Michael Novak and his ultrasuper democraticapitalism:

...In his section on Reinhold Niebuhr, I was startled to read, for example, that in 1933 Niebuhr "also became disillusioned with German socialists, only ninety-six of whom voted against the grant of dictatorial powers to Hitler" (My italics...

...Horowitz was lamenting the fact that conservatives and corporate leaders had abandoned all the "moral buzz words" to liberals...

...Cynicism marks the laborer's life...

...He even claims that during all those years of writing about interna-tional affairs, ethnicity, and domestic politics, he deliberately preserved his economic virginity: "I saved economics . . . until last...

...One is also reminded of Marx's line - how appropriate in this case - describing capitalism's unbridled power of transformation: "All that is solid melts into air...

...The indi-vidual that this society was increasingly producing was iso-lated, lonely, at war with his or her own feelings, anesthetized to both sexual love and tragedy, incapable of acknowledging evil and America's sometimes devastating role in the world...

...The university, the media, the churches were all hobbled and manipulated by the economic and political powers that be...

...Novak continues, "For many of my adult years I thought of myself as a democratic socialist...

...Formerly, Novak suggested, sometimes by the use of quotation marks, that the claims made by such words were spurious, that what passed for realism, pragmatism, productivity, and rationality was in truth con-stricted, ideological, destructive, and irrational...

...Even worse, he is oblivious to the history of democracy...

...Liberalism was the creed which, on both sides of the Atlantic, generally represented the political inter-ests of new economic forces in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries...

...Horowitzes do...

...In 1850, outside of Switzerland, not a single European state granted universal suffrage even to males...

...Liberal leaders of the rising economic classes needed the support of the "people" to break the monopoly on political power of the landed aristoc-racy...

...Questions like these are simply bowled over by the force of Novak's rhetoric...

...Just like that...

...THERE SHOULD be no underestimating exactly how dra-matic a transformation in Novak's views his latest book signals...

...Did it head the resistance to the wave of ideological terrorism that swept over Western Europe between the world wars...

...Every night the same procedure, and never can the guard find any of the plant's property in the wheelbarrow...

...Democratic capitalism," however, is a somewhat more complicated phrase...

...Liberalism demanded "free institutions" - some kind of deliberative parliament, accountable state officials, freedom of religion, freedom from political censorship, inde-pendent courts, an end to hereditary privileges...

...Today Michael Novak devotes his considerable talents to articulating the inchoate ideals of successful executives rather than fledg-ling revolutionaries, to making the best case for Reaganism rather than radicalism...

...Formerly, realism and pragmatism, prod-uctivity, efficiency, and economic rationality were terms of scorn...

...A The speaker was Michael J. Horowitz, a senior aide to David A. Stockman at the Office of Management and Budget...

...We are told, "Many, perhaps most, leaders of major industrial and marketing concerns spring from poorer families...

...We are treated to a defense of interest-group pluralism against its critics without any accurate representation of what those critics ("certain writers") have argued...

...FROM ALL THIS, it should be clear that The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism represents two massive shifts, even reversals, in Novak's perspective...

...was trapped in the same immemorial poverty and underdevelopment as other nations.'' (According to a major study by Alice Hanson Jones, the American colonies were among the most prosperous of regions in the world as early as 1700...

...Now they are accolades...

...As one can plainly see, his lament was not limited to the state of the common man and mass tastes...

...Yet much of the vision of America found in A Theology for Radical Politics was equally present in The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics...

...Why should they not suspect he has simply traded in one set of "conventions" for another, exchanged those of the "literary" world that evidently dominated his thinking so easily for those of the world of businessmen, economists, policy planners, and conservative politicians where he now operates...

...Whenever capitalism shows a less attractive face, e.g., its alliances with dictatorial regimes, this is attributed to "bastard forms of capitalism" and held to be an unstable and transient reality...

...written by a Lutheran theologian Robert Benne and published with little fanfare a few months before Novak's book...

...Democratic centralism" is the Leninists' way of saying that the party elite makes all the decisions...

