Michael Novak

From the beginning of his papacy in 1939 until well after his death in 1958, Pope Pius XII was honored with unfeigned warmth by Jewish leaders around the world. Golda Meir was uncommonly effusive in her praise of him. Trees were planted in Israel in his honor. In 1955, the Israeli Philharmonic . . . . Continue Reading »

The collapse of communism in 1989 was one of the greatest events of human history—one of the most sudden, unexpected, dramatic, and utterly transformative. We are too close to it to be certain how to read it. Yet one characteristic of communism proved to be decisive—its particular form of . . . . Continue Reading »

Human Dignity, Human Rights Michael Novak Copyright (c) 1999 First Things 97 (November 1999): 39-42. Fifty years ago, a tangle of intellectual and diplomatic puzzles blocked the world from agreeing on a universal code of human rights. In the years 1945-1948 the world was emerging only slowly from . . . . Continue Reading »

On March 19, 1998, the young social historian Eugene McCarraher delivered a portion of his doctoral thesis as a lecture at the Cushwa Center of the University of Notre Dame. His subject was Michael Novak, “The Technopolitan Catholic.” Though the lecture was highly critical of . . . . Continue Reading »

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor By David S. Landes. Norton 650 pages, $30 The irony of this major study of economic development is that its author writes as a complacent secularist and yet his fundamental thesis is theological. One can see this by comparing . . . . Continue Reading »

For more than a century now economics has been advanced and practiced as a science, on the model of physics and mathematics. It was not always so. From Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and the Causes of the Wealth of Nations in 1776 until well after the publication of John Stuart Mill’s . . . . Continue Reading »

Some time ago, I wrote an essay claiming St. Thomas as the first Whig, one of the founders of “the party of liberty.” One antecedent to this claim comes in the essays of Lord Acton on the origins of the idea of liberty, and other antecedents in the political writings of Jacques Maritain, Thomas . . . . Continue Reading »

It is all very curious. Once it became clear that the Republicans had won power on November 8, 1994, it took only seven days for the serious thinkers in the liberal press to rediscover the issue of poverty. “Scapegoat Time,” wrote Bob Herbert of the New York Times , while Anna Quindlen . . . . Continue Reading »

This essay is adapted from an address presented by Mr. Novak at Westminster Abbey on May 5, 1994. He is the twenty-fourth recipient of The Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion . As we draw near the close of the twentieth century, we owe ourselves a reckoning. This century was history’s . . . . Continue Reading »

Adam Smith in His Time and Ours: Designing the Decent Society by Jerry Z. Muller Free Press, 272 pages, $22.95 A good work of intellectual history should exemplify two qualities above all: an imagination that allows the author to “pass over” into the horizon of his subject in order to . . . . Continue Reading »