In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

73 A Philosophy of Economics INTRODUCTION My philosophy of economics emerges, not from formal training in economics, but from my own particular experiences. I do not claim this to be a definitive “philosophy of economics,” only an expression of my intellectual journey from sympathy for collectivist control of the economy to embracing market capitalism fully as the most effective way to organize contemporary economies. Let me begin this way: Business is a noble Christian vocation, a work of social justice, and the single greatest institutional hope of the poor of the world, if the poor are to move up out of poverty (Novak, Business as a Calling 1996; 2002). Only business, especially small business, creates new, independent, and progress-generating jobs. In Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia—to the one side—are an immense number of poor people either underemployed or unemployed. To the other side is an immense amount of work to be done. There are homes, clinics , and schools to be built; sanitation to be supplied to villages and cities; and lights, refrigerators, and simple ovens to be manufactured for those who lack them, so that their children can live decently. All that work is to be done; and Michael Novak Chapter 5 The author would like to thank Grattan T. Brown for outstanding work in executing the footnotes, under the author’s direction. hend133002_ch05.qxd 12/02/05 10:44 AM Page 73 all those good people are looking for work. Who will bring these two together, like two live wires now held apart? Who will bring these two wires together to generate the spark of development? That is the role of entrepreneurs: to match people seeking work with all the work desperately needing to be done. The vocation of business is the single most strategic vocation in the work of social justice. It is the vocation most necessary for lifting the poor out of poverty. Business creates jobs where jobs did not exist before. Yet as a recent issue of the Religious Studies Review demonstrates (Reiger, 2002), many scholars in this nation’s divinity schools voice disdain for business corporations and even for the business vocation. All that remains on the Left, after the fall of real existing socialism, is anticapitalism. Anticapitalism is the single broad cause that has for generations united both the Leninist and social democratic Left with the traditionalist Right. From the Right and the Left, there are century-old arguments against capitalism, business, and (the current buzzword) neoliberalism (for example, Bourdieu, 1998). The collapse of socialism did not make this hostility to capitalism go away. This hostility is older and deeper than socialism. This hostility is not hard to understand, and I once shared it myself. Poets, romantics, and mystics have been hostile to any and all economic systems that have ever existed—socialist, feudal, mercantile, traditionalist, and all those current economic regimes of the Third World. But the hostility toward capitalism has a particularly broad “spiritual” or quasi-religious passion behind it. Capitalism is rejected, not as less practical or less effective than other systems, but as in some way corrupting , immoral, even evil. The source of this hostility, I believe, lies in a profound philosophical error. On the Left, that source is not empirical. Even when any factual argument is rebutted—even when it is conceded that capitalism is in fact more productive, efficient, and economically creative—still, it will be argued that capitalism is immoral. This judgment seems to flow from a certain habit of wishfulness, dreaminess, or perhaps more accurate, utopianism, in the light of which the humble, vulgar realism of capitalism appears to be an outrageous surrender to the unworthy. On the Right, the source of hostility to capitalism appears to be nostalgia for the high courtesy, chivalry, and noblesse oblige of the aristocratic, land-based order of the precapitalist, preliberal world. Both Left and Right compare capitalism not to any historical system that has actually existed, but to an ideal of perfection as they imagine it. A more just and realistic assumption would be this: just as one should not expect too much from democracy, so one should not expect too much from capitalism. Both are flawed systems, just as human beings themselves are flawed. Perhaps I am wrong in this diagnosis of the sources of hostility to capitalism. If I am, the larger point stands forth all the more starkly: Simply in order to understand the vocation of business in the highly...

Share