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The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism By Michael Novak American Enterprise Institute/Simon & Schuster, 433 pp., $17.50 This is a notable book, and it is no denigration of it to say that it may be most important for reasons other than those the author intended.

Novak’s major purpose is to rehabilitate the idea of democratic capitalism, primarily in religious terms. He seeks to banish once and for all the assumption, which threatens to become endemic among contemporary theologians and religious spokesmen, that capitalism is an inherently unjust system and that, at least as an ideal, Christians ought to espouse some kind of socialism. Since much of the anti-capitalist spirit of contemporary religionists is unthinking and even irrational, he has little trouble making his major argument. There is perhaps little that is strikingly new in that argument, but it has rarely been put more spiritedly.

JH

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James Hitchcock

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The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism By Michael Novak American Enterprise Institute/Simon & Schuster, 433 pp., $17.50 This is a notable book, and it is no denigration of it to say that it may be most important for reasons other than those the author intended.

Novak’s major purpose is to rehabilitate the idea of democratic capitalism, primarily in religious terms. He seeks to banish once and for all the assumption, which threatens to become endemic among contemporary theologians and religious spokesmen, that capitalism is an inherently unjust system and that, at least as an ideal, Christians ought to espouse some kind of socialism. Since much of the anti-capitalist spirit of contemporary religionists is unthinking and even irrational, he has little trouble making his major argument. There is perhaps little that is strikingly new in that argument, but it has rarely been put more spiritedly.