The Power of the Powerless and Václav Havel’s “Responsibilityism”

Václav Havel’s life, activism, and published writings—from playwright to president—often returned to key themes, one of which might be called his “thick” notion of responsibility. Indeed, Havel’s views on responsibility, not unlike Weber’s famous ethic of responsibility as expressed in Politics as a Vocation, rest upon a morality firmly grounded in human existence and experience. Furthermore, responsibility includes both accountability and action, and it is based upon free will, Kantian judgment, and the capacity for human agency and impact, regardless of structural constraint. Indeed, Havel’s arguments have relevance whether the political limitations are imposed by post-totalitarian state socialism, another contemporary variant of dictatorship, illiberal democracy, or the post-industrial model of capitalist consumption, premised on social engagement defined less by citizenship than by economic behavior. This meditation will explore Havel’s ethic of responsibility—first metaphysically, then as grounded in his famous metaphor of the greengrocer in his landmark essay, The Power of the Powerless—and the wider implications of his “responsibilityism” for social movement politics in the twenty-first century.

Havel’s notion of responsibility includes responsibility to one’s self and one’s surroundings—including, and moving outward in a Hegelian sense, from the family to the local community and finally to something higher, such as the polis or the public sphere. In this sense, his ideas are firmly rooted in liberal republican traditions and the European project, which at its core includes civic engagement, human rights, public stewardship over resources, and even a palpable identity, one that has a proto-spiritual dimension. Likewise, he owes much to the neo-Platonism of his friend and fellow Chartist Jan Patočka. Responsibility involves deliberate action and choice: moving from the world of appearances to the world of what is. Conversely, responsibility is lost—or at grave risk—when humankind becomes the measure of all things, when teleological projects aimed at the betterment of humankind take utilitarian positions that inevitably sacrifice individual human rights or dignity in the name of some higher utopia. Taking responsibility involves, first and foremost, a recovery of the human dimension. This approach, with all its messiness and indeterminacy, recognizes the impossibility of utopian projects. Responsibility innately involves a rejection of what is ideologically prescribed or proscribed. If Havel can be said to have been categorically against something, it is anything that obscures or obstructs individual responsibility. His mantra, particularly as evidenced in The Power of the Powerless, might be called “responsibilityism.”

For Havel (in his writings both before and after the fall of Communism) both the “really existing socialism” of the Soviet variety and capitalism driven by globalized capital accumulation and consumerism share a loss of the “human dimension.” Indeed, this human dimension is directly related to his elaboration of humanity as linked to a higher meaning, or Order of Being, a metaphysical Absolute, as outlined in Letters to Olga and in the interviews in Disturbing the Peace. In philosophical terms, responsibility involves resolving the dilemma of the universal and the particular. Only through self-knowledge and taking responsibility can human existence be imbued with meaning and a contribution to the whole panorama of Being be contemplated.

How ideology and responsibility are represented as polar opposites is clarified in Havel’s landmark essay, The Power of the Powerless. Woven through the narrative is the story of the greengrocer, an ordinary guy who is compelled to display a sign in his shop window that states “Workers of the World, Unite!” Havel reminds us that the greengrocer is largely “indifferent to the semantic content of the slogan” (III), in the sense that he does not feel a burning and didactic desire to celebrate and publicize the message. ¹ What is critical, however, is the subliminal message and his required behavioral response: by placing the sign in his shop window, the greengrocer simultaneously signals both his obedience and his right to be left alone, having fulfilled this obligation. At the same time, he doesn’t feel that there is anything particularly wrong with the idea about workers uniting, either. Importantly, the ideological nature of the slogan helps to conceal his obsequiousness. Ideology helps negate any sense of personal responsibility. Ideology fulfills the same function as an illusion in a magic trick, yet behind the veil of the illusion lies his own fallen existence, trivialization, and adaptation, in effect a shirking of responsibility. In an indirect reference to Plato’s analogy of the cave in the Republic, ideology governs the world of appearances, much like the apparitions that appear on the wall of the cave. Ideology is the glue that binds the regime’s constituent parts together—all the relations and practices of power require this lubricant to function smoothly. There is, however, a price to be paid—accepting life within the lie. Part of this lie is the very denial that any such responsibility even exists. Havel himself masterfully pulls back the curtain when he condemns those who, by their very adaptive behavior, “confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system” (IV). It is a harsh judgment, one that Havel does not shy away from, even though there is a good deal of nuanced argument in the essay about the differing levels of responsibility that accrue to, say, greengrocers versus prime ministers. Not everyone is a willing accomplice in the same manner—relative positions in the hierarchy of power determine levels of actual responsibility. But the key point is that no one avoids responsibility; indeed, all are complicit. We may be victims of the system, but by our very actions we are also its supporters. Yet the lie, like the apparitions on the wall of the cave, is not reality, or at least not the only possible reality.

