Business as a Calling: Work and the Examined Life.

The market "may have its martyrdoms as well as the pulpit, and trade its heroisms as well as war," John Ruskin wrote well over a century ago in Unto This Last. Yet Ruskin went on to argue that, by making profit the over-tiding principle of enterprise, capitalism made martyrdom and heroism impossible. To the contrary, Michael Novak asserts in his new book that capitalism is heroic by its very nature. When properly pursued as a "calling," business opens the gates of heaven to the entrepreneur and may just slide the camel through the needle's eye.

Small enough to be easily portable in briefcases, Business as a Calling is a breviary for the information age, complete with anecdotes, adages, success stories, and corporate credos. (Indeed, Novak proudly aligns his book on a shelf of contemporary success literature that contains The Reflective Executive and The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People.) Having already christened American capitalism in his previous books, Novak celebrates the wizards of postindustrial affluence - CEO's, chairpersons of the board, managers, and technicians, all of them daring and "creative" - in chapters on business morality, virtue, "corporate responsibility," and philanthropy.

Taking issue both with his usual suspects in the "new class" of academics, journalists, and liberal do-gooders, and with many entrepreneurial partisans, Novak asserts that business involves much more than the accumulation of wealth. The Novakian capitalist is a bold, generous, even saintly pioneer who lives out an "inner vision" and a "sharing of values" with workers, customers, colleagues, and "the world in the largest possible definition." (In fact, Novak writes, businesspeople "remain very close to other ordinary Americans.") Fired by a love of work, determined to improve the world, and emboldened to risk, the businessperson builds community, unlocks creativity, and exhibits a "practical realism" that almost invariably respects the inscrutable ways of Providence. (Businesspeople, Novak contends, are among the most religious elites in America, along with athletes and generals.) The entrepreneur answers a call to uplift the poor, promote human tights, foster civic virtue, and endow cultural institutions. "Capitalism is not solely about the individual. It is about a creative form of community."

Andrew Carnegie serves as Novak's model capitalist. Yes, Novak concedes, Carnegie secretly supported the brutal suppression of the Homestead strike in 1892. But in doing so he flouted every principle of fair dealing and philanthropy he had ever espoused, and these, Novak argues, constitute the real core of business life. Citing Carnegie's autobiography and his essay on "Wealth," Novak lauds both the steel baron's lucrative creation of new technologies and enterprises and his "giving it all away" in support of libraries, schools, music halls, and parks.

Always a romantic, Novak once again demonstrates that his romanticism inspires both his virtues and his faults. Reflecting on the union of goodness and beauty called kalos, he reminds us that virtue can be aesthetically as well as spiritually graceful. Indeed, Novak recognizes the sacramental character of material reality - a conviction that he rightly argues should inform any Christian approach to the problems of work, technology, and economics.

Yet Novak remains so mesmerized by the achievements and glitter of capitalism that he misses its harsher contradictions and mundane foundations. "Commerce does not require that we have physical or emotional contact with all with whom we do business," he declares. And for good reason: personal contact might acquaint us with some of the appalling practices that sustain our prosperity. As Novak himself admits, Carnegie fled to Scotland rather than watch the Pennsylvania state militia render Homestead safe for philanthropy. Kathy Lee Gifford shed many an outraged tear about Guatemalan sweatshops; Michael Eisner has yet to acknowledge the conditions of Honduran children "creating" Disney products. In both cases, press releases and generous checks papered over business as usual in the underdeveloped world. The testimonies of workers expose the corporate credos cited by Novak for the rhetorical smoke they usually are.

Content to wander in this fog, Novak never interrogates the credos, never ventures outside the executive suite, and thus seems to parrot the ideological lexicon of corporate culture. By casting the firm as a "community," for instance, Novak artfully obscures the power relations inevitably at work. Most Americans who "work in business" are not the shiny, happy people of Novakland; they sit in cubicles, stand at assembly lines, sweat in kitchens, scour toilets, or wait on tables for the low wages and precarious benefits provided by the "creative" types. (And by the way, unionized workers are slightly more religious than business elites, even by Novak's dubious standards: look carefully at the chart on page 44.) Indeed, Scott Adams's Dilbert cartoons convey the feel of contemporary work life much more reliably than Novak's virtually company-store populism. Let's pray that people don't become the creepily devoted worker-bees idealized in "total quality management" or the folklore of Wal-Mart.

Or take "creativity," another keyword. Anyone acquainted with the history of labor and technology knows that capitalists (like Novak's hero, Carnegie) wrested the power to design and produce goods and services away from artisans and workers and gave it to a small class of professional, technical, and managerial elites. True, inventors and craftsmen often don't possess the organizational skills needed for marketing goods in a modern economy. But Novak's hosannas to "creativity" drown out the noisy historical struggles of ordinary people against the expropriation of their knowledge and skill. "Creativity" has become, not the widespread exercise of craft, but an advertising charm used both to grace such "innovations" as turbo-charged tie racks or to announce "revolutions" in coffee-drinking.

And as for the necessity of "practical realism," there are three points worth making. The first - a banal but still worthwhile point - is that the "realism" of business is that of the ledger book. Second, the "leftish sentiments" of many intellectuals such as Paul Tillich or R. H. Tawney were earned, not at wine and cheese parties, but in direct experience of working-class poverty and imperialist oppression. Third, capitalism depends crucially on the stimulation and commodification of desire and fantasy. Novak can wag his finger all he wants at advertisers who wage "assaults on traditional values." But that ole-time religion doesn't sell beer, cars, or cruise vacations. The true nihilists of our time are not "new class" mandarins but corporate chieftains who beckon us (as their advertising slogans suggest) to break the rules, find your own road, and enjoy a life without limits where you'll be your own rock and know no boundaries.

"Wealth," Ruskin declared, "is the possession of the valuable by the valiant." Capitalism, in Ruskin's view, guaranteed little more than the possession of material abundance by the few.

Eugene McCarraher teaches American history at the University of Delaware. He is completing a study of liberal Protestant and Roman Catholic social thought and cultural criticism in the twentieth century.