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Christian Personalism and Democratic Capitalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2014

Richard C. Bayer
Richard C. Bayer*
Affiliation:
Fordham University
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Abstract

In his recent works Michael Novak offers an affirmation of “democratic capitalism” based on a Christian personalist perspective. Novak's scholarship has received increasing attention since the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, and particularly since the recent encyclical Centesimus Annus. In that encyclical John Paul II offered a qualified affirmation of market economies. This article addresses an important question: to what extent can a Christian personalist social theory be used to offer an affirmation of a market economy, and how might it offer vision and constructive critique? I initiate a creative dialogue between the personalism of Emmanuel Mounier and Michael Novak's presentation of democratic capitalism. I argue that Novak has shed important light on the positive moral aspects of a market system, but I identify and emphasize the important remaining areas for moral concern.

Type
Articles
Information
Horizons , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , Fall 1994 , pp. 313 - 331
Copyright
Copyright © The College Theology Society 1994

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References

1 Novak, Michael, The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Free Press, 1993).Google Scholar

2 Neuhaus, Richard John, Doing Well and Doing Good: The Challenge to the Christian Capitalist (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1992).Google Scholar

3 Coleman, John A., “Neither Liberal nor Socialist” in One Hundred Years of Catholic Social Thought, ed. Coleman, John A. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1991), 32.Google Scholar

4 Neuhaus and Novak hold that experience teaches the importance of a free market economy to support a political democracy. Democratic socialism is therefore an abstraction not requiring much discussion for them.

5 Neuhaus, , Doing Well and Doing Good, 63.Google Scholar

6 Ibid., 48.

7 Ibid., 240.

8 Ibid., 279. Neuhaus offers general directions for the reconstruction of social policy. Such reconstruction contains a very limited role for the state, and will stress the role of mediating institutions (especially the family) in achieving the common good. This reconstruction demands that the poor, whose problem is not exploitation but exclusion from full participation in society, be brought into the process of production and exchange. There will necessarily be a role for the Judeo-Christian tradition in a successful reconstruction.

9 Ibid., 31.

10 Because his work tends to play down the responsibilities of the state in achieving the common good, Novak's work is not infrequently described (accused may be a better word) as libertarian. Novak rightly rejects this description. From beginning to end what Novak says about economics must be seen in the context of a tripartite system of politics, economics, and culture.

11 Johnson, Thomas S., “Capitalism after Communism” in One Hundred Years of Catholic Social Thought, 240.Google Scholar

12 Mounier, Emmanuel, Personalism (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1950), xvi.Google Scholar

13 Mounier, Emmanuel, Be Not Afraid: A Denunciation of Despair (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1946), 193.Google Scholar

14 Mounier, , Personalism, 17.Google Scholar

15 Amato, Joseph, Mounier and Maritain: A French Understanding of the Modern World (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1975), 7.Google Scholar

16 Mounier, Emmanuel, A Personalist Manifesto, (New York: Longmans, Green, 1938), 89.Google Scholar

17 Mounier, , Personalism, 19.Google Scholar

18 Ibid., 21.

19 Mounier, , A Personalist Manifesto, 93.Google Scholar

20 Mounier, , Personalism, 25.Google Scholar

21 Ibid., 50.

22 Mounier considers the extent to which the modern Christians should become more assertive with respect to the social implications of faith, and less concerned with reconciliation and individual piety: “These crooked beings who go forwards in life only sidelong and with downcast eyes, these ungainly souls, these weighers-up of virtues, these dominical victims, these pious cowards, these lymphatic heroes, these sugary infants, these colourless virgins, these vessels of ennui, these bags of syllogisms, these shadows of shadows, are these the vanguard of Daniel marching against the Beast?” (Mounier, Emmanuel, The Spoil of the Violent [London: Harvill, 1955], 3).Google Scholar Mounier laments here the appearance of a Christian personality type which is increasingly taken as normative for Christians. The personality type is passive, sweet, not interested in competition, social ethics, and issues of power. According to Mounier, this personality type is influenced by Jansenism and gives support to specifically Nietzschian criticisms of Christianity as a pathological expression of religious sentiment.

