Piotr H. Kosicki has written a fascinating, detailed book that documents how French and Polish savants tried to create a just society within the context of their Catholic faith and the geopolitical reality of the interwar era, World War II, and the postwar Stalinist period to the advent of de-Stalinization in 1956. Consulting archives and many primary sources in multiple languages, he shows how religion can be used to analyze, compare, and write transnational history and how the period from 1891 to 1956 can be re-conceptualized as a time when Polish and French Catholic intellectuals, appalled by the Industrial Revolution's splintering of the social fabric, turned to politics, social revolution, and the seedbed of Catholic thought for an antidote.

The story is one of tragedy, catharsis, remorse, and renewal. The Poles were members of western civilization, yet the western powers abandoned them politically and economically after Poland regained its independence at the end of World War I. The French, British, and Americans pursued narrow interests and largely closed their markets to Poland's agricultural exports. The Poles were left alone on the frontier of western civilization to face communism's assault against the western order after World War I through the 1930s and then to confront Nazism that grew partly in response to the communist threat but included in its solution lebensraum and racism that targeted Poland and its people. At home, the Poles split between the integralism, anti-Germanism, antisemitism of Roman Dmowski, and the multicultural nationalism and anti-communism of Józef Piłsudski.

At the end of the interwar period and during and after World War II, when the Poles faced devastation and genocide when the Nazis and communists allied, partitioned, and then fought over Poland and the western powers ended up ceding Poland to Stalinists, many key Polish Catholic intellectuals like Jerzy Turowicz, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, and Janusz Zabłocki went to France literally or vicariously in search of a Catholic Weltanschauung that would guide Poland through the morass of exclusionary nationalism, German revanchism, Germanophobia, and Stalinism. In Paris they found Jacques Maritain, who had answered Pope Leo XIII's call in 1891 in Rerum novarum to improve the condition of the poor and working class in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. The pope had reiterated St. Thomas Aquinas's defense of private property and rebuffed socialism and Marxism as panaceas to worker exploitation, but also argued against laissez-faire capitalism and for labor's right to earn fair wages, form unions, and bargain collectively. Maritain fastened on Thomism's emphasis of the importance of the “human person,” who was created in God's image. From this tenet and in light of the working class's ennui in fin de siècle Europe, Maritain devised a philosophy called “personalism,” which maintained that social justice, whether in the work place or state policy, must acknowledge the dignity of the human person.

The Polish cognoscenti embraced Maritain's philosophy, but found Maritain's student Emmanuel Mounier's interpretation of “personalism” even more compelling. Mounier stressed that the times called for total revolution, perhaps led by the state itself, thus opening the door to totalitarian regimes that might use their power to deliver social justice. Mounier advised the Poles after the war to cooperate with Stalinists in order to achieve “total” personalism and collectivism and end the prevailing global western order of liberalism, individualism, and capitalism.

The Polish Catholic intellectuals, brandishing “personalism” as a “revolutionary” force, decided to give the Stalinists the benefit of doubt. Jerzy Turowicz, who became the editor of Poland's main Catholic postwar periodical Tygodnik Powszechny, kept politics out of his journal, and Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a youthful leader in the Christian Labor Party, abandoned democracy and joined Soviet-sanctioned religio-political groups to help build Stalinism in Poland. The communists also enticed the Poles by stoking deep-seated antisemitism and anti-Germanism related to the “Recovered Territories.”

It would seem that the Poles were naïve about politics or simply recognized Poland's reality under Soviet occupation, but Kosicki shows how they genuinely worked for a good outcome, and, when their expectations proved fatuous, regrouped, repented, and exploited de-Stalinization to weaken Stalinism. They soon joined other Catholic intellectuals like Karol Wojtyła, the future Pope John Paul II, who was also influenced by Maritain's personalism but who went to Rome instead of Paris, which fortified him against collaboration with Stalinists, to reconnect Poland to the west. Wojtyła's “personalism” centered on personal love of God, evangelization, ecumenism, and pastoral reform that galvanized faith. He called upon Catholics and non-Catholics to build a society of global solidarity, energized by love and faith. Eventually, in the wake of Vatican II, with de-Stalinization in the air, and Pope John Paul II in charge in Rome in 1978, Poland found its solidarity. Now Jerzy Turowicz's Tygodnik Powszechny became the leading voice in defense of Poland's Catholic culture and Tadeusz Mazowiecki worked to dismantle Stalinism, ultimately becoming an advisor to Solidarity and then Poland's first post-Communist prime minister in 1989.

Kosicki's call to study “transnational” history from a religious perspective and to reexamine historical periodization has great merit, but perhaps the lens should stretch to comparative missionary civilizations. We live in a global society because three proselytizing world religions and their accompanying civilizations (western, Orthodox, and Islamic) emerged in the course of the first millennium and openly competed and intermingled with each other from about the eleventh century to have their values (and beliefs) become the basis of universal fellowship. By the advent of the twentieth century, the values of western civilization were in ascendancy as the underpinning of an emerging global order, particularly notions like private property, human rights, the rule of law, limited government, separation of church and state, and the importance of the evolution of knowledge, which included the founding of universities and the scientific method. The Catholic Church had helped grow these values, but it remained ambivalent about some of them and the significance of the emanating global order. It was a time for bold moral and spiritual leadership and a reformation that would make faith, with permanent truths always safeguarded and serving as an anchor, relevant to changes that were often the consequence of new knowledge, itself the result of the ongoing search for truth and God.

The transnational lens shows the close nexus between France and Poland, but only loosely covers the metanarrative of the global advance of western values. The French largely misled the Poles because they blamed the discombobulation of the Industrial Revolution on the west's abandonment of its Christian roots, particularly its degradation of personhood. This analysis was imprecise, however. Disruptive though it was, the Industrial Revolution was a product of western values that had Christian roots or sanction. It was a major advance in technology, science, and the standard of living, but, like with any dramatic change, whether it be the revival of cities or the founding of universities in medieval Europe, there were issues to be fixed, and, in the case of the Industrial Revolution, the injustices that related to workers had to be resolved, perhaps by the thoughtful suggestions in Rerum novarum. It was a time of evolution that called for rational adjustment to faith-inspired change, not revolution and chaos.

The real struggle was and is over which values would be the basis of the evolving global order. Would it be a world of authoritarian regimes and strife based upon racial, national, ethnic, religious, and class division that devalued human dignity and truth? Or a world of solidarity and subsidiarity that celebrated diversity in culture but accepted core values that enabled individuals to develop their talents for the betterment of the community and make social justice, truth, and salvation possible? The communist elite, not the people, opposed most western values. The heart of Stalinism, like Marxism, was the abolition of private property, manifested in collectivization, and the reassertion of alienating authoritarianism across the Eurasian Plain. Mounier-type advice to support Stalinism over western values eviscerated Thomism, Catholicism, and common sense.

The Poles would have been better directed if they had read Montesquieu or de Tocqueville, or, instead of Paris, had gone to London where they would have encountered Catholics like Christopher Dawson, who understood the dynamic nature of Christianity, and G. K. Chesterton and Hilarie Belloc, who saw Poland as a rampart of western civilization. They would have also found in Europe a commitment to Christian morality and democratic integration that reasserted itself after World War II, first in the reaffirmation of natural law that underlay the Nuremburg Trials, and then in the work of such Catholic democrats as Robert Schuman, Jean Monnet, Konrad Adenauer, and Alcide de Gasperi, who fathered, with American support, the European Union. The Poles eventually found their footing, thanks largely to Catholicism. With the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989–91, men like Tadeusz Mazowiecki rushed to prepare Poland's membership in both the European Union and NATO.