Jőzef Tischner’s The Spirit of Solidarity (translated by Marek B. Zaleski and Benjamin Fiore, SJ; Harper & Row, $10.95), seems to me a major document of the dawning post-Marxist age, in which the only “believers” in Marxism-Leninism will be children of all ages in universities, defrocked priests, illiterate dictators of hemp-and-banana republics, and the tanks that roll through Red Square on May 1. Father Tischner is Poland’s leading Church spokesman for Solidarity and director of the Institute of Philosophy at the Papal Theology Faculty in Cracow, and this “cycle of reflections” is, in its simple and intellectually unassuming way, a significant work of social philosophy, eloquent, poetic, and touchingly original, written de profundis in a spirit of devout hope, which remains prepared nevertheless to endure.
The supreme irony of the Solidarity Congress was of course that it was a Workers’ Congress, springing up like a grotesque toadstool bang in the center of a certified socialist republic—a Workers’ Paradise. And so it is from a consideration of the idea of work that Father Tischner unfolds his thesis, to produce at last the spare formulation that “The key to an independent Poland is a work about work, the pondering over a work culture.” In so doing, he has produced also an explication of the human significance of work and a justification of the economic relationship between man and man that make the writings of “supply-side” popularizers appear trivial, shallow, and materialistic by comparison. “Work,” Tischner writes,
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