Michael Novak was the leading Catholic public intellectual of his generation. Like Irving Kristol, to whom Novak alone among those in that category can be compared, he began on the Left but moved to the Right as reflection on the human condition conspired with events in the world to lead him to embrace what he labeled “democratic capitalism.”

At the heart of the Novakian vision is freedom—free people, free markets, free institutions. But Novak’s vision of freedom, like Kristol’s, is not the doctrinaire libertarianism that the word evokes for many today. Much less is it the “me generation” liberal counterfeit of freedom that licenses people to do whatever they want, wherever they want, whenever they want, with whomever they want, so long as there is no immediate palpable harm to others.

At the heart of the Novakian vision is freedom.

Rather, it is the idea of unleashing the human spirit for the creative pursuit of excellence. As such, religion in general, and Catholicism in particular, is the very opposite of a threat to freedom. Faith, at least any faith worthy of human allegiance, inspires, shapes, and gives content to the virtuous and creative pursuit of the human good—in politics, in economics and the workplace, in family life, in the communities and associations of civil society, in art, in education, in philanthropy, in entertainment and communications, and, indeed, in religion itself.

In short, freedom for Novak is morally ordered freedom. It is not merely freedom “from”; it is freedom “for.” Indeed, it is freedom from unjust intrusion or coercion precisely because it is freedom for excellence. In this way, Novak’s vision of freedom avoids the radical individualism that no faithful Catholic (or Christian of any type or devout Jew) could embrace. It affirms the social nature of human beings as creatures whose integral fulfillment includes their flourishing in positive goods such as friendship and community that are inherently and irreducibly relational. And it recognizes that our obligations to others include obligations that are not the fruit of contracts or other choices we have freely made. Some of our obligations, including some obligations to others—not least, the poor—are unchosen.

So Novak was no laissez-faire dogmatist, much less a Social Darwinist. He was no more a disciple of Ayn Rand than he was a follower of John Rawls. His defense of free people, free markets, and free institutions was a natural law defense—a Catholic defense. His principal writings on politics, economics, and social questions grounded rights and duties in a consideration of human goods and in the virtues that dispose us to fulfill our duties, including duties of justice, which we have in virtue of the rights of others, even when we are tempted (as sin and selfishness guarantee that we will sometimes be) to violate those duties or fail fully to live up to them.

Where liberal thinkers (such as the late Ronald Dworkin) and some libertarian thinkers (such as the late Robert Nozick) see something of a tension or even conflict between individual rights and the common good, Novak, in good Catholic fashion, saw a harmony and order. Individual rights, properly understood, cannot be in conflict with the common good, properly understood; and the protection of true human or natural rights, far from requiring the compromising of the common good, was always a strict requirement of the common good. It is always for the good of all—the common good of justice—that true individual rights be honored.

Of course, the qualifying terms and phrases “true” and “properly understood” are important here. Novak always avoided the depressingly familiar error of identifying wants, desires, feelings, and the like with rights. The fact that someone desires something is completely irrelevant to the question whether he has a right to it. He has a right to it if, and only if, he is entitled to it as a matter of justice. And to know whether he is or isn’t requires moral analysis—an inquiry into the human good, the good of human persons constituted with the nature we have as biological, rational, relational, and moral creatures.

Honorable freedoms can be abused.

Honorable freedoms—economic, political, intellectual, artistic, and otherwise—are, for Novak, freedoms that liberate persons to achieve all they can achieve by dint of intelligence, creativity, dedication, discipline, cooperation, and the like for themselves, their families, and their communities. He recognized, of course, that honorable freedoms can be abused, but he respected the distinction, well known to the American founders, between true liberty and mere license. And he was able to recognize that oft-overlooked distinction because he knew that the foundation of our rights is not in subjective personal desires but in objective human goods.

Novak was born into a middle-class Catholic family in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. His grandparents were Slovak immigrants. At age fourteen, he entered preparatory seminary to study for the priesthood. His intellectual gifts were recognized by his superiors and he was eventually sent to study at the famous Gregorian Pontifical University in Rome. Although he was happy there, reflection led him to conclude that he in fact did not have a priestly vocation. Believing that God was calling him to other things, he returned to the United States to study at Harvard to be a lay theologian. He married a young woman named Karen Laub, who would go on to fame in her own right as a painter and sculptor, and took a job as an assistant professor of humanities at Stanford, where he was regarded as a superstar teacher of undergraduate students.