...Democratic capitalism is introduced in the book's first sentence, and by sheer repetition it takes on a life of its own, eventually to roll like a juggernaut through hun-dreds of pages...

...Faced with The Spirit of Democratic-Capitalism, for instance, Mr...

...Where once he saw it as corrosive of inner life, pressing toward shoddiness, imposing isolation, and destructive of communities, now he sees it as enriching and humanizing, demanding of excellence, support-ive of association, and giving birth to "a new type of human being, the communitarian individual.'' Where once he saw the society as dangerously militarized, now he sees it as vacci-nated against the military ethos...

...When work becomes "a job," violence accumulates beneath the sur-face of the skin...

...Skepticism," said Santayana, "is the chastity of the mind...

...Not every fact in Novak's book is wrong...

...Consider so basic a criterion of democracy as the right to vote...

...Much the same can be said of other efforts to assure or expand democratic liberties in this century...

...It stimulates invention . . . delights irreve-rently in change, dissent, and singularity...

...In like manner, Novak concludes that capitalism is essential for democracy and socialism incompatible with it...

...But to take from him, as well, pride in the arts of his own hands was to strip his spirit raw...

...Where Novak is sweeping and grand-iloquent, Benne is specific and systematic...

...THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRATIC CAPITALISM is marked by dozens and dozens of such blunders and misunderstand-ings...

...Democratic Caesarism" was the label that devotees of a flamboyant Latin American dictator pasted on his regime...

...But actual rule by the "people" was something else again, conjuring up dangerous leveling and all the excesses of the French Revolution...

...The nativists concluded that you could not preserve political liberty without preserving the numerical and cultural hegemony of Protestant Anglo-Saxons, and that the Catholic culture of Southern and Eastern European immigrants was incompatible with democracy...

...The vote for women came later...

...THERE IS NOTHING wrong with a person changing his mind...

...The mere fact that two words can be put together does not mean they represent a reality...

...One can find similar descriptions not once but dozens of times in Novak's writings, and in far more forceful terms than this summary can suggest...

...And it is a Freudian country, stressing how each man must liberate himself, explore himself...

...The watershed year," he writes, "was 1776...

...Finally the guard begs the worker, under a solemn pledge of secrecy, to reveal what he is stealing and how he is concealing it...

...The answer, of course: wheelbarrows...

...One of Novak's favorite rhetorical devices is to refer to democratic capitalism as ' 'designed'' to do this or that...

...Unable to live with themselves, Americans level the earth, build and destroy," etc., etc...

...a more objective measure was the fact that only three percent had fathers who were unskilled laborers as opposed to sixty percent whose fathers were professionals or business executives...

...Indeed, there is an embarrassing parallel between the argument of The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism and that of turn-of-the-century Anglo-American nativists...

...Not quite...

...But liberalism - and in this it spoke for capitalism - was highly ambivalent about democracy...

...He suggested Novak's The Spirit of Dem-ocratic Capitalism as a corrective...

...Novak builds his case on a statisti-cal association between capitalism and democracy and a simi-lar association between socialism and dictatorship...

...What is involved, after all, is quite a lot more than a few deprecations of mass taste or occasional passing lapses in A Theology for Radical Politics...

...It was, indeed, against this America, now more explicitly identified with the WASP establishment and the liberal educated classes, that Novak wished to defend ethnics...

...A life, like a generation, is not as long as it used to be...

...liberal politics sometimes encouraged democratic forces...

...SHOULD NOVAK'S capitalism-democracy link be relegated, therefore, to the category of half-educated pamphleteer-ing...

...But suspicion dies hard, and so does curiousity...

...This is hardly adequate even for the narrowly Anglo-American historical viewpoint that, ironically, now dominates the thinking of this once Unmeltable Ethnic...

...I understand, therefore, the impulse not to take Novak seriously...

...Brit-ain's landmark Second Reform Act of 1867 extended the franchise to no more than eight percent of the population...

...Although this revelation obviously renders his recent conversion all the more striking, it comes as something of a surprise to those of us who cannot remember a single occasion when Novak, even in his most radical period, declared in print that he was a socialist...

