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Michael Novak: The
Major Writings
Over in the shadows of the
darkened lots of the Bethlehem Steel Company, across the river from the Point
Stadium in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, where he grew up, the young Michael Novak
often saw molten red ingots cooling in the night air. That image burned into
his memory as a metaphor for the way God’s love penetrates the world and the
incarnation suffuses itself into history. Thus, Novak’s work has from his
earliest days pressed the edges of new issues, exploring, pioneering, advancing
Christian thought into various corners of contemporary culture in which theology
has seldom gone. In Belief and Unbelief, he tried to advance a new
method for approaching the presence of God through inquiry and reflection. In
The Experience of Nothingness, he tried to meet the challenge
articulated by Albert Camus: that anyone writing today about ethics must pass
through the problematic of nihilism. His books were also the first to reflect
theologically upon sports and on “the new ethnicity.” So, too, in the economics
area. He has constantly attempted pioneering work, to open up new territories
for others.
Novak’s major works can be
divided into five categories: preparatory studies; statements of method and
horizon; religious explorations in American culture; a trilogy on capitalism and
socialism; the cultural ecology of liberty.
A. PREPARATORY STUDIES
1. Setting The
Agenda. A New Generation: American and Catholic (New York:
Herder and Herder, 1964). In this first collection of essays, Novak set out the
aims of his lifetime work, as he then saw them: to deal with the two great,
overriding facts of his time and place: being Catholic and being American. The
United States is the creative land of this century, he held; the center of the
struggle between the free human spirit and technology is fixed in her daily
life. Respect for the person is not preserved by the insights of British
empiricism and American pragmatism, but by inarticulate traditions in American
and British life; our philosophy lags behind our living. We must extend the
empirical and pragmatic temper into neglected experiences of human
consciousness. Sustained reflection on new experiences, in the light of the
open traditions of the past, seems also to be the most adequate philosophy for
finding the vital relation of Christian faith to contemporary life.
2. Context and
Stage: State of the Question. The Open Church: Vatican II, Act
II (New York: Macmillan, 1964). This report on the second session of the
Second Vatican Council, tells the story of an apparently immobile Church finding
its way back into the living sources of contemporary history. The conservative
men who loved the splendor of papal Rome, the clarity of Roman law, and the
absoluteness of non-historical theology, Novak found, are not despicable, mean,
or uncouth men. They are men who have tried to live outside of history. Having
shown how “non-historical orthodoxy” is unable to come to grips with history,
the Council began proposing another way: through an open Church. In opening the
Church, the Second Vatican Council spoke afresh to the world, changing
centuries-old alignments and probabilities.
The Open Church
was published again, 2002 (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers), with a
32-page introduction in which he describes with brilliant retrospect the
historical setting and effect of the Second Council of Vatican II. Read the Introduction in PDF file
format.
B. METHOD, HORIZON
3. Belief and
Unbelief: A Philosophy of Self-Knowledge (New York: Macmillan,
1965). This book is an attempt to work out some of the problems of
self-identity, and some of the problems of belief and unbelief. The roots of
the two sets of problems are entangled. For in deciding who one is, one places
oneself in relation to others, to the world, and to God. This study begins to
elucidate those experiences of human intellectual life in which belief in God is
rooted; that is, the experiences of “intelligent subjectivity.” Its aim is to
provide empirical tools for sorting out the elements of belief and unbelief in
one’s own experience. Under certain conditions, in the quality of experience
they engender, belief and unbelief are quite close.
4. The Experience
of Nothingness (New York: Harper and Row, 1970). The first
philosophical problem of our time is how to interpret the experience of
nothingness, how to plunge deeper into it and wrest from it a humanistic,
revolutionary ethic. The experience of nothingness arises only under certain
conditions. To notice them, to reinforce them, and to build one’s life upon
them is a choice which does not falsify the experience of nothingness. The
experience of nothingness arises when we consciously become aware of – and
appropriate – our own actual horizons. What seemed certain, necessary, and
stable suddenly seems arbitrary and unfounded. We do not know who we are. Yet
we continue to throw up symbols against the dark. This book does not intend to
remove, cover over, or alleviate the experience of nothingness. It unmasks one
piece of ideology only – that the experience of nothingness necessarily
incapacitates one from further action. Granted that we have the experience of
nothingness, what shall we do with it?
