In this ambitious work, Alan Fimister attempts to prove that the inspiration for the European Coal and Steel Community, and the integrationist project writ large, ‘resulted from the self-conscious application by French foreign minister Robert Schuman of the Papal Social Magisterium and of Neo-Thomistic political philosophy’ (p.1). Flying in the face of much current scholarship on the origins of the European Union, Fimister downplays the role of Jean Monnet and the various geopolitical imperatives that were at the heart of the ECSC, choosing instead to locate the origins of a united Europe in the interwar Thomist revival. Fimister is, however, unable to make good on these massive claims. The book is divided into two sections: in the first, Fimister discusses the social and political policies of Leo xiii, and the continuation of this Ralliement by the neo-Thomists of the interwar period. Fimister provides a fine summary of a complex topic, although it is hamstrung by his belief in the ‘natural sympathy between republican governmental forms and Catholicism’ (p. 26), and that Thomism, in particular, was the intellectual expression of this sympathy (p. 42). This leads him to downplay the relationship between Thomism and reactionary politics (especially in the case of Chesterbelloc), and to misleadingly characterise the Maritain of the 1930s as a proponent of ‘Liberal Democracy’ (p. 118) when in fact Maritain was just as critical of liberalism in the 1930s as he had been earlier. There is, for instance, no room in Fimister's account for Maritain's 1934 letter to L'Aube in which he rigorously distinguishes his own beliefs from those of the Christian Democrats. These chapters are also marred by long digressions about, among other topics, the novels of Dostoyevsky and the history of the Roman Republic, which are not relevant to Fimister's argument. The second section of the work is an account of the life and career of Robert Schuman, the ‘Father of Europe’. These chapters – historically sensitive and rooted in archival research – are the most successful sections of the book, despite the fact that Fimister largely ignores the large literature on European integration or Christian Democracy, notably the work of Wolfram Kaiser. The larger problem, however, is that the connection between the book's two parts is remarkably flimsy, and it is on the success of this linkage – between neo-Thomism and Robert Schuman – that the argument rests. There is little to prove that the neo-Thomist revival had a significant impact on Schuman. Maritain and Schuman met twice and corresponded little; likewise, there is no firm evidence that Schuman ever read any of Maritain's works. Fimister mainly relies upon vague declarations of the link between Christianity and democracy in Schuman's speeches and writings, but such a link was a common trope of early Cold War rhetoric: Harry Truman, for instance, spoke in 1946 of the ‘fundamental unity of Christianity and democracy’ without enlisting himself in the Thomist revival. In the end, despite its considerable virtues, Fimister's account is more rooted in the Catholic faith than in serious historical argumentation.