Dimensions: 1.03'' x 7.76'' 368 pages Rowman & Littlefield Publication Date: June 1999 Hardcover ISBN: 0847694054

June 1999
On Cultivating Liberty: Reflections on Moral Ecology
By Michael Novak

Michael Novak is best known for his wide-ranging exploration of the ideal and practice of "democratic capitalism." Novak's journey through political economy--understood in the most capacious sense--began with the architectonic The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (1982), developed with The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1993), and continued with two recent books, Business as a Calling (1996) and The Fire of Invention (1997), that looked at democratic capitalism from within. Novak's writings on democratic capitalism, which grew out of the long process of self-education described in the autobiographical "Errand into the Wilderness," included in this volume, seek to take back the moral high ground socialism claimed for most of the twentieth century. Socialists, with many fellow-traveling liberal intellectuals in tow, had long excoriated the capitalist societies for their many failures--from economic inequality to pervasive consumerism. As Novak painstakingly argued, however, socialists unfairly compared the ideal of socialism with the practice of democratic capitalism. Had they bothered to look closely at the reality of existing socialism, they would have discovered what the British political theorist John Gray felicitously called "the system of ruins."

Conversely, capitalism's enemies paid no attention to the moral goods democratic capitalism promised and, in many cases, realized: the rule of law, the intrinsic dignity of the individual, the encouragement of creativity, economic prosperity, and the challenge and moral decency of a life in business. We can safely say in post-Marxist 1999 that Novak won the argument, though the socialist idea continues to burn, albeit more dimly, on college campuses and in academic publishing houses across the globe. Now the contention has increasingly shifted to finding out what kind of capitalism works best. Among the possibilities: the "American" model of openness to innovation; the "Rhine" model of risk-averse social democracy; or an "Asian" capitalism more communitarian than either of its worldly rivals.

A Global Vision of the Free Society

But Novak's work extends far beyond the defense of market institutions to encompass a global vision of the free society in all its dimensions--political, moral, and cultural, as well as economic. The purpose of On Cultivating Liberty is to highlight this broader dimension of Novak's thought by publishing a range of essays--two appearing here for the first time, and several in substantially expanded versions--on "how to make a republic work" (to borrow a title from Novak's 1987 lectures at the University of Notre Dame).

If the free society won its debate with socialism, it has not won its debate with itself: to build or preserve a free society requires vigilantly tending to what Novak calls "the moral ecology" to prevent moral relativism from corrupting it. The essays collected here offer a sharp corrective to the moral deregulation that threatens democratic societies, despite their immense productivity and unprecedented liberties, with fragmented families, escalating crime, an overextended government that enervates the human spirit, and, at the limit, what Pope John Paul II calls "the culture of death," a cheapening of human life that attacks society's vulnerable: the unborn, the infirm, the elderly. The free society, Novak warns, will survive only if it grounds itself in an order of moral truth that transcends it.

Three Major Threads

Three major threads--each a crucial part of Novak's thought--run through the essays in On Cultivating Liberty.

Man's nature: dignified and sinful. As Novak stresses, man is made in the image of God--capable of reflection, choice, remarkable acts of creativity, communal solidarity, and a life well and virtuously led. But man is fallen, too, immersed in the sin that mocks his pretensions and from which none of us ever completely frees himself. That dual aspect of human nature has political and economic implications: anti-utopianism (no earthly city will ever be the city of God); an emphasis on unintended consequences (given human blindness because of sin and finitude, the social world cannot be programmed like a computer); the need for political and economic institutions that cultivate man's creative and rational side and that discourage his weaknesses, but that always remain sensitive to the human capacity for good and evil. (See "Twice Chosen: Irving Kristol as American" and "Errand into the Wilderness.")

Liberty and truth. Nihilism has been "the dark underground river of the twentieth century." (See "Truth and Liberty: The Foundations of the Republic.") Liberal theorists, many of whom bravely resisted the totalitarian temptation, have not been as successful in escaping the twin seductions of the nihilistic view of freedom: that no moral constraints, whether natural or supernatural, limit the will; and that the will is sovereign, lord and master of all it surveys, a pure force of self-invention, at no time more commanding than when it rejects reason. To Novak, this is a dramatically false and ultimately self-destructive conception of liberty. Upon its relativistic base, no republic can stand. Novak's alternative understanding of ordered liberty—of liberty as self-government—links many of the essays in this volume and brings together thinkers as diverse as Irving Kristol and Pope John Paul II, each of whom is profiled in the book.

From state to civil society. The twentieth century has witnessed an unprecedented growth in state power, a development closely related to the abandonment of liberty as self-government. That growth has taken monstrous forms, with the emergence of totalitarian regimes that exacted a terrifying cost in human suffering; and it has taken more benign forms, in the emergence of the social democratic "mixed" regimes that managed, at least for a time, to combine political and intellectual liberties with some redistribution of economic wealth. But even in its benign forms, the growth of the state has had deleterious results: it replaced the vibrant associations of civil society with stultifying government bureaucracy, and it sapped economic productivity--to such an extent that Europe's social democracies can no longer afford their overgenerous welfare systems. (See "The Crisis of the Welfare State.") Novak's response to the expansion of the state is to call for a reinvigoration of civil society, that realm of associations between individual and state where men and women pursue their interests and learn, as Tocqueville explained, how to be citizens of a democracy. (See "Civil Society and Self-Government.")

To highlight these three themes is not to deny the existence of other rich veins running through On Cultivating Liberty: grappling with the "boredom" of democratic capitalist societies; controversially articulating a "Whig" tradition of political thought running from Thomas Aquinas to Friedrich Hayek, open to progress but respectful of the past; exploring the tension-filled intersection between religion and democracy, the centrality of the family to the free society, and the permanence of tragedy; and making many more forays in neoconservative political theory. The picture that emerges by the end of the volume is of a complex thinker, working to synthesize classical insights into the possibilities and limits of human nature with modern institutional advances that protect the individual from arbitrary power in politics, economics, morality, and culture.