Michael Novak

Intelligence as a Principle of Public Economy offers the best expression of the life and thought of the nineteenth-century Italian political economist Carlo Cattaneo. Available here for the first time in English, this volume showcases pensiero come principio d'economia publica, Cattaneo's pioneering vision of economic growth that emphasized the central role of intelligence and will in economic processes, the value of knowledge and innovation, and the importance of liberty. This classic of Italian thought is framed by a long biographical sketch of Cattaneo's life before, during, and after the Italian Risorgimento and an afterword that demonstrates the continuing relevance of Cattaneo's social, political, and economic ideas to today's ongoing debate about the importance of a free society.

Hannah Arendt wrote that America was the greatest adventure of European man. Times have changed and stale anti-American sentiment flowing west from the European continent has replaced the flood of Europeans crossing the Atlantic in search of the American Dream. In Olof Murelius, one encounters a European observer who grasps what so many Europeans now miss, the adventure that is still America. Don't Play Away Your Cards, Uncle Sam is a spirited account of the growth of a nation. Murelius's work cuts a broad swathe through American history from the Founding Fathers to Bill Clinton, accentuating America's many and varied accomplishments. It is a gloriously unapologetic battle cry to America to cast off any lingering national self-doubt and will delight readers seeking a conversation with the best of Old Europe about the American "way of life."

Michael Novak's eyewitness report on the second and pivotal session of Vatican II in 1964 vividly inter weaves pageantry, politics, and theology. An unusually well-informed lay intellectual, who had earned a theological degree just before the Council, Novak applauded the purposes of Pope John XXIII and his successor Paul VI-"to throw open the windows of the church." In this report, he coined the classic description of the foes of the reforms at Vatican II as the party of "nonhistorical orthodoxy," emphasizing the eternal and unchanging, neglecting history and contingency. The author recounts many moments of high drama-Pope Paul VI's opening speech, the vote on the collegiality of bishops, the plea of Cardinal Bea on behalf of the chapter on Jews, and Bishop De Smedt's defense of religious freedom. His colorful chapter on the American bishops in 1964 serves as a fascinating benchmark, as do his many insights into the new role of the laity. His final chapter is a moving tribute to the Open Church engaging the contemporary world, and his new introduction brings this report up to date. This work will be of compelling interest to those interested in the post-conciliar fall of Communism, under the great John Paul II-who took his name from his two predecessors at Vatican II. The winner of the million-dollar Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion (1994), Michael Novak is a theologian, author, and former U.S. ambassador. He currently holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. where he is director of social and political studies. His writings have appeared in every major Western language, and in Chinese, Bengali, Korean, and Japanese. Also available from Transaction are his Catholic Social Thought and Liberal Institutions, The Experience of Nothingness, The Guns of Lattimer, Unmeltable Ethnics, Belief and Unbelief, and Choosing Presidents.

A Free Society Reader rises to the challenge of freedom in the twenty-first century, offering thoughts and insights with significant implications for citizens of today's brand new world. Our era's most prominent figures in the fields of Christianity and liberty speak about Pope John Paul II's vision of a free society, conceptualize Christianity and political economy, debate issues of democracy and the free society, and question the role of culture. Together for the first time in one volume, these preeminent thinkers provide inspiration and insight to scholars, students, and general readers charting the enormous changes the new millennium has seen.

Each of the seven DVDs in this series, represents one of a series of seven lectures sponsored in 1999 by Liberty Fund and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago in celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Friedrich von Hayek's birth. Approximate running time: 79 minutes.

Hailed as a new classic in faith exploration, this remarkable book offers a rare chance to eavesdrop on a conversation between a believing father and a skeptical daughter about God, faith, and morals. World-renowned theologian Michael Novak accepts a unique challenge when his twentysomething daughter Jana sends him a long fax filled with practical questions about life and religion. His answers -- warm, wise, and unfaltering -- serve as guideposts to faith at a critical time in his daughter's life. For her part, Jana is not interested in a scholarly essay but in straight and honest replies; she challenges what she doesn't understand, and she never hesitates to bat back an answer she doesn't like. The result is a lively, thought-provoking dialogue that addresses the concerns of Jana's generation while also taking on the questions of the ages -- from the purpose of religion in our lives, to how "good" must a Christian be, to the problems of suffering, compassion, and the existence of God. Enacting as it does the difficult passing on of a noble tradition, Tell Me Why offers an illuminating path for anyone searching to embrace or deepen their faith.