...Yet take him seriously we must, if only because so many of the world's Mr...

...The question, in the former case as in the latter, is what exactly is the relationship between the two elements named...

...Despite that earlier reference to "moving from the conservatism of my hometown," we are now informed that The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism represents a break "with the tradition of Christian socialism in which 1 was reared...

...Novak believes that this is a fact of history...

...Almost simultane-ously, Adam Smith published An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations and the first democratic capitalist republic came into existence in the United States...

...Where once he saw inequalities of wealth and power as scandalous, now he sees them as "in tune with natural inequalities which everyone experiences every day...

...The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism does not, it should be made clear, rest on economic analysis...

...People like Mr...

...If familiarity with Novak has bred more than a little incredulity, it is important that the reasons be set forth, even at some length...

...While so many of his critics are suspiciously wondering whether he has slipped this or that virtue into the container, without its legitimately belonging there, it is the container itself, the very concept of democratic capitalism, that he is boldly wheeling past them...

...Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism MICHAEL NOVAK has written what I think is per-haps the most important book of the decade...

...In that respect, Novak has been ideologically promiscuous...

...Liberalism strove to limit the power of the state (except when it came to enforcing contracts, main-taining a stable currency, subsidizing or protecting new indus-trial enterprises, outlawing labor unions, and breaking strikes...

...In the U.S., Southern blacks, whose enslavement had been terminated at least in part because it represented a pre-capitalist way of life, were nonetheless de-prived of their voting rights precisely during the heyday of expanding capitalism...

...Americans...

...This results in ludicrous anachronisms, as when he scolds Leo XIII and Max Weber for not celebrating the virtues of democratic-capitalism, without any notice of just how democratic was the capitalism of their generations...

...This is vintage Novak prose and one can understand how he might be embarrassed by it ("vacant eyes .. .drinking beer...

...our illusion of innocence...

...To confine him to crowded and noisy homes, to polluted sections of the cities, to poor and dispir-ited education systems, to a horizonless income peak, to a constant stream of silent contempt - all this was bad enough...

...raises a number of basic issues that are always well worth reviewing...

...The struggles for ballot-box democ-racy, including, besides universal suffrage, the secret ballot and paid representatives, were led in almost every case, by working-class movements or left-wing reformers highly criti-cal of existing capitalism if not explicitly socialist...

...Perhaps such occasions can be recovered by the archivist, but one must admit that Novak was extraordinarily discreet about his socialist beliefs in the years when he allegedly held them, compared to his frank confessions now that he has repented...

...Insofar as these can be documented at all, Novak leans heavily on the conference papers and favored authorities of the American Enterprise Institute, where he is a Resident Scholar, even as earlier he had relied uncritically on New Left sources...

...NOWHERE DOES Novak's rhetoric run roughshod over care-ful thinking so much as in the central concept of his book: democratic capitalism...

...According to that Michael Novak, a Christian could hardly "live in these United States and not protest with every fiber of his being against the militarization of American life, the appal-ling mediocrity of American imagination and sensibilities, and the heedlessness and irrationality of merely technological progress...

...Liberal principles had democratic im-plications...

...Perhaps it is too much to expect Novak to know things like this...

...Novak's early critique was of an entire society and its domi-nant consciousness...

...In the United States at the present time, the moment has clearly not arrived for armed revolution...

...Niebuhr's "only" was not bemoan-ing the fact that some greater number of socialists did not oppose dictatorship, but rather that the most genuine oppo-nents of dictatorship - the socialists - had been reduced to so few votes and so little power...

...Many hidden costs - selfishness, pollution, envy, international conflict, and aliena-tion - are lurking in the word 'productivity.' Productivity means thinking of the earth as a planet to be conquered and despoiled...

...Why should they believe that the scales suddenly fell from his eyes in the mid-seventies...

...Like Novak's other books, it abounds in vast gener-alizations - about America, about groups of people, about social structures...

...Yet if there is one thing almost totally lacking from Novak's argument it is any sense of history, better yet, any knowledge of history...