5. Ascent of the
Mountain, Flight of the Dove: An Invitation to Religious
Studies (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). Religious studies are
primarily the taking up of successive standpoints, from which one may assimilate
a fresh horizon. Progress in religious studies is not a logical progression,
within one fixed and unchanging standpoint. It is a series of “conversions”
from standpoint to standpoint, of breakthroughs, of perspectival shifts. In our
actions, intelligence is always intermixed with the work of the imagination and
the sensibility – with experience, image, symbol, myth and narrative context.
The concept story allows us to treat all parts of the self in one unified
concept and to approach the problem of belief and unbelief in a fresh and more
illuminating light.
C. EXPLORATIONS IN AMERICAN
CULTURE
6. Cultural
Pluralism. The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics: Politics and
Culture in the Seventies (New York: Macmillan, 1972). The “new ethnicity”
of the 1970s was a form of historical consciousness. This book is not a call to
separatism but to self-consciousness. It does not seek division but rather
accurate, mutual appreciation. For it is in possessing our own particularity
that we come to feel at home with ourselves and are best able to enter into
communion with others. The point of becoming ethnically alert and
self-possessed is not self-enclosure, it is genuine community. This book maps
the shape of long repressed sentiments of Southern and Eastern Europeans in
cultural collision with British-Americans. Ethnicity, Novak predicted, would
become an increasingly important dimension of social life around the world.
Not surprisingly, this text received a second printing – Unmeltable Ethnics:
Politics & Culture in American Life (New Brunswick: Transaction,
1997). In his 35-page introduction to this new edition, Novak reflects upon the
political changes since his 1972 proposals, and carefully distinguishes his own
position on celebrating ethnicity from the new “multiculturalism.”
7. Presidential
Politics, Symbolic Geometry. Choosing Our King: Symbols of
Political Leadership (New York: Macmillan, 1974); 2nd ed. Choosing
Presidents: Symbols of Political Leadership (New Brunswick: Transaction,
1992). The American presidency is the most dramatic expression of America’s
“civil religion.” Two presidential roles can be distinguished: the president as
personification of the nation and the president as political leader. Symbols
possess decisive power in American politics. Americans, lacking a king,
necessarily invest kingly majesty in the office of the presidency. They seek and
choose a man with whom they can identify – as they are and as they want to be.
The President mirrors the people that elect him. There is a “geography of the
soul” to be learned in understanding this continental nation. Sets of symbols
that “work” in one place seem in another off-key. To communicate credibly with
Americans about America, one must grasp a good many secrets of this symbolic
geography.
8. Labor Union
History, Slavic History. The Guns of Lattimer (New York:
Basic, 1978). On September 10, 1887, in the hamlet of Lattimer Mines,
Pennsylvania, an armed posse took aim and fired into a crowd of oncoming mine
workers, who were marching in their corner of the coal-mining region to call
their fellow miners out on strike. The marchers – Poles, Slovaks, and
Hungarians, most of whom could not yet speak English – were themselves armed
only with an American flag and a timid, budding confidence in their new-found
rights as free men in their newly adopted country. The mine operators took
another view of these rights and of the strange, alien men who claimed them.
