Well-Worn Whig.

The Universal Hunger for Liberty

A Surprising Look Ahead at the Politics, Economics, and Culture of the Twenty-First Century

Michael Novak

Basic Books, $26, 304 pp.

Michael Novak is, he claims several times in this book, a Whig. It's a label he prefers to "conservative" or "neoconservative," terms more often and naturally applied to him. He is best known, after all, for his thoughtful, intelligent, and often deeply theological defenses of capitalism and of the American experiment against their cultured despisers, and this work places him firmly in the neoconservative camp. But the appellation "Whig" is carefully chosen and entirely appropriate, for what Novak offers in this book is as fine an instance of Whig history and prognostication as you're likely to find.

Whether this is a compliment depends on your tastes in history and theology. The term "Whig history" was coined by the English historian Herbert Butterfield in the 1930s to describe those who, with relentless optimism, narrated history as an ever-upward story of progress, pointing to and perhaps even culminating in the glories of the British Empire. Novak, of course, doesn't think that the British Empire is history's high point; but he does think America is, and he thinks, too, that it is in America that Catholicism is coming to its ripest and fullest self-understanding. In this book he tells us why, and imagines, too, what the future may be like if things go as well as he thinks they will, a future that he labels with the term "Caritapolis" (mixing Latin and Greek), the city of love.

The vision he offers is an optimistic, thoughtful, deeply Catholic one, and in many ways wise and winsome. It is ordered around the idea of liberty, and this conceptual thread is woven on three spools: Islam, Catholicism, America. In the book's first part, "The Culture of Liberty," Novak sketches the emergence of a distinctively Western idea of liberty through the legacy of Aristotle as mediated by Muslims, Jews, and Christians in the medieval period. This idea issued eventually in a God-grounded free society, democratically republican in polity, capitalist in economy, and peopled by an energetic, self-disciplined, and inventive citizenry. It issued, in other words, in America--not the actual America that I now live in nor an America that anyone has ever lived in, but rather an America idealized and abstracted from the vision of the founders as expressed in the Constitution.

The book's second part, "The Economics of Liberty," argues that a broadly capitalist economics is necessary for liberty's maintenance. Only capitalism, based upon private property and a high (but to Novak accurate) view of human ingenuity and inventiveness, can draw upon human capital in such a way as to remove conditions of scarcity and foster the moral qualities needed by a free citizenry. Novak makes much here, as he has in other works, of the material and cultural successes of those countries that have recently adopted capitalism (for example, South Korea) in comparison with those that have remained socialist (for example, North Korea). He emphasizes, too, the importance of the conceptual and practical links between democracy and capitalism, and the contributions that the Catholic Church's social and anthropological teaching might make to educating people about these matters.

The book's third part, "The Politics of Liberty," turns to the question of religion's relation to this ideal capitalist-democratic political order, taking Catholicism and Islam as the main examples. Especially valuable here is Novak's review of the complicated process by which the Catholic Church has come and is coming to terms with democracy, and his discussion of the recent (late 1990s) contributions of the Pontifical Academy of the Social Sciences to this process. Novak gives considerable space to this question because he would like the church to devote more energy than it does to teaching Catholics the merits of democratic capitalism. This, more than anything else, he thinks, will hasten the coming of Caritapolis. His discussion of the relations of the varieties of Islam to democracy is less good, tending toward superficiality and condescension: the good Muslims, for him, are those whose thought approximates his own, and he regrets that there aren't more of them. Nonetheless, Novak should be given full credit for seeing clearly the importance of this issue, and for attempting analysis of it. He is certainly right that Muslims and Catholics, together numbering about 2.5 billion or about 40 percent of the world's population, will determine between them the world's political and economic future.

Most of what Novak says in this book is true. Countries that have taken the capitalist route in the last forty years have done economically much better than those that have not; property ownership does provide motivations and rewards that engage much that is very good about human beings; the poorest Americans are much better off in income and access to basic necessities than the poor in other countries; and there are good Catholic reasons for actively supporting some parts of the American experiment. It is impossible not to admire Novak's warmheartedness and energy in advocating programs in economics and politics that embrace these truths. But he is just as good at ignoring truths inconvenient to his vision of Caritapolis as he is at advocating those that conform to it, and in this he shows the characteristic vice of Whigs: they, like blinkered horses, look in only one direction, straight forward, following the upward track of progress with future-fixated eyes. What they see is there; but the fact that they don't look sideways means that they ignore the bodies and the beggars by the side of the road, and these are every bit as real as what they do see. The result is a true picture, but one so partial as to be deeply misleading.

For example: Novak accurately contrasts the economic condition of the poor and middle classes in the United States favorably with that of the same groups in most (perhaps all) non- or antidemocratic Islamic countries. But he does not note that the United States imprisons a higher proportion of its citizens than almost any other country--certainly--for example, Egypt, Iran, Morocco, Pakistan, or Indonesia. He does not note that the rate of violent deaths in America far exceeds that in most other countries not currently at war--and exceeds that of many that are. (It is salutary to note that the number of Americans violently killed so far this year in Chicago, where I live, is only slightly smaller than the number of Americans killed in Iraq during the same period). He does not note that violence (rape, beating, murder) against women is more widespread and systematic in the United States than in, say, Saudi Arabia. And so on. I don't mean that these facts are susceptible to easy interpretation. But failing to note and account for them is strange for someone who claims that his wholehearted commendation of the American experiment to Catholics and to the world at large is hardheadedly based on facts.

Are the American horrors I've mentioned (and there are many more) intrinsic or incidental to the American experiment in particular and to capitalist democracies in general? I suspect they're intrinsic. Novak, I'm sure, would say they're incidental. Whatever the truth of this, the horrors that Novak fails to address loom very large for non-Americans, especially for those on the receiving end of current U.S. efforts to export our politics and economics. The United States has a culture, too, and it is one that includes the crass, the materialistic, the sexist, and the violent. It will be (is being) exported along with the capitalism and democracy lauded by Novak. To ignore this does Novak's larger argument no service.

Paul J. Griffiths is Schmitt Professor of Catholic Studies and chair of the Department of Classics Mediterranean Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago. His most recent book, Lying: An Augustinian Theology of Duplicity (Brazos Press), is reviewed on page 36.