...NOVAK IS SO innocent of historical knowledge that he can stumble into appalling errors...

...I would like to consider this argument about democ-racy, pluralism, and the attitudes of religious critics toward capitalism and socialism in a separate article to be published in the February 11 Commonweal.icle to be published in the February 11 Commonweal...

...We even learn "its two favorite words...

...Yet for all its overwhelming presence, democratic capitalism, like most of Novak's notions, remains a mightily shifty phenomenon...

...the sincere eyes of the politician...

...Modern democracy has been built on this liberal heritage...

...A Christian theologian," wrote Novak in explanation of his own efforts, "does well to commit his life to such an enterprise...

...I mean liberalism...

...The centralization implicit in the pursuit of rational efficiency is monstrous...

...He quotes a passage from A Theology for Radical Politics in which he referred to "the hollowness of so much American life...

...Are they independent of each other, or mutually supporting, or in conflict...

...Michael Novak, opening sentence of Naked I Leave "The first of all moral obligations is to think clearly...

...At a time when debates about religion and public policy have grown intense, Novak, with an astonishing energy as well as a grasp of religious language and history uncommon in the political world, has established him-self as a kind of one-man battalion in what he calls a "war of ideas...

...the tired eyes of the men on the commuter train...

...Novak protested " 'modernization,' that is to say, the hegemony of economic power...

...Does their relationship remain the same throughout all stages of development...

...But why should readers be convinced that Novak's later views are any sounder than his earlier ones...

...In exactly the same fashion, the Anglo-American nativists pointed to a statistical association between free, tolerant institutions and Protestant and Northern European races, on the one hand, and between corrupt despotisms and Catholic Southern and East-ern European peoples, on the other...

...Most important, someone had to help the young generation of New Left activists to articulate their intuitive rebellion and "construct a new system of life in America...

...Nonetheless - this was now the beginning of the seventies - Novak characterized Maritain as "more 'New Left' than 'liberal.' " But by 1982, with Novak returning to something very much like that old hometown conservatism, Maritain was right along with him - the patron saint of democratic capitalism...

...Belgium had 60,000 voters out of 4.7 million inhabitants - and those were among the most "democratic" of states...

...But if Novak cannot be expected to know that every single available socialist vote was cast against dictatorial powers for Hitler, he cannot be expected to know that every single vote of the German parties representing capitalism - and of the Catholic party, too - was cast for Hitler's Enabling Act...

...Whatever its other flaws, no one can accuse it of not being provocative...

...The difficulty that faces any theoretician of "democratic capitalism" is obvious: Since the latter part of the nineteenth century, there has scarcely been an expression of democratic reform toward which most capitalist leaders were not, at best, indifferent or, more commonly, hostile...

...The Communist guard inspects the wheel-barrow, finds nothing being stolen...

...But Novak has also shifted in his description of what actu-ally transpires in the social system...

...It was Maritain who "provided for me an intellectual path for moving from the conservatism of my hometown" to the tough-minded "liberalism of John F. Kennedy...

...Horowitz is most likely not haunted by the image of the Michael Novak of A Theology for Radical Politics posed in white turtleneck and lovebeads, advocating a "revolution of consciousness" which would "reintroduce freedom into an industrial, technological state...

...If he had really held his earlier judgments so fiercely and firmly on such slight evidence, what confidence can readers have in his current opinions...

...Novak also wrote of "the anger, low morale, and alienation of our workingman.'' He wanted to see industry decentralized, factories and work schedules reintegrated into the patterns of neighborhood and school and family life...

...What they begrudge him is not so much that he has changed his mind - though, to be fair, his evolution would sit a lot better with many had it been, like Garry Wills's, from right to left rather than the opposite - but the way he has done it...

...Niebuhr then contrasts that success to the scene, fourteen years later, when the German Reichstag "abolished parliamentary government and initiated a dictatorship by an overwhelming vote with only 96 socialist votes recorded against the enabling act...

...Almost too methodically he sets out the principles of Niebuhrian theology and Rawlsian philosophy by which he proposes to evaluate the American economy...

