MICHAEL NOVAK’S SPIRIT OF DEMOCRATIC CAPITALISM VERSUS THE SPIRIT OF CATHOLICISM. CRITICAL EVALUATION
MICHAEL NOVAK’S SPIRIT OF DEMOCRATIC CAPITALISM VERSUS THE SPIRIT OF CATHOLICISM. CRITICAL EVALUATION

Summary/Abstract: In his iconic book The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, Novak, among other things, complainsthat for the past centuries the Catholic Church has not revealed its intention to cooperate withthe emerging, mainly in Britain and the United States, ‘new spirit of capitalism’ – following Adam Smith’s work published in 1776, entitled An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealthof Nations. Above all, the Catholic Church was said, Novak writes, to have failed to understandthese moral and cultural roots of the New Economy and doctrinally (in many papal documents)even sought to ‘extinguish the freshly lit fire’ of civilisational change. Novak writes that the Church,while remaining on the outside, did not offer encouragement; tied to the past, it did not bless thenew order with the same combination of critical distance and benevolent hope that the feudalsystem, guilds and urban organisations of medieval Europe once inspired. It was not until JohnPaul II was the first of the Popes, in his encyclical ‘Laborem exercens’ (1981) – published on theninetieth anniversary of Leo XIII’s ‘Rerum novarum’ – to emphasise ‘the creativity of modernwork through the use of theological symbols of the Creator and His creation’. In doing so, he took,in Novak’s view, a huge step into the tradition of John Locke and Adam Smith and more recentdemocratic capitalism.In the six aspects analysed, the article seeks to demonstrate whether there is indeed anyrecognisable convergence between the ‘spirit of democratic capitalism’ and the ‘spirit of Catholicism’,or whether there is a gulf between them? Using a comparative method between the two aforementionedconceptions of ‘spirit’ (the method of scientific synthesis), the article thus aims to attempt to answerthe above question. The original comparison between the ‘spirit of capitalism’ and the ‘spiritof Catholicism’ contained in the text may also prove useful for engaging in an interdisciplinarydiscussion on the meaningfulness and desirability of economic globalisation.

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