23 Novak, , The Catholic Ethic, 27.Google Scholar

24 Novak, Michael, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), 357.Google Scholar

25 Mounier, , Be Not Afraid, 176.Google Scholar

26 Bellah, Robertet al., Habit of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1985).Google Scholar

27 Ibid., 72.

28 Mounier, , Personalism, 5.Google Scholar

29 Ibid., 14-15.

30 Ibid., 2.

31 Mounier, , Be Not Afraid, 128–29.Google Scholar

32 Novak, , The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, 341.Google Scholar

33 Mounier, , Personalism, 109.Google Scholar

34 Ibid., 110.

35 Ibid.

36 Lebacqz, Karen, Six Theories of Justice (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1986), 101.Google Scholar, 116.

37 Harrison, Beverly Wildung, Making the Connections: Essays in Feminist Social Ethics, ed. Robb, Carol (Boston: Beacon, 1985), 243.Google Scholar Another incisive collection of essays from a variety of authors which touches on feminist incarnational method is found in Christ, Carol P. and Plaskow, Judith, eds., Womanspirit Rising (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1992).Google Scholar

38 The only positive point made with respect to liberation theology is that it has pointed out the problem of poverty. Yet this theology and the movements that it represents offer no other insights.

39 Mounier, , Personalism, 76.Google Scholar

40 Mounier acknowledges his debt to Maurice Blondel; see Blondel, , Action: Essay on a Critique of Life and Science of Practice (1893) (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984).Google Scholar

41 Mounier, , A Personalist Manifesto, 31.Google Scholar

42 Mounier, , Personalism, 97.Google Scholar

43 In light of the appearance of Quadragesimo Anno (1931) it is interesting to note that personalism for Mounier did not lead to consideration of corporative systems of political economy since these give insufficient attention to issues of power and conflict of interest: “Some thinkers imagine a corporative economy modeled upon the human organism, and postulate a harmony of workers, employers, nation and state by a mythical analogy which is in striking contradiction with the actual and enduring divergences of interests” (Mounier, Personalism, 105).

44 Ibid.

45 Ibid., 104; emphasis added.

46 Mounier breaks with Marxism in his theoretical analysis of personal life. Mounier the Christian personalist understands material possessions not only according to their use in meeting basic needs but also according to the exigencies of personality development freely undertaken.

A helpful analysis of the possibilities of a dialogue between Marxism and Mounier's Christian personalism is found in Hill, Patrick, “Mounier's Integral Realism” in Marxism and Christianity, ed. Aptheker, Herbert (New York: Humanities Press, 1968).Google Scholar Concerning the issue before us now Hill says the following: “The Christian, however, passionate his longing for the Kingdom, must recognize that the actualization of the Kingdom, the ability to respond to the higher values of personal life and, most of all, to the Personhood of Christ, presupposes not only a liberation from basic anxieties about the vital minimum necessary to sustain life, but also a range of possessed objects which anchors this existent being in his objectivity and his uniqueness. These are the ‘terrestrial conditions’ upon which actualization of the Kingdom waits” (192-93).

47 Mounier, , A Personalist Manifesto, 25–26.Google Scholar

48 Mounier, , Be Not Afraid, 176.Google Scholar

49 Novak, , The Catholic Ethic, 81–82.Google Scholar

50 Novak, Michael, Free Persons and the Common Good (New York: Madison, 1989), 83.Google Scholar

51 Ibid., 84.

52 Arguably the most significant American political theorist in this century has been John Rawls. Rawls, who has articulated a powerful version of liberal social theory, goes to great length to distance his work from anything that contains a substantive philosophical anthropology. See Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University 1971)Google Scholar, and Rawls, John, “Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 14 (Summer 1985): 223–51.Google Scholar

53 Mounier, , Spoil of the Violent, 85.Google Scholar