Dogmatism of the Right

...Novak then launches into a lengthy discourse on how individuals are inevitably unequal in talent and on the possible benefit to society of some economic inequalities, as if Hampshire had argued the contrary...

...Michael Novak was the author of one of the declarations...

...Novak is well aware that the Democratic Socialists he chooses to cite—R.H...

...Moreover, since the values of Democratic Socialists are so often indistinguishable from the ones Novak claims for Democratic Capitalism, Novak is driven to blatant distortions of his opponents' plain words...

...According to Novak, Democratic Capitalism is infinitely flexible and adaptable, while retaining its basic values and identity...

...hence his concern with Democratic Capitalism's "spirit," rather than simply with its humdrum and blemished reality...

...Except for Christian theologians—Novak holds degrees in theology and religious studies—the contemporary authorities here are mostly prominent social scientists who write for a wide intellectual public (people like Thomas Sowell, John Kenneth Galbraith and Daniel Bell...

...Although the samples I was shown were obviously more intellectually astute than the usual corporate institutional advertising, I responded that the sponsorship and the much-publicized identity of the spokesmen as "neoconservatives" associated with the Reagan Administration guaranteed that the whole thing would at the very least be taken with a liberal helping of salt (or perhaps a helping of liberal salt...

...I took it that way, despite my fancying myself as less of a "kneejerk Leftwinger" than many others in my field...

...In any case, Novak himself does not seem to be free of envy...

...For example, he quotes the British philosopher Stuart Hampshire as stating that for him socialism is a moral injunction against "great inequalities of wealth between different social groups...

...These attributes are contrasted with the tyranny and economic backwardness of existing Communist states...

...The author acknowledges the help of others in assembling "vast quantities of materials," there are 51 pages of notes, and the text is full of quotations from past and present authors...

...But no matter...

...The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, described on the title page as an "American Enterprise Institute Publication," reads like a spin-off from that project (whose fate I don't know, because I only read most of the targeted magazines in dentists' offices or airplanes and I haven't been in either recently...

...Tawney, the young Reinhold Niebuhr, Michael Harrington, Irving Howe, and others?have always insisted on the qualifying adjective precisely to repudiate the totalitarian reality of state socialism...

...There is an odd resemblance between Novak's argument and that of the most dogmatic Marxist...

...Reviewed by Dennis H. Wrong Professor of Sociology, New York University IT IS NOT clear for what audience this book is intended...

...The latter asserts that the progressive income tax, expanding welfare entitlements and, for that matter, the very extension of the suffrage that constitutes full political democracy are mere palliatives, granted from above by the capitalist ruling class in order to stave off a socialist revolution...

...To Novak, these reforms were always "latent" in the "practice" of the system and therefore attest to its inherent benevolence...

...Novak finds it "astonishing" when Michael Walzer, a "sophisticated" Democratic Socialist, endorses the "bourgeois values" of, inter alia, freedom, equality, work, authority, and property, as if most Socialists (including Marx and Engels) had not always contended that the goal of socialism was to complete the "bourgeois revolution" by making its achievements accessible to everyone...

...But does Novak disagree with Browning that "a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for...

...The brevity and assertiveness of some of Novak's chapters suggest their origins as manifestoes for the educated masses...

...The result of his hunger to articulate his conservative impulses in the form of an ideology—nay, a theology?is a synergistic concoction...

...Still, the object of Novak's praise is scarcely separable from American society as constituted at present, and he frequently indulges in long eulogies interspersed with scatter-shot statistics on the success of capitalism in conquering disease and abject poverty, lengthening life expectancy and improving everyone's standard of living...

...He also knows there were Democratic Socialists long before the Russian Revolution, even in the Russian Social Democratic Party itself where they were known as Mensheviks...

...At first, the author does not seem the sort of conservative who is content to point at what exists and bow respectfully or reverentially...

...Novak makes the preposterous claim that the "invention of the market" has made it possible for Western civilization to "triumph over envy...

...By elevating the term to the level of principle and creed, Novak is able to claim for it a commitment to all the virtues of both democracy and capitalism: freedom, pluralism, religious tolerance, the rule of law, productivity, technical progress, just about everything that is good, true and beautiful...

...Neither position gives any weight to the fierce political struggles that had to be waged to achieve these modifications in the face of the anti-statist bias of "pure" capitalism...

...I was asked whether I, an academic social scientist, might be impressed by these utterances, and whether I thought my colleagues might be...

...The gains so far won have, to be sure, fallen far short of the full realization of their ideals...

...Reading this volume, I recalled being interviewed last winter by someone from a public opinion and market research firm about a proposed project of the American Enterprise Institute and various corporations that would place in mass circulation magazines statements by prominent intellectuals extolling democracy, free enterprise and America...

...As for inventing the market, the great contemporary French historian Fernand Brau-del has remarked that the best thing about capitalism is that nobody invented it...

...He neglects to note that Tocqueville came to exactly the opposite conclusion...

...the citations from older texts are invariably from the best known works of certified great names (Adam Smith on the market, James Madison on interest groups, Alexis de Tocque-ville on America, Max Weber on the Protestant ethic...

...Even in the United States, the battles were often fought under the leadership of Democratic Socialists or Social Democrats who were rarely committed to total revolutionary transformation, let alone to the Soviet model...

...Yet these are no more than the simulacra of learning and scholarship...

...In fact, he often uses Democratic Capitalism as a portmanteau descriptive label for the industrial societies of the West...

...This is merely one instance of the sort of specious polemics abundant in the book...

...He concludes his book with the rather plaintive justification that "if it is legitimate for socialists to dream and to state their ideals, it is also legitimate for Democratic Capitalists to dream and to state our ideals...

...Democratic Socialism, by contrast, though an objective rather than an established order of things, can never stand for anything other than rigid dedication to the concentration of all power in a monolithic state, a command economy dispensing entirely with market mechanisms (he never mentions Yugoslavia), and a drive toward leveling that denies individual differences and destroys moral responsibility...

...He wants to propound and affirm an ideal, even a doctrine...