[1] Although a convinced socialist and scientific atheist, he retained his earlier passion for liberal democratic and Catholic worldviews, generally identifying with humanism.

In the 1960s, he organized Christian-Marxist dialogue in Czech and German, visited by major Central European thinkers including Erich Fromm, Ernst Bloch or the theologian Karl Rahner.

The planned publication of his major work on Jesus, however, was destroyed in 1969 after the Prague Spring, a national reform movement in which Machovec participated and whose suppression he protested internationally with an open letter.

After signing Charter 77, a civil rights movement championed by fellow ex-academic philosopher Jan Patočka, he was denied even his surrogate job as a church organist.

Milan Machovec wrote for a broad audience, mainly about the spiritual legacy of major historical figures, which beside Jesus (1969/1990) included Tacitus (1948),[3] Jan Hus (1953), František Palacký (1961), Thomas Aquinas and neo-Thomism (1962), Josef Dobrovský (1964), Augustine (1967), Tomáš Masaryk (1968), and Achilles (2000).