In those days—the mid-1960s—ethnic Catholics tended to be loyal Democrats, and Michael Novak certainly fit the description. He favored Great Society welfare and entitlement programs and held business in suspicion. As for capitalism, he regarded it as pandering to the greed of crass businessmen who cared for nothing but money, and as virtually inviting the exploitation of labor. He involved himself in politics as an advisor to, and writer for, Democratic Party figures such as Robert F. Kennedy and his brother-in-law Sargent Shriver, Eugene McCarthy, and George McGovern. But however committed he was to the liberalism of the time, he was by temperament no dogmatist. His mind was always inquiring and his philosophically rigorous seminary education had trained him to interrogate his own assumptions. Soon, doubts began creeping in.

These doubts were exacerbated by the leftward lurch of the Democratic Party—especially on moral issues. As the party began to embrace me-generation liberal ideology—radical feminism, abortion, sexual liberation—Novak experienced the same sense of alienation from the party and the liberal movement that was experienced by millions of Catholics and others (including Jewish and Protestant “neo-conservatives”) who later would become the “Reagan Democrats.” If forced to choose between the ideology of “if it feels good do it,” and the moral teachings of the Catholic faith and the larger Western tradition, it was for Novak scarcely difficult to decide. His party had left him.

In the crucible of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Novak began to reconsider what he had always believed about economics. He studied the great tradition of Catholic social teaching that was inaugurated by the late-nineteenth-century Pope Leo XIII in his encyclical letter Rerum Novarum and developed by later popes. This tradition rejected socialism and affirmed private property, but expressed suspicion of laissez-faire capitalism as an economic theory that was grounded in the radically un-Christian doctrine of individualism and that promoted greed and exposed workers and the poor to exploitation and abuse. The question Novak asked was, “Does capitalism have to be that way?” He concluded that it does not. The profit-motive does not necessarily presuppose extreme forms of individualism, nor does it need to promote the vice of greed, and a properly regulated but fundamentally free market does not have to leave workers exposed to exploitation or neglect the needs of the poor or the obligations of the wealthy towards them. Christianity may not require democratic capitalism, but democratic capitalism is not, or need not be, inconsistent with it.

The profit-motive does not necessarily presuppose extreme forms of individualism or promote greed.

All of this thinking—or re-thinking—bore fruit in 1982 in the form of what would become Novak’s most famous and influential piece of writing, his book The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. It was a work that would profoundly influence the thinking of many non-Catholics as well as Catholics about the moral and spiritual foundations of democracy and free markets, but one that would also alienate him from many of his friends and former allies (Catholics and non-Catholics alike) in the Democratic Party and on the political Left. He would extend the hand of friendship to them, but many would refuse to take it. In their view, he had betrayed the cause, sold himself to the rich capitalist exploiters, turned the teachings of Jesus on their head: “blessed are the rich.”

The one-time advisor to George McGovern became an advisor to Ronald Reagan, who appointed him to the post of U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in Geneva. He became an iconic figure in the conservative movement—up there in the firmament with Irving Kristol, William F. Buckley, Russell Kirk, and Milton Friedman. His admirers included not only President Reagan but also Margaret Thatcher, Lech Wa??sa, and Karol Wojty?a—Pope John Paul II. Various honors came his way, including
the 1994 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion.

Novak’s thought was not only shaped by the tradition of Catholic social teaching, it also helped to shape that tradition—especially when elements of Novak’s work on democracy and free markets were integrated into John Paul II’s most important encyclical letter on social matters: Centesimus Annus, published in 1991 as the Soviet communist empire crumbled and disappeared. It is hard to avoid hearing a strong echo of Novak’s teachings in the words of the Polish pontiff who had survived both fascist and communist tyranny:

Man fulfills himself by using his intelligence and freedom. In so doing he utilizes the things of this world as objects and instruments and makes them his own. The foundation of the right to private initiative and ownership is to be found in this activity. By means of his work man commits himself, not only for his own sake but also for others and with others. Each person collaborates in the work of others and for their good. Man works in order to provide for the needs of his family, his community, his nation, and ultimately all humanity.

Of course, not everyone in the Church regarded Novak’s influence as positive. This was the age of “liberation theology,” often Marxist-inspired, especially in Latin America, where left-wing Catholics appealed to the teachings of Jesus and the prophets in their radical critique of the market economy and limited government. In the end, however, John Paul II proved to have little tolerance for liberation theology, perceiving in it more of Lenin than of Christ, and among its critics no writer was more incisive or influential than Michael Novak. In 1986, he published a book about liberation theology under the title Will it Liberate? His answer was, no, it will lead, as collectivist ideologies invariably do, to slavery, exploitation, and tyranny. The way of liberation, he argued, was to unleash human creative potential: free people, free markets, and free institutions—democratic capitalism.

Michael Novak died on February 17 of this year. He was eighty-three years old.

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 35 Number 9, on page 78
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