February 2020 marks the third anniversary of the death of the American Catholic intellectual and the 1994 winner of the Templeton Prize in Religion, Michael Novak. Perhaps most famous for his 1982 book, “The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism,” Novak’s ideas were immensely influential for several decades in American public life, numerous faith communities and the world of political economy.
Read MoreMichael Novak, who died recently at age 83 from colon cancer, was a philosopher and theologian of the first rank. His writings on capitalism, democracy and religion had an enormous influence in the 1980s and 1990s. In fact, they provided critical intellectual underpinnings that led to the demise of Soviet communism.
Read MoreLast month, America lost a great defender of freedom, Michael Novak.
Novak was committed to rightly ordered liberty and cared deeply about the principles and practices that produce it. His enormous body of work emphasized the cultural prerequisites for political and economic freedom, as he stressed that economic conservativism and social conservatism are indivisible.
In the words of Heritage Foundation founder Ed Feulner, “Michael forced those of us trained in the dismal science of economics to explain that we should be more than ‘free to choose’—rather we should be free to make good free choices.”
Read MoreIn 1960, at age 26, Michael Novak moved into a Manhattan apartment swarming with cockroaches. After 12 years of preparing for the Roman Catholic priesthood, he had abandoned that mission and would devote himself to writing—about exactly what, he wasn’t sure.
He realized, as he noted later, “there was no way to know how deep my talent ran.”
Read MoreThe news of Michael Novak’s death Feb. 17 saddened close friends and colleagues in the community of think tank scholars who drew so much from his writings and lectures.
Novak’s perspectives expanded our conceptual grasp of economic liberty beyond dry formulas to include a more complete picture of the creative, human, and virtuous nature of entrepreneurship.
Read MoreHeritage Foundation President Jim DeMint released the following statement on the death of Michael Novak:
I fondly remember Michael Novak’s last public appearance at The Heritage Foundation in July of 2016. He had written the introduction to our Index of Culture and Opportunity, and I was honored to introduce and listen to him the day of its launch last summer. We were reminded once again that day why Michael has had such a powerful shaping influence as he taught the love of freedom and care for the principles that produced it.
Read MoreIt pains me very much when thinkers I admire hold a doctrine as toxic as it is admonitory. Patrick Deneen, for instance, holds that the United States of America is badly founded, because it springs from the philosophy of liberalism (as Europeans understand liberalism).
Read MoreThe Institute for Faith, Work & Economics sponsored a special report on Faith and Work, which was prepared by The Washington Times Advocacy Department and published May 12, 2016. The report is entitled, "Faith at Work: Individual Purpose, Flourishing Communities" and it includes thirty authors from a broad spectrum of backgrounds, including business, political, cultural, and theological sectors. The entire report can be found here. I was honored to be one of the 30; my essay, adapted from my book “Business as a Calling: Work and the Examined Life” (Free Press, 1996), was originally published is here.
Read MoreAPR 22, 2013 | By GERTRUDE HIMMELFARB
Published by The Weekly Standard: THE MAGAZINE: From the April 22 Issue
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She praised “the American theologian and social scientist” Michael Novak for stressing the fact “that what he called ‘democratic capitalism’ was a moral and social, not just an economic system, that it encouraged a range of virtues, and that it depended upon co‑operation not just ‘going it alone.’ ”
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I was at a reception at the British embassy here in Washington in the early 1990s, I believe, when I was introduced to Margaret Thatcher by John O’Sullivan, her friend and former “Special Adviser.” Gertrude Himmelfarb, he told her, had recently delivered the Margaret Thatcher Lecture in Tel Aviv on a subject dear to her, Victorian values. “But of course, I know Gertrude,” she replied, “we’ve met before. And what a great subject, Victorian values. Let me tell you about Victorian values.” Which she did, eloquently, perceptively, and at some length, while John vainly tried to move her on to more worthy guests who were waiting to greet her.
