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Never, ever would we ever say, or even wish to imply, that a death was bracing, refreshing, or needed. And so we wish that Michael Novak one of those names you seldom hear but whose bearer achieved true greatness; in this instance, in the twinned fields of philosophy and theology was still with us, spreading his unique perspective on the American Dream, as he both lived and defined it.

Mr. Novak, who died Friday at the age of 83, hailed from one of those classic and now largely forgotten Rust Belt cities Johnstown, Pa., whose steel (and the local Pennsylvania coal that fired it) built modern-day America and helped win its wars.

Mr. Novak left Johnstown a Roman Catholic as most boys did from those Cambria County hills populated by immigrant Eastern Europeans but, over time, surrendered his faith to socialism. To be sure, he came full circle, as exemplified by a decade that saw him begin as a speechwriter for George McGovern and end as the author of The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, not to mention Ronald Reagans ambassador to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights.

What returned Mr. Novak to his roots? Viscerally, perhaps the Catholicism hard-wired into his heart and soul, but, on an intellectual level, most likely the utter common sense that marks capitalism. As he implied in an article published in The Wall Street Journal two days after Christmas in 1994, neither capitalism nor democracy are perfect, but together democratic capitalism; hence the title of his seminal 1984 work they are the most moral conjoining of theory and method for the betterment of man on both an individual and communitarian basis.

Better than the Third World economies, and better than the socialist economies, Mr. Novak wrote that December, capitalism makes it possible for the vast majority of the poor to break out of the prison of poverty; to find opportunity; to discover full scope for their own personal economic initiative; and to rise into the middle class and higher.

Unlike the great economists of that time Milton Friedman, pre-eminent, but also, for instance, Thomas Sowell Mr. Novak did not so much look at capitalism from the perspective of, say, entrepreneurial supply and demand, but rather from how the demands of the soul could be supplied by capitalisms provisions. Take this abbreviated disquisition, found in the Journal piece, of capitalisms effect on envy, which Mr. Novak called the most destructive social passion ... a deadly invisible gas:

When all the people in the [commercial] republic, especially the able-bodied poor, see that their material conditions are actually improving from year to year, they are led to compare where they are today with where they would like to be tomorrow. They stop comparing themselves with their neighbors because their personal goals are not the same as those of their neighbors. They seek their own goals, at their own pace, to their own satisfaction.

So Mr. Novaks continued relevance, to our way of thinking, is obvious. But never so much more than today, when people are almost fixated on the present, and often the pettiness folks choose to extract from it. If nothing else, Michael Novak instructed us to take the long view, to appreciate the present for the promise it portends for tomorrow.

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Our Views: Michael Novak A journey away from socialism - The Winchester Star