One of these alternative realities occurs when Havel asks us to imagine what might happen if one day something snaps in the mind of the greengrocer and, against all “prevailing logic,” he decides to stop displaying the sign in his shop window. Moreover, and consonant with this initial step, he starts doing other “small” things, such as not voting in farcical elections, saying what he really thinks at political meetings, or simply expressing solidarity with those “whom his conscience commands him to support” (VII). But what is the greengrocer really doing? Havel tells us he is doing much more than rejecting the ritual or breaking the rules. In his very action, he unearths his suppressed identity and acts in dignity. He gives his freedom “concrete significance” (VII). In short, he assumes responsibility. The results are not inconsequential, for the world of appearances—of ideology—is shattered, and can never be fully repaired:

[The greengrocer] has upset the power structure by tearing apart what holds it together. He has demonstrated that living a lie is living a lie. He has broken through the exalted façade of the system and exposed the real, base foundations of power. He has said that the emperor is naked. And because the emperor is in fact naked, something extremely dangerous has happened: by his action, the greengrocer has addressed the world. He has enabled everyone to peer behind the curtain. He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth. Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal. The principle must embrace and permeate everything [VII].

Ultimately, living in truth is the essence of opposition, but only if one understands opposition in the general sense, that such action widens social spaces independent of the party-state. This is not an opposition that is “loyal” to the regime, nor is it involved in the competitive and routine exchange of elites as in democracies, but it functions completely externally to the institutions of governance and power. This kind of opposition—situated in a larger continuum of resistance and dissent—is thus unpredictable and not subject to control.

In such a closed system (and here we can imagine other closed systems besides post-totalitarian state socialism), every independent action and every expression of diversity or self-organization will necessarily be at odds with the system, even the greengrocer’s decision not to display the sign. Thus, the system that, prima facie, commands absolute obedience contains its own Achilles’ heel, for logically any small act counter to its dictates is fundamentally destabilizing. Herein Havel locates “the power of the powerless.”

But the responsibility of such opposition is difficult work indeed. There is both comfort and social utility in the minute level of regulation provided by ideology: to step outside this universe is to undertake enormous risks on an existential level. Living in truth sounds very fine and noble, but under a coercive system (whether “totalitarian” or “post-totalitarian”) it is also a life unmoored from comfortable certainty. Havelian responsibility is not for the faint-hearted, and the personal choices of all those high-minded greengrocers would certainly unduly affect family and friends who were not party to their decisions to live in truth. After 1989 this did not read so well to a public that did not want their faces smeared in their previous subservience. Havel was criticized as abstract, preachy, scolding, and judgmental. As well, this kind of responsibility must be calibrated in accordance with probable or expected regime response. Iranian writers and activists in the last decade have fared far worse than Havel for their brave decisions to carve out independent social space. Still, the word “dissident” sat uncomfortably with Havel, because even in 1978 it was already a reified category, defined by Western journalists as romantically persecuted intellectuals and writers or derisively by the regime as dangerous renegades and backsliders. He was uncomfortable with the denial and rejection linguistically implicit in the label. Rather, he promoted action that was affirmative, positive in outlook, and growing out of responsibility and acknowledgment of the indivisibility of freedom and equality. He stressed the very ordinariness of the Chartists; as a group they were neither dangerous nor special, but what united them was the decision to take responsibility and live in truth. After all, the metaphor of the greengrocer reminds us that responsibility is the job of everyone, not one that can be morally contracted out to a few dissidents.

