Gianmarco Botti

Co-Holder Michael Novak Chair of the Tocqueville-Acton Centre Studies

Italian version: https://tocqueville-acton.com/2026/03/29/a-mind-for-the-poor-alla-catholic-university-si-discute-di-welfare-sulle-orme-di-novak/

It is suggestive that the long and rich intellectual career of Michael Novak (1933-2017) – philosopher, theologian, political scientist, economist, and a great promoter of the encounter between the principles of the liberal-capitalist system and those of the social doctrine of the Church – can ideally be encapsulated within a single framework: the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, one of the oldest Catholic academic institutions in the United States, founded in 1887 by order of the episcopate and with the approval of Pope Leo XIII. It was there that Novak completed some of his early theological studies between the late 1950s and early 1960s; it was there that he returned as a professor at the Busch School of Business in 2016, concluding his career there. It is therefore to preserve and disseminate, especially among younger generations, the precious legacy of thought he built within those walls that the School of Business itself, on the initiative of the Ciocca Center for Principled Entrepreneurship, has for several years promoted the Novak Undergraduate Fellowship: a program that, through the open and interdisciplinary format of seminars, aims to create a community of scholars who can follow in the footsteps of Michael Novak on the many fronts of knowledge he practiced, with a special focus on business ethics.

Among the topics addressed by the young scholars in their monthly meetings, coordinated by Professors Frédéric Sautet and Rebecca Teti, the March session was particularly interesting: “Poverty – Having a Mind for the Poor” was the title of the meeting dedicated to what Novak considers to be the single most important issue facing the democratic capitalist system. Indeed, he was – as the late Dario Antiseri described him – first and foremost “a moralist entirely and sincerely concerned with the redemption of the poor,” and this is reflected in his vision of a bottom-up capitalism, which Novak called people’s capitalism and Guy Sorman, with a more famous phrase, barefoot capitalism. It is from below, according to what the American thinker calls his central thesis, that wealth arises and spreads according to a completely bottom-up process, and therefore fundamentally alternative to the principle of “trickle-down” from above that constituted one of the central axioms of Reagan’s economic policy, of which Novak was also a supporter. But at the same time, it is in this light that we understand his tenacious critique of the welfare state, convinced as he has always been that the emancipation of the poor should not be a consequence of the generosity of public power but can only be achieved through the liberation of the creative intelligence of the poor themselves. Rejecting the two opposing and, in his view, equally erroneous vertical solutions to the problem and embracing a completely horizontal vision of subsidiarity, Novak believes that aid to those in need should come from the closest community: families, neighborhoods, churches, along with the many associations that constitute civil society. This is always done with a view to empowering the poor themselves, enabling them to save, invest, produce, and become active economic agents, no longer passive recipients of social policies, but agents of widespread development. Neither the state nor the market can therefore, according to Novak, guarantee what only collaboration between people can generate, and the highest task civil society is called to is to promote such cooperation.

As Novak often repeated, reflecting on his country’s institutional philosophy, faced with a problem, 18th-century French citizens would seek help from the state, English citizens from the aristocracy, and Americans would form a committee. This is what a keen European observer like Alexis de Tocqueville had already grasped in his famous journey when, observing that young people governing themselves, he identified the principle of association as the first law of democracy. Yet, obviously, Novak himself never denied – despite criticizing some of its degenerations – the essential role of welfare systems in providing support to those in need. Nor did the Founding Fathers, to whom he so frequently refers, deny it when they had to imagine a new system – a “new order,” as the seal of the United States proclaims – and thus also a completely new relationship between state and civil society. It is therefore a particularly interesting choice, that of the Novak Fellows, to discuss, alongside the pages that The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism dedicates to this theme, those of another contemporary classic of American political thought: Vindicating the Founders by Thomas G. West.

Reconstructing the debate that at the dawn of American history concerned issues of race, gender, and class, West devotes a chapter to the question of welfare, which, perhaps surprisingly, was not a controversial issue for the Founders: they unanimously rejected the idea that aid to the poor could come exclusively from private charity and favored a public welfare system, guaranteed by local governments that, for example, supported with incentives those landowners who sheltered the poorest. The New Deal of the 1930s was therefore not, as is commonly thought, the first example of state welfare in America, because the Founders had already envisioned one by the late 18th century. If anything, the problems began – and here West’s analysis dovetails with Novak’s – when, in the second half of the last century, and especially since the 1960s of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, the system, which was once local, became increasingly nationalized and thus centralized, becoming increasingly impersonal and expanding its bureaucratic apparatus beyond measure. If, as the authors of the Constitution, and Novak with them, believed, welfare systems function best when they are closer to citizens and therefore better acquainted with their needs, it’s clear that such a shift from the local to the federal level has not been without consequences. California’s problems are not Arkansas’s, and the mayor knows the needs of his people much better than the Department of Labor.

In his latest essay, provocatively titled Social Justice Isn’t What You Think It Is, published in 2015, Novak developed this reasoning based on the principles of the Church’s social doctrine, recalling the definition of subsidiarity found in the English-language Catholic encyclopedia Sacramentum Mundi. This encyclopedia recounts President Lincoln’s considerations on the federal system and the intermediate institutions of civil society, perfectly consistent with those of the Founding Fathers. It also states that higher governments should not intervene within the jurisdiction of lower governments unless – and even then they should do so with caution – the problems are too complex for them to manage alone. Higher governments are, in fact, too removed from immediate experience, and what seems rational to them often turns out to be inefficient, if not downright harmful to the common good. Conversely, lower governments’ proximity to concrete reality makes them far more capable of formulating competent assessments and making effective choices to resolve problems of which they have direct experience. Bringing the discussion back to the central theme of helping the poor, Novak argues that the bureaucratization of social assistance effectively turns the beneficiaries of these services into clients, reducing the scope for human empathy, which is replaced by the impersonal authority of the state. For their part, in this dynamic, taxpayers are naturally led to ignore the poor, trusting that the government will take care of them.

For Novak, the solution lies in reversing these processes, which must become processes of devolution: social justice, ultimately, also means devolving significant responsibilities from central government to local administrations, but above all from bureaucratic apparatuses to citizens, considered both as individuals and as they unite in a rich variety of associations. This, in short, is a devolution of power from the state to civil society, that is, to centers of responsibility closer to people’s real needs.