ABSTRACT
Michael Novak’s inheritance from Weber is obvious from the titles of his books-The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism and The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.1 Although he critiques Weber for not recognizing that the Catholic rather than the Protestant ethic contributes to capitalism’s possibility, he finds Weber’s work indispensable for his identification of ‘spirit’ as the decisive element in understanding economics. Novak writes:
What needs to be explained is not private ownership or the means of production, the existence of markets, and profit or accumulation…. What Weber set out to explain is something quite different…. To put it simply, Weber detected something new, a novel Geist or spirit or cultural inspiration, some new complex of social attitudes and habits.2
For Novak, this spirit is Catholicism, rightly understood. Weber’s work allows theology to be relevant to economics because of the dialectical relationship between facts and values. The market is a semi-autonomous sphere that operates on the basis of its own facticity. However, it also operates within a cultural system that sustains it. Yet that cultural system is not produced by the market itself; the market needs cultural values that come from outside it. It needs the ‘spirit’ that Roman Catholic theology offers.3