Few writers have covered the intellectual terrain traversed by Michael Novak, who has written on theology, philosophy, political economy, and business theory. This book brings together many of Novak's crucial essays on "moral ecology": the ethos that must be cultivated and preserved if liberal democratic societies are to survive. Novak argues in defense of the free and virtuous society by examining the family, welfare reform, free markets, self-government, and the American founding. A series of remarkable intellectual studies on figures such as Jacques Maritain, St. Thomas Aquinas, and John Courtney Murray, along with an autobiographical essay by Novak and an introduction by Brian C. Anderson, complete On Cultivating Liberty, an indispensable book for anyone concerned about the future of the democratic project as we enter the third millennium.

Many Americans today consider the corporation to be the number one public enemy. Downsizing, corporate greed, an exclusive focus on the needs of shareholders at the expense of workers—the list of complaints from the left and right is long and growing. In this penetrating and insightful book, Michael Novak, regarded by some as America's foremost social thinker, and author of such internationally acclaimed bestsellers as The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism and Business as a Calling, argues that these critics ask the corporation to be something it is not, and they overlook the functions that it performs best—the cultivation of civil society, the fortification of democracy, and the elevation of the poor. Borrowing a phrase from Abraham Lincoln, Novak shows how the corporation weds "the fire of invention" to the "fuel of interest" to generate a creative, dynamic, and civic-minded citizenry. The Fire of Invention examines and illuminates many crucial debates: What is the purpose of the corporation? How should a corporation be governed? How much corporate independence from government regulation is desirable? How can businesses prepare for the complex economic and ethical challenges of the next century? This important book will fundamentally change the way Americans think about big business.

In The Experience of Nothingness, Michael Novak has two objectives. First, he shows the paths by which the experience of nothingness is becoming common among all those who live in free societies. Second, he details the various experiences that lead to the nothingness point of view. Most discussions of these matters have been so implicated in the European experience that the term "nihilism" has a European ring. Novak, however, articulates this experience of formlessness in an American context.In his new introduction, the author lists four requirements that must be met by an individual in order for the experience of nothingness to emerge: a commitment to honesty, a commitment to courage, recognition of how widespread the experience of nothingness is, and a virtue of will. Novak writes that these principles are what guide self-described philosophical nihilists. But many people simply borrow the nihilistic conclusions without observing the moral commitments to them. For this reason Novak believes that nihilism is fraudulent as a theory intended to explain the experience of nothingness. Nihilism in practice, he maintains, often results in a form of intolerance. The Experience of Nothingness is a work that will cause many scholars to rethink their beliefs. It should be read by philosophers, theologians, sociologists, political theorists, and cultural historians.

Two achievementsup the poor and animating civil societyare powerful moral claims for business corporations but schemes for corporate governance jeopardize these achievements.

On September 10, 1897, in the hamlet of Lattimer mines, Pennsylvania, an armed posse took aim and fired into a crowd of oncoming mine workers, who were marching in their corner of the coal-mining region to call their fellow miners out on strike. The marchers Poles, Slovaks, Hungarians, most of whom could not yet speak English were themselves armed only with an American flag and a timid, budding confidence in their new found rights as free men in their newly adopted country. The mine operators took another view of these rights and of the strange, alien men who claimed them. When the posse was done firing, nineteen of the demonstrators were dead and thirty-nine were seriously wounded. Some six months later a jury of their peers was to exonerate the deputies of any wrong-doing.This long-forgotten incident is here movingly retold by Michael Novak, himself the son of Slovak immigrants and one of our most gifted writers and social observers. In his hands, the so-called "Lattimer Massacre" becomes not only a powerful story in its own right (and an invaluable key to the history of the growth of the united mine Workers), but an allegory of that peculiarly American experience undergone over and over again throughout the land, and down to this very day; the experience of new immigrants, still miserable with poverty and bewilderment and suffering the trauma of culture shock, being confronted by the hostility and blind contempt of the "real" Americans.In Michael Novak's uniquely vivid account, the incident at Lattimer is seen as a tragedy brought on not so much by inhumanity as by the profound failure of majority WASP society to understand the needs and responses of "foreigners." The Guns of Lattimer is a gripping book that tells Americans, old and new, a great deal about themselves and the society they live in.