...What purports to be a discussion of demo-cratic capitalism in general is for the most part a discussion of the United States alone, and even that with no reference to the specific history or conditions, other than "democratic capitalism" of course, that have shaped American society...

...Just as the values attached to key words in his vocabulary like realism and pragmatism have shifted without explanation, whole bodies of literature have dropped from his range of references, to be neither cited nor refuted, as though they ceased to have any factual value or compelling force now that they no longer coincide with his own position...

...It was not exactly a totalitarian dictatorship the nation was moving to-ward...

...More apt to describe this society as "technological" or "pragmatic" than as "capitalist," he saw it as progressively reducing the richness of experience under the pressure of functional rationality, the demands of spe-cialization and mass production, and the transformation of human relations and personality into commodities...

...Both Novak and the nativists are guilty of confusing histori-cal correlations with logical ones, but both are also bad, because ethnocentric, historians, Novak, for instance, shows no awareness of the stages or process by which capitalism was established in any nations other than Britain and the U.S...

...Freedom of belief and expression, freedom to organize in independent unions, guarantees of equal justice in the courts, minimums of well-being that secure a degree of political as well as economic independence for masses of citizens - has capitalist leader-ship been in the forefront of recent struggles for any of these things...

...The men around the President merged the corporate system with the Constitutional system...

...That is the radical defect of our technology, constructed as it is upon the ideology of power, objectivity, efficiency, and production...

...But the overall impression is of a forced case, one pumped up by flashy language and a sheer will to assertion...

...Is their simul-taneous presence merely fortuitous...

...One is a shift in values, in the norms by which he evaluates the surrounding social system...

...From about the middle of the nineteenth century, the link liberalism had provided between capitalist forces and demo-cratic ones was increasingly broken...

...Democratic capitalism, it seems, was "in-vented" by its "founding fathers" around the end of the eighteenth century, or rather it sprang, apparently fully-armed, from their Enlightenment brows...

...Each new cause is taken up with the same lack of restraint, the same sense that Michael Novak is the first to touch these shores, the same need to bolster his latest enthusiasm with the severest judgments on those whose outlook he had sympathetically portrayed not long before...

...None of Novak's rhapsodies here: The Ethic of Democratic Capitalism is sober and qualified...

...Niebuhr was indeed somewhat disillusioned with German socialism - but mainly because it had been so complacent about the likelihood of combining democracy and capitalism...

...It is a Protestant coun-try, stressing how each man must earn his own way, restrain himself, master himself . . . millions of squirrels shut up in millions of cages of their own fashioning...

...Several years later, in Choosing Our King, Novak remained unsparing toward the "adolescent American dream" and the economic structures that bolstered it...

...As for American life in general, Novak insisted that national maturity demanded that we rec-ognize our enthnocentricity...

...He launched a coruscat-ing attack on the cult of productivity...

...Novak's major explanation for his change of mind is that in his forties he finally got around to studying economics...

...Universal manhood suffrage did not come to most European nations until late in the nineteenth or early in the twentieth century...

...Even the reference points that do endure prove to be remark-ably malleable...

...The fact is that the vote of every socialist deputy - and most texts I have seen say ninety-four, not ninety-six - who had not already been jailed, forced into hiding, or driven to flee the country, was cast against Hitler's Enabling Act...

...Take that basic matter of the suffrage again...

...but it is this sheer facility for selectively emphasiz-ing different facets of a reality in order to make the necessary case of the moment that undermines Novak's credibility...

...My italics...

...Novak's personal history, too, seems subject to sudden revision...

...but liberal - and capitalist - self-interest dictated drawing the line far short of genuinely democratic govern-ment...

...Novak has never failed to invoke the blessing of Jacques Maritain, for instance, on every phase of his career...

...Though the question of employment of arms and open vio-lence must remain open," he wrote, "it does not follow that violence is the only or even the ordinary method of the rev-olutionary...

...Those who have observed the succes-sive phases of Novak's evolution are all too tempted to greet his latest performance as defender and explicator of "demo-cratic capitalism" with more than a little cynicism...

