The Political Thought of Michael Novak
Lecture One: The Ideal of Democratic Capitalism
Emmett McGroarty offers a few words about Michael Novak’s reputation as a good person, a reflection on his influence on the great events of the 1980s and 1990s, and a discussion of his philosophy and the need for the present to recall that philosophy. Michael Novak’s reputation was of genuinely caring for others as made in the image and likeness of God and honoring them as such. Novak, it seems, was continually affirming the dignity of those he encountered, regardless of their position in life.
His character seems to have informed his intellectual work, and it explains how it is that his study of democratic capitalism fleshed out a framework that affirms the dignity of the human person. On that note, George Weigel has written that Pope John Paul II, having confronted both National Socialism and Communism in Poland, had internalized that “the crisis of modernity [is] a crisis in the very idea of the human person.” Having acknowledged the concepts of human freedom and human dignity, Western civilization has struggled with the economic and the political.
Against that backdrop, Novak’s work on democratic capitalism explained the connection between human dignity and economic and political freedom. He described three interconnected systems of liberty – political, economic, and moral – which is widely regarded as having influenced Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Centesimus Annus. That framework provides an effective philosophical response to the crisis of modernity.
It had several consequences, including human creativity as the basis of capitalism. Such human creativity usually results in two types of goods: (1) the thing or service created and (2) the creation or affirmation of two or more personal relationships.