When the posse was done firing, nineteen of the demonstrators were dead and
thirty-nine were seriously wounded. Some six months later a jury of their peers
was to exonerate the deputies of any wrongdoing. The “Lattimer Massacre” is not
only a powerful story in its own right (and an invaluable key to the history of
the growth of the United Mine Workers), but an allegory of that peculiarly
American experience undergone over and over again throughout the land, and down
to this very day: the experience of new immigrants, still miserable with
poverty and bewilderment and suffering the trauma of culture shock, being
confronted by the hostility and blind contempt of the “real” Americans. The
incident at Lattimer was a tragedy brought on not so much by inhumanity as by
profound intercultural suspicion. The victims were not attracted to socialism,
and did not denounce America even when they were denied justice; they believed
doggedly that their children would live a better life. Injustice was not to
them a new experience; liberty was.
9. The Joy of
Sports: End Zones, Bases, Baskets, Balls, and the Consecration of
the American Spirit (New York: Basic, 1976); 2nd ed. (Lanham, Md.: Madison
Books, 1994). Far from feeling guilty over the hours spent in front of the
television set watching grown men play games, American sports fans ought to
recognize that they are engaging in an important public liturgy – it is not
“mere entertainment.” Sports bring to human beings – whether as players or
spectators – experiences more akin to natural religion than to diversion.
Particularly in America, where religious forms have tended to fade, such
indispensable aids to the spirit as sacred time and sacred space are found
within the innings or quarters of a game and inside the park or stadium. It is
play, not work, which truly civilizes people, touching them with the qualities
of beauty, truth, and excellence. Each of the three games invented in America
(and beloved by all social classes) – baseball, basketball, and football – has
its own distinctive mythic content. You can’t understand America unless you
understand its public, liturgical sports.
D. TRILOGY ON CAPITALISM v.
SOCIALISM AND CATHOLIC THOUGHT.
10. Three
Systems. The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1982). Of all the systems of political economy which have
shaped our history, none has so revolutionized ordinary expectations of human
life – lengthened the life span, made the elimination of poverty and famine
thinkable, enlarged the range of human choice – as democratic capitalism. And
yet, for two centuries now, democratic capitalism has had little appeal for the
human spirit. To invoke loyalty to it because of the prosperity it brings is
regarded by most Western intellectuals as simply materialistic and, at worst,
even corrupt. The “moral high ground” has been regularly conceded to
socialism. The practice of democratic capitalism has been informed by
presuppositions that until now have remained largely unarticulated. Democratic
capitalism is a novel unity of political democracy, a market and incentive
economy, and a liberal and pluralistic culture. The idea of this threefold
social system, based on respect for the inalienable dignity of the individual,
the rule of law, and compassion for the poor, has an inherently greater moral
and spiritual power than the idea of socialism. This book is about the life of
the spirit which makes democratic capitalism, as well as its vision of high
moral purpose, both possible and spiritually fruitful.
11. Freedom with
Justice: Catholic Social Thought and Liberal Institutions (San
Francisco: Harper & Row, 1984). Although the Catholic church during the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries set itself against liberalism as an
ideology, it has slowly come to admire liberal institutions such as democracy
and free markets. Between the Catholic vision of social justice and liberal
institutions, there is a profound consonance (but not identity). One may
cherish liberal institutions without embracing the philosophies of the liberal
thinkers who first promoted them. Institutions have a life of their own in
history, that permits genuine but often-unpredictable development from the germ
of earlier intuitions. One may, indeed, undergird liberal institutions with the
more adequate Catholic philosophy of the human person, its deep sense of
community, and its long-experienced respect for “intermediate associations” or
“mediating structures.”
12. Will It
Liberate? Questions About Liberation Theology (New York:
Paulist, 1986). “Liberation theology” presents itself as an alternative to the
sterile theoretical thought of the Old World. It offers a vision of history and
human salvation that borrows heavily from a Marxian analysis of society. This
book offers the empirical hypothesis that the liberal society, built around a
capitalist economy that promotes discovery and entrepreneurship among the poor,
will succeed more quickly, more thoroughly, and in a more liberating fashion
than the socialist societies so far conceived of by liberation theologians.