...Universal male suffrage was not established until after World War I, female suffrage after World War II...

...the efficient eyes of the professor and the manager...

...our self-deceiving optimism and desperate pursuit of happi-ness...

...indeed, if anything, the economic institutions are in thrall to the cultural.Where once he found the forces of the economy in conflict with family life, now he sees family and capitalism linked in an ultimately supportive tension...

...In the post-1870 Kingdom of Italy (which the popes had before their eyes), no more than one or two percent of the population could vote before 1882, seven percent until 1913...

...The April, 1933 article by Niebuhr which Novak cites here actually begins by describing the dominant socialist role in the establishment of the Weimar republic...

...A 1978 survey by Fortune showed that nine percent of the chief executives of American industry reported coming from poor families, and "some . .. may be suspected of a little romanticizing...

...In the later industrial powers like Germany and Japan, capitalism was introduced by bureaucrats and aristocrats as much as by the bourgeoisie...

...Still, Novak's mea culpa subtly misrepresents his own think-ing here, as he does that of many others...

...Novak offers some pertinent criticism of popular writing on Latin American poverty, but his general argument about Latin American development simply skirts all confrontation with opposing theories of any sophistication...

...From the first he admits that by "democratic capitalism" - a phrase he attri-butes to Novak- he only means "the American political economy," and that other terms like "liberal capitalism" of "social market capitalism" might have done as well...

...But then again there are men (Novak and I are both examples) who are at once tall and balding - without that fact justifying a concept such as "tall baldingism...

...He was as hard on the professors and mana-gers as on the stereotypical TV-watching beer-drinker...

...To dismiss him out of hand or to attribute his changing opinions to fashion or opportunism is not only unfair, it suggests to his newest audience that Novak's critics have only ad hominem complaints to sustain them...

...Of Novak's neophyte status in this subject there can be no doubt - his book shows not even passing familiarity with opposing viewpoints at any sophisticated level - but why, exactly, should this be a recommendation of his new-found truth to others...

...Democratic capitalism" is Michael Novak's wheelbar-row...

...Where once he saw cultural institutions in the thrall of economic and political power, now he sees them as vigorously independent...

...in 1774, two years before democratic capitalism was invented by Adam Smith - or Michael Novak - the American per capita GNP was already twice the 1974 figure for nations with about one-third of the world's population and at the top of the modern range for nations with another third of the world's population...

...Whenever something beneficial is attributed to capitalism, e.g., the material progress of Europe since 1800, it is attrib-uted to democratic capitalism, quite regardless of whether democracy was involved at all...

...This unanimous vote was cast in the face of Hitler's vitriolic denunciations and at considerable personal risk...

...This is the intellectual equivalent of three-card monte...

...There is a real historical link between capitalism and democracy, but it is by way of a third "ism" which, for some reason, Novak has preferred not to name...

...It was rather the controlled efficiency of the Chase Manhattan Bank, IBM, Exxon, and General Motors...

...Which, it seems, would be a more relevant topic of concern for an advocate of democratic capitalism to reflect upon...

...What our experts (and ideologies) have done is to deprive the workingman of art...

...It is in no way a tightly argued, thoroughly documented book that contains within itself all the necessary justification for its author's conclu-sions...

...Capitalist prod-uctivity, efficiency, and economic rationality are conducive to virtue and self-government...

...and our dream of solitary, individualist self-fulfillment.' 'There are excellences in Amer-ican culture . .. but against the rush of money and celebrity and conglomerated industries, these sources of excellence find survival difficult...

...After all, he can define democratic capitalism by referring to "social systems like those of the United States, West Germany, and Japan" with-out reflecting on the fact that two out of three of his leading illustrations existed as decidely undemocratic capitalist socie-ties for a longer period of time than as democratic ones, and that they settled into democracy only after being militarily conquered and occupied by the third...

...It becomes the subject of active verbs, is even personified: "Democratic capitalism . . . glories in di-vergence...

...Clearly there are nations that, at the same time, are more or less democratic and more or less capitalist...

