Michael Novak: life, ideas and books

Life

Michael Novak was born in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in 1933. He studied at Stonehill College and at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, took a master's degree at Harvard in 1966 and taught at Stanford and at the State University of New York at Old Westbury. He was a University Professor at Syracuse University from 1976, and later held the George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion, Philosophy and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute.

He served as U.S. Representative to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in 1981 and 1982 and led the American delegation to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe in 1986. He received the Templeton Prize in 1994 and died in Washington in 2017.

Ideas

Novak began as a writer on the political left, close to the Catholic reform movement of the 1960s, and moved to the right during the 1970s. The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics (1972) argued that the white ethnic communities of American cities were a distinct constituency that resisted assimilation. His most influential book, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (1982), set out the case that a free economy, democratic politics and a vigorous moral and cultural life support one another, and that capitalism is compatible with, and best sustained by, the Christian tradition.

He drew on Jacques Maritain and on Daniel Bell, and in The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1993) he argued that Catholic thought had contributed to the development of capitalism, an answer to Max Weber's account of the Protestant ethic. He was suspicious of utopian politics and warned the New Left that its aspirations produced alienation.

Major works

• A Theology for Radical Politics (1969).
• The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics (1972).
• The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (1982).
• Will It Liberate? (1986).
• The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1993).
• Washington's God (2006).

Why conservatives read him

Novak showed religious conservatives that they could embrace markets without embracing materialism, and he showed economic conservatives that markets need a moral culture. That synthesis made him one of the intellectual forces behind the alliance of faith and free enterprise that supported Ronald Reagan, and it connects him to Irving Kristol, who argued a similar case from a secular Jewish background, and to Friedrich Hayek on the economic side.

His work was frequently published in First Things and National Review, and his influence reached abroad: in Latin America and Eastern Europe his writing was read as a Catholic defence of the free society. His arguments about the compatibility of Catholic teaching and capitalism were contested by some in the Church, who preferred more attention to inequality and the poor, and that debate gives his books continuing relevance.