Liberation theologians seem to misunderstand systematically the spiritual
resources and economic dynamism of liberal societies. Of course, a pluralism of
theologies entails serious disagreements. Identifying those disagreements
exactly requires each participant in the debate to “cross over” into the point
of departure and dynamic of the other points of view, both with sympathy and
with alert skepticism, but in the end with a painstaking desire to understand.
Novak tries to read the liberation theologians with seriousness and dogged
inquiry, to understand and to raise further questions. The main question: what
will actually work to help the poor out of poverty?
E. CULTURAL ECOLOGY
13. Solving A Key
Puzzle: How to Reconcile the Incommensurable Value of Person with the
Common Good? Free Persons and the Common Good (Lanham, Md.: Madison
Books, 1989). This work seeks to bridge the gap between liberalism and the
Catholic notion of the “common good” by showing that the liberal tradition
includes a vision of the common good, a vision both historically original and
crucial to its defense of the human person. Too often, the liberal tradition is
discussed wholly in terms of the individual, the rational economic agent,
self-interest, and something like the utilitarian calculus. On the other side,
too often the classical view of the common good is presented as though it did
not respect the freedom of the human person, the rights of the individual, and
the unique properties of the many different spheres through which the common
good is cumulatively realized. Yet the liberal tradition has in fact greatly
expanded and enriched the concept of the common good. And the Catholic
tradition – through its distinctive concepts of the person, will,
self-deception, virtue, practical wisdom, “the dark night of the soul,” and
insight itself – has thickened and enriched our under-standing of the
individual. On matters of institutional realism, the liberal tradition has made
discoveries that the Catholic tradition sorely needs; reciprocally, regarding
certain philosophical-theological conceptions, the Catholic tradition has
achieved some insights (e.g., into the nature of the human person, the human
community, and mediating institutions) in which many in the liberal intellectual
tradition are now expressing interest. The two traditions need each other, each
being weaker where the other is stronger.
14. This
Hemisphere of Liberty: A Philosophy of the Americas
(Washington, D.C.: AEI Press, 1990). To call attention to the distinctive
complex of mental tendencies that speaks to the Latin American condition, in
this book Michael Novak coins the phrase “the Catholic Whig tradition.” Lord
Acton called Thomas Aquinas the first Whig. The ancient Whig pedigree, far
older than the now defunct British and American parties of that name, includes
Bellarmine, Alexis de Tocqueville, Acton himself, Jacques Maritain, Yves R.
Simon, and others. Catholic Whigs, like Progressives, believe in the dignity of
the human person, in human liberty, in institutional reform, in gradual
progress. But they also have a deep respect for language, law, liturgy, custom,
habit, and tradition that marks them, simultaneously, as conservatives. With
the conservatives, the Catholic Whigs have an awareness of the force of cultural
habit and the role of passion and sin in human affairs. With the liberals, they
give central importance to human liberty, especially the slow building of
institutions of liberty. The Catholic Whigs see liberty as ordered liberty –
not the liberty to do what one wishes, but the liberty to do what one ought.
Working within this horizon, this book shows how institutions of liberty may be
built in this hemisphere (and the other). The liberation of Latin America,
especially its economic liberation, has not yet been accomplished. In the
precapitalist mode, Latin American economies are characterized by markets,
private property, and profits. These do not, contrary to Marx, suffice to
constitute a capitalist system. Latin America offers few legal or cultural
supports for the essential mark of the capitalist economy: enterprise,
innovation, creativity. Only from the dynamic energy of moral striving (through
ideas, habits, and institutions) can a political economy take life. Economies
work better when human persons are given institutional support to become
creators of wealth, not merely dependents on government. Development means
empowering the poor to incorporate their own businesses, to own their own land,
to improve their education and skills, and to exercise their God-given right to
personal economic initiative.
15. Summarizing
the Work of One Decade and posing Questions For the Next... The
Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Free Press, 1993).