...That this needn't have been so is demonstrated by a simi-larly titled book, The Ethic of Democratic Capitalism (For-tress, $10.95, 286 pp...

...At one point in The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, repeating the familiar charge that intellectuals disdain ordinary people and the polyester, fast-food, gas-guzzler tastes which the market and "consumerism" serve, Novak admits that he, too, "once uncritically accepted these conventions...

...one is reminded of the Heraclitian roots of Greek sophistry...

...What is more, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (Simon and Schus-ter, $17.50, 434 pp...

...It seems too easy to dispose of the matter with the explanation he had not "looked more closely at my neighbors and companions" but had been taken in by "literary conven-tions...

...The United Kingdom granted the right to vote to approximately one mil-lion property-owners out of a population of 27.5 million...

...In the older capitalist regimes, liberals often turned sharply against democracy...

...It is not too much to say that The Spirit of Democratic-Capitalism marks the intellectual, if not the social, assimila-tion of Michael Novak into the world and worldview he had previously identified with the WASP establishment and the corporate, professional, and intellectual managers of both left and right...

...Unlike Novak, he sets forth these adversaries' positions di-rectly and carefully, fully indicating the divisions of expert opinion and stating his own conclusions firmly but modestly...

...Novak's use of evidence does less to ex-plain than to illustrate or reflect his changed standpoint...

...The Nixonian concep-tion of politics, he wrote, was modeled on the managerial efficiency of the corporation...

...the vacant eyes watching television and drinking beer...

...Horowitz have an advantage in reading Michael Novak...

...Recall the old joke about the worker who exits from his Eastern European plant each evening push-ing a wheelbarrow...

...Yet both books develop common themes...

...Germany, at the time Max Weber wrote The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, maintained a complicated voting system that ef-fectively blocked universal suffrage...

...Now such notions are taken at face value and honored...

...the word suggests a degree of regularity, rationality, and purposefulness belied by history...

...It instructs na-tions . . . awakens individuals...

...Quite the contrary: it was nurturing and accommodat-ing...

...our shoddy quest for superlatives...

...Is one the cause of the other...

...millions of squirrels biting their way out of the millions of cages constructed inside them...

...There are many subjective judgments about social phenomena that are plausi-ble and even eloquent, especially if one forgets the author's earlier plausible and eloquent judgments to the contrary...

...Naturally, A Theology for Radical Politics, written under the influence of the New Left and in the heat of conflict over the war in Vietnam, was most unrestrained with this kind of condemnation...

...Though his footnotes are far sparser than Novak's, he displays a much more serious grasp of the Marxist and Keynesian theorists he would dispute...

...indeed, the more I read him, the more I understand it...

...These turn out to be "new" and "im-proved," as in, I suppose, "new, improved, long-lasting Sudso...

...Only an abysmal ignorance of modern history, combined perhaps with a prejudice that assumes socialists are acquies-cent toward dictatorship, could lead someone to so mis-construe Niebuhr's meaning...

...They both main-tain that American pluralism is positively served by American capitalism, and they both make this argument against the background of criticism emanating from religious activists who are increasingly attracted by some form of democratic socialism...

...The forces creating this desiccated consciousness were coming to dominate every part of life...

...Is one the necessary cause of the other...

...No one should doubt Novak's ability to explain how this "conservatism of my hometown'' and this' 'tradition of Chris-tian socialism in which I was reared'' were really one and the same thing...

...Things had reached such a point in America that Novak even toyed with the idea of armed revolution, only to reject it as much on tactical grounds as on any others...

...do not know who they are . . . are violent because they secretly resent the lies they are forced to live...

...What was at stake in the early months of the second Nixon administration . . . was the supplanting of the nation's fundamental symbolic form, em-bedded in the Constitutional 'system,' by a new symbolic form, that of the high-technology corporation...

...Riots in the cities may well be a foretaste of what is ahead, and those who serve now in the army may one day be grateful to have learned military skills...

...We are informed that "not long ago," the U.S...

...All is flux, nothing is stationary...

...The natural logic of capitalism leads to democracy...