On March 14, 1976, a writer, academic, and Democratic party operative published a 1,200-word op-ed in the Washington Post called “A Closet Capitalist Confesses,” and all hell broke loose. Nearly every intellectual journal in America felt compelled to opine about the absurdity of a modern intellectual defending capitalism. Nearly every religious journal denounced the Catholic thinker’s apparent apostasy. Across the nation, angry letters and harsh newspaper columns raged at the sight of a rising figure in the public intellectual life of America being so . . . so . . . stupid. So atavistic. So wrongheaded.
If you have trouble imagining that there was a time in America when democratic capitalism seemed to have almost no intellectually respectable defenders, you owe a debt to the author of that op-ed. If you can’t picture a world without widely read outlets for intellectual conservatism—a world in which socialism and secularization were the unquestioned air that all American thinkers were assumed to breathe—you should offer up a prayer of thanks for the life of a man named Michael Novak.
Those who knew him owe him even more, for Michael was not just someone who influenced the history of the age. He also radiated a gentleness that touched all around him. He spent his life working among public intellectuals, politicos, and writers—which is to say, people given to a level of ambition, backbiting, and status-seeking not usually seen outside of junior high school. But he seemed not even to notice, assuming a public seriousness and personal kindness in others that matched his own.
For that matter, Michael had enormous amounts of abuse directed at him for his public positions, from his praise of the working class to his support for Reagan and his success at helping establish the American Enterprise Institute as one of the premier think tanks in the nation. The years saw a parade of lost friends, hostile reviews, withdrawn invitations. Crowds in South America gathered to scream “Yankee Shit!” at him for his arguments against liberation theology. European audiences hissed at his name. And through it all, he kept inviting his opponents to conferences, kept writing notes to his old lost friends, and kept conversation going even with those who announced to the world how much they despised him.
When Michael Novak died last week at age 83, there came an immediate outpouring of reminiscences and obituaries, remarking on his extraordinary career. All of it was deserved. He had been an adviser to popes and presidents, written more than 40 books and hundreds of essays, founded (with Ralph McInerny) the magazine Crisis, and forced into American public life a countercurrent of conservative thought.
Not that he was alone in the effort. William F. Buckley Jr. had founded National Review in 1955, Milton Friedman published A Monetary History of the United States in 1963, the Philadelphia Society began meeting in 1964, Allan Bloom and other students of Leo Strauss were beginning their careers by the mid-1960s, and various Catholic, libertarian, and anti-Communist writers had been producing serious studies for decades. Nonetheless, well into the 1970s, all that work seemed invisible, unnoticed by much of the intelligentsia in the United States.
And then there came along a generation of former leftists who compelled the nation’s thinkers and writers to pay attention. Of all the classic works of the original neoconservatives—Irving Kristol’s essays, Norman Podhoretz’s indefatigable work at Commentary, Richard John Neuhaus’s The Naked Public Square, Jeane Kirkpatrick’s influential essay “Dictatorships and Double Standards”—the most irreplaceable may be Michael Novak’s 1982 book, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. The expansion of his Washington Post op-ed into a full-blown theoretical account of the American experiment, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism stands as the one volume from which much of the entire project of the new conservatives could be reconstructed, were all else lost.
These days, the book is remembered mostly for its economics, but in truth it ranged far beyond that, reflecting Michael’s interests in theology, philosophy, social organization, public culture, and even sports. The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism insists that the family and the church—and not just the entrepreneur and the investor—are engaged in high social and moral endeavors, and they flourish best when left to their own devices. They stand as bulwarks against the tyrannies, great and small, to which all societies are prone, because they require economic, social, and even political power to be distributed widely, scattered in too many places for any government to seize complete control.
However successful he was, Michael never lost the formation he received growing up among Slovak immigrants in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Sent to the Holy Cross fathers for preparatory seminary at Notre Dame at age 14, he studied for the priesthood at Stonehill College in Massachusetts and the Gregorian in Rome, before deciding against taking priestly vows. Articles in the Catholic journals America and Commonweal turned into a gig helping cover the Second Vatican Council for Time magazine—and a subsequent, well-received book on the council by what seemed the hotshot young reporter on intellectual topics.
Michael’s return to the United States, however, was marked by uncertainty. He had written a novel, The Tiber Was Silver (1961), and met Karen Laub, the artist he would marry. His graduate study at Harvard was abandoned after gaining a master’s degree, and he wrote mainly philosophical texts—Belief and Unbelief: A Philosophy of Self-Knowledge (1965), The Experience of Nothingness (1970)—while he worked in academia at Stanford, SUNY, and Syracuse and tried to see his way forward.
His magazine writing on Catholicism and politics brought him into the circle of Catholic politicians with intellectual interests: Bobby Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, and especially Sargent Shriver, the vice-presidential candidate whom Michael served as a senior adviser and speechwriter during George McGovern’s doomed 1972 presidential campaign. And yet those political experiences, the peak of his career on the left, are what began his turn to the right. His travels with Shriver convinced him that political and cultural liberals were abandoning the traditionally Democratic working class, especially the old Catholic constituencies he knew from his childhood. Predicting the Reagan Democrats who would vote Republican in 1980, he wrote The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics (1972), arguing that the actual nation was far different from what the elites supposed it to be—both more optimistic and more pessimistic than the politics of the 1970s could represent.
From there, it was only a small step to “A Closet Capitalist Confesses” and all that followed: the influence on figures from Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan to John Paul II and Lech Walesa, the ambassadorships, the medals and awards, the 26 honorary doctorates, the million-dollar Templeton Prize, and all the rest. Along the way, he wrote on sports, the American founding, the nature of business, the structures of theology, and nearly everything else under the sun.
Along the way, as well, he carried on his conversations and his kindnesses. The first time we heard Michael give a lecture, my wife got the giggles, having to flee outside at the sound of that surprisingly high-pitched voice coming from the distinguished, barrel-chested man at the lectern. But she and I quickly learned to love Michael not just for the books he had written but for the company he was always willing to provide.
Dozens of dinners with Michael and Karen followed from our meeting, especially the one they threw for us when I first moved down from New York to join The Weekly Standard—a gathering of people whom Michael and Karen thought we should know, if we were going to live and work in Washington. It was there that I first met Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ben Wattenberg, Walter Berns, and others. Professional talkers, all of them. Accomplished people with amazing careers. Sharp, quick, and deep thinkers.
But what I remember best from the evening is Michael himself. His joy in our toddler daughter. His concern that all his guests enjoy themselves. His intelligence, yes, but overwhelmingly his kindness and gentleness. Michael Novak was not just a great man. He was a good man. And all who knew him are injured by his passing: some essential part of us, wrenched away.
Joseph Bottum is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