This book offers a fuller theory of the Catholic social ethic and capitalism, a
practical agenda for addressing the critical problems of poverty, race, and
ethnicity, and an approach to the problem yet unaddressed: the ecology of
liberty. Out of a hundred-year debate within the Catholic Church has come a
vision of the capitalist ethic more full and satisfying than Max Weber’s
Protestant ethic. No other religious tradition has wrestled so long with, or
been so reluctant to come to terms with, the capitalist reality. This book
chronicles the Catholic opposition to capitalism and the beginnings of modern
papal social thought, including an account of how Pope John Paul II’s commitment
to human liberty came to include economic as well as religious and political
liberty. Novak offers a new and practical definition of “social justice,”
designed to rescue this central concept of papal social thought from the
powerful objections of Fredrich Hayek. It reinterprets social justice as the
distinctive virtue of free persons associating themselves together,
cooperatively, within a free society. It also de-links social justice from an
uncritical reliance on the blind leviathan of the state and links it, instead,
to the concrete intelligence of individuals and their free associations within
“the civic forum.” This new definition of social justice, which emphasizes
“civil society,” not the “state,” gives rise to a new approach to government and
social activism, which Novak calls “the civil society project.” This project
addresses several social perplexities of the near future, including the
desperate condition of many of the world’s poor, ethnicity and race, and the new
factory in cultural ecology, the omnipresent media or communications. The
combination of democracy and capitalism can do more to free the poor from
poverty and tyranny when the welfare state is redesigned to open up the sphere
of free associations and “little platoons” that express the social side of human
nature. In matters of race and ethnicity, a wise focus is the development of
“human capital” among the most vulnerable, as the chief ground on which an
individual can build a sense of dignity, achievement, and pride. Finally, the
primary flaw in free society today lies not so much in its political or economic
systems, but in its moral-cultural system. Today, one must scrutinize
especially the cultural elites who create the stories, images, and symbols of
the nation’s self-understanding and moral direction. The new frontier of the
twenty-first century is likely to be contestation for the soul of the
moral-cultural system. Building up civilizations that respect the true and
nature-fulfilling “moral ecology,” in which the virtues of ordered liberty
flourish, is a demanding task which will occupy the human race throughout the
coming century. Novak calls this “the ecology of liberty.”
16. A New Look at
Democratic Capitalism – from Within. Business as a Calling: Work
and the Examined Life (New York: Free Press, 1996). Drawing on interviews
with men and women who work in business, as well as published accounts and
wide-ranging research, this book brings us inside the everyday world of
business. What unifies Novak’s report is the conviction that, pace the
treatment it usually receives from Hollywood, the news media, and
counter-culture intellectuals, business life is morally serious, and it
constitutes what religious believers (and even a few secularists) recognize as a
calling: unique to each individual; requiring talent; revealing itself
by the pleasure and sense of accomplishment its practice yields us; and not
always easy to discover among the false paths life presents. Novak begins his
discussion of business as a calling by examining the ideals and possibilities
inherent in industry and commerce, considering both the virtues internal to
business and the myriad ethical responsibilities of businessmen and women. He
then discusses democratic capitalism as a system, underscoring the two most
powerful arguments for capitalism: that it better helps the poor to escape from
poverty than any other economic system, and that it is a necessary (though not
sufficient) condition for democracy. But while Novak is clear about the virtues
of business life, and the moral legitimacy of democratic capitalism, he is also
acutely aware of the threat posed by modern culture to the moral capital of the
West. Both intellectual elites and the national media have been remarkably
incurious about virtue and religion for some years, threatening our nation’s
moral ecology. Because business is dependent on the moral and cultural
institutions of the free society, corporations cannot afford to ignore this
threat to a healthy public ethos of virtue. What becomes clear by the end of
Novak’s study is that, as in all human affairs, one can do both good and evil in
business – whether one owns a small coffee shop or works in a large telecom
corporation – but that to do evil corrupts the inner telos of business
as a calling.