This book discusses the moral and practical foundations of the corporation and corporate governance.

This book reviews the long history of the corporation and examines the central role of business and economic growth in the strengthening of civil society and democracy.

This new, enlarged edition of an influential book—originally published in 1972 as The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics—extends the author's wise and generous view of ethnicity. Its aim "is to raise consciousness about a crucial part of the American experience: to involve each reader in self-inquiry. Who, after all, are you? What history brought you to where you are? Why are you different from others?" But the point of such inquiry is civility: "The new ethnic consciousness embodied in this book delights in recognition of subtle differences in the movements of the soul. It is not a call to separatism but to self-consciousness. It does not seek division but rather accurate, mutual appreciation."This new edition contains six new essays by the author, including the acclaimed "Pluralism: A Humanistic Perspective." New, too, is Novak's comprehensive introduction, bringing the argument up to date. Novak describes how and why ethnicity has become a prominent issue in American politics. He also sharply denounces the current ideology of "multiculturalism" as a disfiguration of genuine ethnicity. "Multiculturalism is moved by the eros of Narcissus" Novak writes, "the new ethnicity is driven by the eros of unrestricted understanding."When the book first appeared, Time said that "Novak has attacked the American Dream in order to open up a possible second chapter for it." Newsweek called it "a tough-minded, provocative book which could well signal an important change in American politics."This new edition adds crucial distinctions for those seeking an intelligent path through such current-day mystifications as "multiculturalism" and "diversity." Twenty-five years ago, Novak's argument led the way in focusing on families, neighborhoods, and other "mediating institutions" of civil society. It is an argument critical to a realistic sense of national community.

This is perhaps the most widely read of Michael Novak's books. Belief and Unbelief attempts to push intelligence and articulation as far as possible into the stuff of what so many philosophers set aside as subjectivity. It is an impassioned critique of the idea of an unbridgeable gap between the emotive and the cognitive — and in its own way, represents a major thrust at positivist analysis.Written in a context of personal tragedy as well as intellectual search, the book is grounded in the belief that human experience is enclosed within a person to person relationship with the source of all things — sometimes in darkness, other tunes in aridity, but always in deep encounter with community and courage. It is written with a deep fidelity to classical Catholic thought as well as a sense of the writings of sociology, anthropology, and political theory—from Harold Lasswell to Friedrich von Hayek.This third edition includes Novak's brilliant 1961 article "God in the Colleges" from Harper's — a critique of the technification of university life that rules issues of love, death, and personal destiny out of bounds, and hence leaves aside the mysteries of contingency and risk, in favor of the certainties of research, production, and consumption. For such a "lost generation" Belief and Unbelief will remain of tremendous interest and impact.When the book first appeared thirty years ago, it was praised by naturalists and religious thinkers alike. Sidney Hook called it "a remarkable book, written with verve and distinction." James Collins termed it "a lively and valuable essay from which a reflective, religiously concerned reader can draw immense profit." And The Washington Post reviewer claimed that "Novak has written a rich, relentlessly honest introduction to the problem of belief. It is a deeply personal book, rigorous in argument and open ended in conclusions."

Combines an immediate enjoyment of sports with an awareness of the influence of athletic heroes on our society's spiritual life, and relates each popular sport to the particular virtue and grace it ritualizes

As nations undergo radical transformation in every quarter of the world, we have a greater need than ever before to re-examine the sources of strength and weakness in our political, social and economic institutions. This book explores fundamental questions of wealth and poverty, of freedom and responsibility, and traces our ideas about them to their sources in Aristotle, Aquinas, and the Judeo-Christian tradition. Novak shows how an understanding of these sources can liberate human potential for creativity, reinvigorate our institutions and lay the foundations for economic progress. Special attention is given to the roots of Latin America's problems of debt, capital flight, and poverty in its religious and philosophical outlook.

Michael Novak's work is challenging. We often disagree sharply in out interpretations and assessments of liberation theology, but he raises important issues which call for clarification and response.

Examines the relationship between capitalism, socialism, and religion, and argues that the benefits of capitalism need not be bought at the price of spiritual values

Examines the relationship between capitalism, socialism, and religion, and argues that the benefits of capitalism need not be bought at the price of spiritual values.