing thinking about a moral approach to practicing capitalism was a major contribution by philosopher Michael Novak, who moved from being celebrated on the left to revered by the realistic in a life that ended at age 83 in February.
His website (michaelnovak.net) described him as “author, philosopher, theologian” at the top of the page. He indeed was those, but also helped thinkers see how economies worked, and why capitalism was better than state systems that seemed to captivate many clerics.
Himself a former seminarian, Novak was a correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter during the Second Vatican Council and wrote the 1964 book The Open Church, which his website describes as applauding “the purposes of Pope John XXIII and his successor, Paul VI — ‘to throw open the windows of the church’.”
At his most notable, he was as prominent in Catholic chatter as Raymond Cardinal Burke is today — although initially on the other side of the religious aisle.
In The Open Church, Novak’s website says, “he coined the classic description of the foes of the reforms at Vatican II as the party of ‘non-historical orthodoxy,’ emphasizing the eternal and unchanging, neglecting history and contingency.”
Upon Novak’s death on February 17, Edwin Feulner, Ph.D., founder of the conservative, Washington-based Heritage Foundation, said:
“Michael’s journey from progressive socialist to leading conservative intellectual can be told by many, but never more clearly than he does himself: ‘slowly I taught myself out of left-wing positions…’ he says in his 1989 essay ‘Errand into the Wilderness,’ wherein he tells us both how he made the journey from an uncritical man of the left, to an advocate of democratic capitalism.”
The Heritage Foundation presented a panel of thinkers at its headquarters on March 13, “Celebrating the Life and Legacy of Michael Novak.” Announcing the presentation, Heritage said:
“His enormous body of work emphasizes the cultural prerequisites for political and economic freedom, as he stressed that economic conservativism and social conservatism are indivisible. His example and encouragement helped form many scholars, and his thoughts equipped a generation of policymakers to defend a free and virtuous society.”
Among those influenced: Pope John Paul II, who saw the failings of socialism and possible benefits from capitalism.
In his 1991 encyclical, Centesimus Annus, the future saint, who had been oppressed by both Nazi- and Communist-ruled governments, asked, “can it perhaps be said that, after the failure of Communism, capitalism is the victorious social system, and that capitalism should be the goal of the countries now making efforts to rebuild their economy and society?
“Is this the model,” he asked, “which ought to be proposed to the countries of the Third World which are searching for the path to true economic and civil progress?
“The answer is obviously complex,” John Paul II continued. “If by ‘capitalism’ is meant an economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property, and the resulting responsibility for the means of production, as well as free human creativity in the economic sector, then the answer is certainly in the affirmative, even though it would perhaps be more appropriate to speak of a ‘business economy,’ ‘market economy,’ or simply ‘free economy’.”
Novak’s 1982 book, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, made a notable impression on economic and religious thinking, speakers at Heritage’s March 13 panel said.
Heritage senior research fellow Ryan Anderson, Ph.D., read comments by Samuel Gregg, Ph.D., of the nationally active free-market Acton Institute, based in Michigan. Gregg was prevented from attending by inclement weather.
Novak had a problem finding a publisher for The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, Gregg said, and the book “generated fierce reactions from the religious left,” but also from “sections of the right.”
“It’s easy to forget just how innovative this book was,” Gregg said, and many Christians, both clerical and lay, “were marching in precisely the opposite direction.”
Theologians “were waxing lyrical about dialogues with Marxism. Liberation theology was rife in much of Latin America,” he said, while bishops were issuing commentaries about economic subjects that they had no special competence in, “and which invariably reflected a mildly center-left line.”
However, those who had experienced real socialism “not only knew that collectivism had failed, they also understood that there was no Third Way” for economies to follow, Gregg said.
A new generation of bishops and priests knows that economics is a prudential issue to be decided by the laity, Gregg said, and an “awareness of the reality of sin” should inoculate people against economic utopianism.
Novak gave voice to thoughts of business leaders and entrepreneurs around the world that their daily labor wasn’t a mere necessary evil but a calling from God, Gregg said.
Given the right setting, free markets not only helped diminish poverty quickly but also were touched with a spirit of the divine, he said.
George Weigel, William E. Simon chair in Catholic Studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, told the Heritage presentation that Washington is “a world capital where religious ideas are taken seriously,” unlike other national capitals.
Weigel said earlier economic thinking had been that wealth was just a “fixed pie of stuff,” so the “primary moral question becomes the equitable distribution of that stuff.”
However, this “did not describe wealth in the post-industrial world. Wealth was not just stuff,” he said. Wealth included “ideas, entrepreneurial energy, risk-taking capacity, prudence. . . . (There was) a source of wealth in which more and more people could participate. And if the pie is growing, then the fundamental moral question shifts from distribution to inclusion. . . . That was a huge shift….
“It takes a certain kind of people living certain virtues to make democracy and the market function so that the net result is genuine human flourishing, not human degradation,” Weigel said.
Like Jeane Kirkpatrick, Novak was a traditional Democrat who went on to serve in the Republican Reagan administration, while the Democratic Party moved further toward admiration of statism and Communism.
Kirkpatrick served Ronald Reagan as ambassador to the United Nations, while Novak served as U.S. ambassador to the UN Commission on Human Rights in 1981-1982.
Also speaking at the Heritage presentation were Catherine Pakaluk, Ph.D., assistant professor of economics at the Catholic University of America, and Mary Eberstadt, an essayist and author.
Tenacity
If my one experience with Novak is any indication, he was a tenacious fellow.
Maybe a decade ago, I needed some comments from Novak for a story I was working on, but my day job was at a highly regulated financial institution where you couldn’t have people calling you about other matters.
Nevertheless, somehow he obtained my work number and not only left a voicemail for me but also with my team leader, who informed me that other persistent Novak voicemails had been left around our work site.
Fortunately, innocent I wasn’t disciplined. But Novak once again showed he could leave a mark in the Wall Street world.
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