17. The Fire of
Invention: Civil Society and the Future of the Corporation
(Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997) This book evolved from three
lectures at the American Enterprise Institute on three distinct but related
topics: the history and distinctive nature of the business corporation; the
animating force that gives birth to the business corporation, “the fire of
invention,” and patents and copyrights; and questions of structure and
governance of the corporation. It looks at the business corporation’s influence
on civil society and, in the post-socialist era opening before us, assesses some
of the principal new threats to the corporation appearing on the horizon. Novak
presents a brief history of the corporation, tracing its roots back to Medieval
monastic life, and argues that it is a primary institution of the free society,
second only to religion (the corporation is the major material, while religion
is the major spiritual, institution of civil society). But Novak’s analysis is
prescriptive, too. The business corporation has come under fire from a new set
of enemies, including those, like the British financial journalist Will Hutton,
who call for a “stakeholder” society in which political elites will set out vast
new corporate responsibilities under the heading of “corporate governance.”
Much of the discussion surrounding corporate governance, Novak argues,
misapplies categories of political philosophy – designed for political
institutions – to the corporation, which is not a political community. It is
therefore crucial, Novak argues, for the corporation to take account of its own
identity and its central role in the building of the chief alternative to
government: civil society. One of Novak’s principal themes in this book is the
trade-off between risk and security in the free society. Americans have
traditionally been more open to risk than Europeans – as Tocqueville indicated
in Democracy in America. Hence the greater dynamism of American
economic life, the flourishing of corporation in American soil, and the vast
sums of venture capital invested by Americans in risky new firms. This emphasis
on dynamism and creativity is perfectly captured in the American respect for
intellectual property. Accordingly, Novak illumines the complex field of
patents and copyrights with the help of Abraham Lincoln, for whom “all of nature
is a wholly unexplored mine.” Patent regimes grant inventors and authors the
fruit of their labor, and thereby serve the common good through the inventions
and works of the spirit they promote. The Fire of Invention opens a
new and exciting field of inquiry, the business corporation, to scholars in
humanistic studies.
F. Words for the Next
Generation
18. Tell Me
Why: A Father Answers His Daughter’s Questions About God, with Jana
Novak (New York: Pocket Books, 1998). Beginning with a fax of honest and
pressing questions about religion sent by his daughter Jana, Novak launches into
a discussion with her on crucial issues of faith, religion, and meaning. At
once autobiographical and philosophically and theologically searching, the book
reveals that, far from being an opiate of the masses, as Marx held, true
religion cuts to the core of existence, and that, in the dark night of the soul,
it can be of little short-term solace. What the exploration of faith is finally
about, Novak explains, is truth. The book is written as a dialogue,
with each chapter framed by a question from Jana on God, religious institutions,
and morality. While answering his daughter’s often-skeptical queries on such
issues as the decision to have faith, the variety of organized religions, and
the nature and importance of God, Novak explains both the many ideas that
different world religions have in common and the central beliefs and principles
of Catholicism. Following Chesterton, who described the Catholic faith as “the
democracy of the dead,” Novak stresses the importance of tradition and ritual in
giving continuity and substance to life’s most important events. More, Novak
rejects the view that it is unrealistic to expect modern men and women to adhere
to church teachings on sex and morals. On the contrary, the challenge those
teachings offer serves to intensify experience, to make life richer for
those who adhere to them. No controversy is skirted here: Novak addresses the
role of women in the Church; abortion and contraception; charity; science and
faith; and religion and the free society. Tell Me Why is a return,
thirty years on, to the existential and theological concerns that first animated
Novak’s thought.
