The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
| Author | Michael Novak |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Simon & Schuster |
|
Publication date
|
1982 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism is a 1982 book by philosopher Michael Novak, in which Novak aims to understand and analyze the theological assumptions of democratic capitalism, its spirit, it values, and its intentions. Novak defines democratic capitalism as a pluralistic social system that contrasts with the unitary state of the traditional society and the modern socialist state. He analyzes it as a differentiation of society into three power centers: a political sector, an economic sector, and a moral-cultural sector. Each sector needs the others. Democracy needs the market economy and both need a pluralistic liberal culture. Against the continuing growth of democratic capitalism, modern socialism has contracted from a robust utopian program into vague “idealism about equality” and overwrought criticism of capitalism, most notably in the “liberation theology” of Latin America. Novak ends with the “beginnings of a theological perspective on democratic capitalism” illuminated by the journey from Marxism to realism of Reinhold Niebuhr.
Irving Kristol described Novak's book as “unquestionably a major work for our times.” The Spanish translation of the book served as inspiration for the Chilean lawyer and politician Jaime Guzmán where he was not satisfied by Hayeks thought.
No theologian “has yet assessed the theological significance of democratic capitalism”,(p13) the society of “three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is pluralistic and, in the largest sense, liberal.”(p14) The link is not an accident. You can only have democracy with a market economy, nourishing and nourished by a pluralistic liberal culture: a threefold system.
Democratic capitalism requires economic growth, the “belief of all individuals that they can better their condition.”(p15) Without growth and social mobility democracy devolves into the Hobbesian “war of all against all.”
The treatments of democratic capitalism by religious writers, in papal encyclicals and mainline Protestant theology, have not really understood its essence. So democratic capitalism needs a moral theory about itself, to define a “political economy most consonant with Judaic tradition and the Christian gospels”.(p20)
Capitalism is neither Heaven nor Hell. “Yet all other known systems of political economy are worse.”(p28)
People hate capitalism; its successes do not impress the “poets and philosophers and priests”(p31) “The more it succeeds, the more it fails.”(p32) Intellectuals indict capitalism for all kinds of sins: affluence, moral weakness, and vulgar taste. The intellectuals that do defend capitalism have not made a broad enough case.
...
Wikipedia