When Havel wrote The Power of the Powerless, he was sensitive to the sting of the regime’s criticism, especially against the fledgling human rights group Charter 77. Unlike in Poland, the “opposition” in Czechoslovakia was small, limited in terms of reach and impact. Havel understood that the activities of the metaphorical greengrocers could achieve more “everyday” change—important to living life in the here and now—and have the potential for a longer-range impact. In effect, the overreaction of the regime to the Chartists, and Havel’s reaction to the overreaction as expressed in the essay, illustrate just how much each side effectively understood the danger and potential strength of this “bacteriological weapon” (VIII)—a frank and atypical image in the Havelian canon. Moreover, since the target of dissent was society itself—the greengrocers rather than party functionaries—greater strength lay in the invisibility and indirect nature of the approach. Writing in 1978, he was more prescient than legions of leading Western Sovietologists in suggesting that, although it would never be clear when the “proverbial last straw” might fall, there could be a last straw. Long before Gorbachev’s Prague Spring—like efforts at initiating reform from above with both glasnost and perestroika—Havel here presumes, via his revisionist history of 1968, that such efforts at state capture or piecemeal reform of a structurally flawed system were doomed to inevitable failure. Moreover, The Power of the Powerless was written in the era of détente and discussions of East-West “convergence.” And although such views did not survive the Cold War redux of the Reagan era in the United States and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the audacious idea of a playwright-dissident from that faraway country of which we knew so little (to paraphrase Chamberlain), only one decade after Eastern bloc troops had crushed the hopes of 1968, that the powerless had power and that even a modest “re-kindling” of civic action might have dramatic consequences, seemed patently absurd. Ironically, Havel’s gift is that, despite the absurdity that permeates his plays from the same period, and particularly given his portrayal of the character Vaněk in Audience, Unveiling, and Protest, wherein his dissident protagonist is somewhat hopeless and hapless, he exudes a clarity and a confidence in The Power of the Powerless that he denies his fictional counterpart.

Moreover, Havel’s essay continues to resonate with audiences regardless of their generational and geographical distance from its point of origin—Czechoslovakia in the late 1970s. Indeed, it is not difficult to extrapolate several relevant “lessons” for both post-Communist and capitalist societies, increasingly interconnected via the de-territorializing forces of economic, political, and cultural globalization, as well as the speed, transnationality, and permeability of social media and digital technology. Havel decried the opportunism, self-indulgence, and organized ritual pervading “official” politics, which in turn is too often distant from the concerns of everyday life—a criticism often levied by national and international civil society groups intent on working “outside” the political system conventionally defined. His essay is, taken widely, a defense of “bottom up” politics, the essential externality of dissent and the unique ability of dissenters to speak truth to power. His critique of the trend toward convenient denial of direct and indirect political responsibility both within and outside the corridors of power also speaks to the “democratic deficit” between citizens and their governments or supranational organizations such as the European Union. Havel opposed abstract, utopian political projects. He illustrated how such missions for the betterment of humanity, in the name of progress or a higher set of ideals, often sacrifice and degrade human dignity and lead to enslavement of one form or another. Yet there remains an uncomfortable and irresolvable paradox here. Regimes with considerable state resources at their disposal can pursue lofty goals built upon consequentialist decisions to trample rights now to achieve higher ends later, yet it is ultimately up to ordinary people with far fewer resources to act for something greater than themselves. Havel’s small steps involve enormous risks, yet when the powerless do not undertake such risks, they are complicit in their own degradation.

Still, Havel reminds us that while better systems do not guarantee better lives, by creating better lives for ourselves our systems will be forever changed and bettered. Anomie and passivity are rejected in favor of local engagement. Finally, his eschewal of parties and programs, although tactically problematic for the playwright who found himself president in 1990, has wider resonance when read against his broad ideas about what constitutes legitimate opposition, including all forms of responsible dissent. Havel’s Power of the Powerless bears continual re-reading because it still matters. Because the essay combines philosophy and trenchant historical analysis with a character-driven narrative as well as a consideration of what can be done pragmatically on a very personal level in both authoritarian regimes and bureaucratically driven democracies accessible largely to homogenized elites, it has a timeless quality. As with all great contributions to the canon of political theory, The Power of the Powerless was written by someone who was much more than a spectateur engagé, who revealed a fresh and original response. In the end, Havel reminds us that both ideas and people matter profoundly to public life and political change, but only when responsibility is assumed rather than impersonally denied, and only in spaces that allow for authentic life, grounded in freedom and equality, to flourish.