We had, in fact, met a few years earlier in London at a conference on Victorian values chaired by her—this a few weeks before the election of 1987 that ushered in her last term in office. Victorian values were a prominent and much disputed theme in her campaign. Replying to a television interviewer who observed, rather derisively, that she seemed to be approving of Victorian values, she enthusiastically agreed. “Oh, exactly. Very much so. Those were the values when our country became great.” In another interview, again responding to a critic, she said that she was pleased to have been brought up by a Victorian grandmother who taught her those values. She went on to enumerate them: hard work, self-reliance, self-respect, living within one’s income, cleanliness next to godliness, helping one’s neighbor, and pride in one’s country. “All of these things are Victorian values,” she assured him. “They are also perennial values.”
Her friend and biographer Shirley Letwin aptly memorialized these as the “vigorous virtues.” In her autobiography, Thatcher makes a point of the fact that she had originally used the expression “Victorian virtues,” lapsing into the more modish “values” when that became the more familiar term. On other occasions she gave those “perennial values” a more venerable, and varied, lineage: Christian, Judaic-Christian, Puritan, Methodist. In one speech during her last campaign, she recommended John Wesley’s famous precept as the guiding ethos of conservatism: “Gain all you can. . . . Save all you can. . . . Give all you can.”
The Tel Aviv lecture O’Sullivan alluded to when he reintroduced me to Margaret Thatcher could not have been more inauspicious: first in its naming—Margaret Thatcher was hardly a revered or even respected figure in Tel Aviv University, the most liberal of Israeli universities (I don’t know whether that endowed series survived beyond that first lecture); and even more, because of the provocative subject I chose for that occasion. The title I gave it was “Victorian Values/Jewish Values,” citing Thatcher on Victorian values and extending it, by way of the “Judaic-Christian” ethic, to Jewish values. I might also have mentioned the frequent references to the large number of Jews in her constituency and, more conspicuously, in her cabinet. As Harold Macmillan’s quip had it: “There are more old Estonians than old Etonians in this government.” One biographer explained: “As a moral code for upward mobility of the kind the MP for Finchley [her constituency] never ceased to preach, Judaism embodied many useful precepts and could produce many shining exemplars.” A reviewer of that biography put it more coarsely: “Mrs. Thatcher instinctively warms to the Jewish nouveaux riches of North London and seems to see Judaism as an exemplary religion of capitalism.”
It is curious that the champion of Victorian values—better yet, Victorian virtues—should be accused, by some social conservatives as well as liberals, of elevating the “self,” the autonomous individual, above “society”; indeed, denigrating society in the interest of the self. Margaret Thatcher addressed this objection in her autobiography, insisting that she, like the Victorians, consistently saw the individual in the context of community, family, the other agents of society, and, not least, the nation. It was in that context, she said, that she promoted entrepreneurship, privatization, social mobility, a dynamic economy, and a limited government. She praised “the American theologian and social scientist” Michael Novak for stressing the fact “that what he called ‘democratic capitalism’ was a moral and social, not just an economic system, that it encouraged a range of virtues, and that it depended upon co‑operation not just ‘going it alone.’ ”
“Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life”—that is the title of her chapter on the thorny subject of self and society. The Victorians could not have said it better. Nor can conservatives today, seeking to restore a “way of life” rooted in family, religion, and civil society to counteract the overweening, managerial, programmatic state.
The name, or epithet, Iron Lady has an ambiguous tone, suggesting a strength of character unhappily wanting in humanity. That Margaret Thatcher welcomed it is evidence of her faith in those virtues that are both invigorating and humanizing, which enabled her to resist the currents of the time, domestic and foreign, that were disabling the people and the country. And so we may remember her, an Iron Lady in the most honorable sense of that term.
Gertrude Himmelfarb is the author of The Moral Imagination and, most recently, The People of the Book: Philosemitism in England from Cromwell to Churchill.
© Michael Novak, All Rights Reserved