19. A Free Society
Reader (ed. by Novak, Brailsford, and Heesters; Lanham, Md.: Lexington
Books, 2000). Foreseeing the need for a “primer” for future leaders of free
societies, Novak compiled some of his own essays, as well as those by Pierre
Manent, Rocco Buttiglione, Richard John Neuhaus, George Weigel, Ryszard Legutko,
and others. Organized into three major sections – “Economics and the Free
Society,” “Democracy and the Free Society,” and “Culture and the Free Society,”
the book contains concise essays describing different aspects of the relation
between freedom, virtue and prosperity. Titles are as diverse as “The
Architecture of Freedom,” “Modern Individualism,” “Behind Centesimus
Annus,” “The Liberalism of John Paul II,” “The Trouble With Toleration,”
and “The Love That Moves the Sun.” The concluding pages provide background
documentation in the form of original sources ranging from The Federalist
Papers to De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, from Pope John
Paul II’s Centesimus Annus to the pontiff’s speech on the American
Experiment.
20. Three in
One (ed. by Edward Younkins; Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield,
2001).
Professor Edward Younkins
has selected 29 articles from newspapers and journals, beginning with Novak's
first break from social democracy “A Closet Capitalist Confesses” Washington
Post (March 1976) and “An Underpraised and Undervalued System”
(Worldview August, 1977) up to “Solidarity in a Time of Globalization.”
He collects these essays under five headings -- the theory of democratic
capitalism; free persons and the common good; religion and morality; the
responsibilities of the corporation; the global arena - and concludes with the
autobiographical essay “Controversial Engagements.” Younkins located these
articles in well-known journals such as The Public Interest and
First Things, in lesser-known journals such as Worldview, Public
Opinion, Economic Affairs (London) The Journal of Ecumenical
Studies, and the Dravo Review and previously unpublished material.
He has included substantial essays such as “The Communitarian Individual in
America,” “The Silent Artillery of Communism,” “The Evangelical Basis of a
Social Market Economy,” “The Future of Civil Society,” “The Jewish and Christian
Foundation of Human Dignity,” “Economics as Humanism,” and “The International
Vocation of American Business.” He also retrieved two unpublished pieces, one of
which offers a new definition of social justice to overcome the powerful
objections of Friedrich Hayek. Much of the periodical literature in which Novak
has developed the idea of democratic capitalism over the years appears in this
collection, in addition, Younkins appends a valuable bibliography listing
further articles. The collection displays the development of Novak's thought on
democratic capitalism from its embryonic beginnings through its later
unfolding.
21. On Two
Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding
(San Francisco, Ca.: Encounter Books, 2002)
Contrary to conventional
histories, the American Republic took flight on two wings: not only on the
Enlightenment, but also on faith in the God of the ancient Hebrews, the God of
liberty. In “Jewish Metaphysics at the Founding,” the author shows that the God
of the founders was not the God of Deism. The public acts of the Continental
Congress employ the Hebrew names of God and their implied metaphysics of open
history, contingency, individuality, and liberty. Of the 56 signers of the
Declaration of Independence and 38 signers of the Constitution, all but one or
two were deeply influenced by the Hebrew Bible. Chapter two, “Plain Reason and
Humble Faith,” shows that by “reason” the founders meant the qualities of mind
to which the Federalist addressed its arguments: sober reflection and calm
deliberation; an ability to overcome passion and self-interest; a capacity to
consider the larger picture; and a due regard for the long experience of
mankind. Chapter three weaves together separate strands of American
experience: the inalienable loneliness of individual conscience before the face
of God; a new type of moral community; and a new religious architectonic.
Chapter four, “A Religious Theory of Rights,” highlights the Founders’ deep
sense of personal responsibility before the Divine Judge. No human agency can
interfere with that responsibility. Each man and woman has been created by God,
and is called to be a friend of God, and will be held responsible for a personal
response. In chapter five, the author replies to ten questions. The Appendix,
“The Forgotten Founders,” selects nineteen vignettes from the lives of the
top one-hundred leaders of the founding generation, especially the
lesser-known figures who signed the Declaration of Independence or the
Constitution, plus a few other opinion leaders.
Compiled by Derek Cross
and Brian Anderson November, 1999; updated by Cornelius Hesters January, 2001;
updated by Grattan Brown May, 2002
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