Introduction: The Power of the Powerless at Forty

Forty years after its composition, Václav Havel’s The Power of the Powerless retains relevance even in contexts far removed from its original setting. Drafted as a contribution to a Polish-Czechoslovak conversation on why and how dissent made sense in the conditions of Communist central Europe in 1978, the essay combined an eloquent distillation of the phenomenological ideas that inspired Charter 77 with a penetrating analysis of the power structures in which “dissidents” found themselves—structures constituted and perpetually regenerated by ordinary citizens as well as functionaries of the party-state. It was only with reference to this deep understanding of society that Havel proposed to advise dissidents—the new “specter haunting Europe”—about “what was to be done.” The essay was originally published as a stand-alone volume in Czechoslovak samizdat, but it has subsequently been translated into at least twenty-one foreign languages and published in even more editions (some of them, like the Chinese and Iranian, still in samizdat). ¹ Italian students scribbled quotes from The Power of the Powerless on university walls in 1980, the essay circulated in the streets of Cairo during the Arab Spring, and more recently it has become recommended reading for Americans shaken by the movement that made Donald Trump their president. ² The essay has inspired readers where oppression is acute but also where it is subtle, because it is embedded in a critique not just of Communist power structures but of technological modernity as such. It explains how the oppressive and dehumanizing power structures of technological modernity are constituted collectively, such that “the lines of conflict run through each person” (XVII), and it further explains how each person nonetheless retains a real or potential power independent of these structures. ³

Even after forty years, however, questions remain about the inspiration and intent behind The Power of the Powerless, and new questions have arisen about its applicability. Why did Havel choose a greengrocer to illustrate his central arguments about the constitution of power and powerlessness, and about the potential power of “living in truth”? Was the greengrocer really as representative of ordinary citizens—either sociologically or in Havel’s imagination—as we have often assumed? What was the relation between Havel the dramatist and Havel the essayist, and how should it inform our reading of The Power of the Powerless? How do Havel’s ideas about power, technological civilization, and truth compare with those of thinkers like Martin Heidegger and Jan Patočka, from whom he drew inspiration, or theorists who at the same time but in other contexts were examining similar problems, such as Michel Foucault and René Girard? How closely should Havel’s 1978 essay be associated with the subsequent deeds of the dissident and president? How did he seek to apply the essay’s insights in the new world that came into being after 1989? How should we?

The essays in this collection address such questions about The Power of the Powerless and its enduring relevance from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Some proceed on the basis of close textual analysis, whether of the essay itself or of related texts. Some examine the philosophical background of Havel’s essay or its theoretical implications. Some reflect on personal experience with the milieu in which The Power of the Powerless was written, or on teaching the essay in displaced contexts. Most were originally written for a collective volume that appeared in Czech (with one Slovak contribution) in 2016, edited by Jiří Suk of the Institute for Contemporary History and Kristina Andělová of Charles University, both in Prague, and funded by the Czech Science Foundation. ⁴ Essays for that volume that were originally written in English (or in Czech by Anglophone scholars) have been revised by their authors for this publication, while two essays by Czech scholars have been translated (with feedback from their authors). ⁵ Two additional essays have been specifically commissioned for this collection. Suk and Andělová, who have cooperated extensively in the preparation of this special issue, imagined the Czech edition as “an international symposium by correspondence,” and indeed, though no actual meetings took place until the essays were all finalized, they are in dialogue with one another. ⁶

When the editors of EEPS, Wendy Bracewell and Krzysztof Jasiewicz, accepted our proposal for this special issue, they asked whether we might include the text of The Power of the Powerless. Independently, the process of translating the Czech essays into English brought to light some surprising discrepancies between the standard, Paul Wilson translation of Havel’s essay and the wording necessary for the Czech essays to make sense. We therefore asked Wilson (who had already contributed an essay to the collection) whether he would consider revisiting his translation, and to our delight, he was happy to do so. The intricacies of copyright law produced the decision to annotate the original translation rather than “simply” retranslate The Power of the Powerless; the result is a reproduction of the classic text with footnotes that clarify, amplify, and in some cases correct the original translation.

Our collection begins with Suk and Andělová’s epilogue to the Czech edition, which examines continuities and apparent about-faces in Havel’s thinking from 1978 to 2003—that is, from his dissident years to the end of his second presidency of the Czech Republic. The authors argue that apparent contradictions in Havel’s words and deeds over time should be seen as manifestations of the dramatist’s consistent fascination with paradox, and that he remained committed to certain core ideas throughout this quarter-century even if the revolution of 1989 changed the possibilities for their realization.

Several contributions draw on personal experience to reflect on the history and significance of The Power of the Powerless. Paul Wilson’s piece, written especially for this collection, marks one of the rare occasions when an author usually associated with translating a landmark essay for an English audience pauses to reflect on the importance of the work and how he approached it. Roger Scruton, who first came to Communist Czechoslovakia to lecture in the “underground university” in 1979, describes young people excluded from the official educational system who rejected ideology for thought, and whose powerlessness made possible a transcendent experience of virtue, love, and happiness—a kind of “erotic monasticism” that somehow faltered after 1989. Barbara Day reflects on the difficulty (but not impossibility) of explaining the moral complexity of the Communist era to young people with no experience of it; she shows how inserting oneself into the subject position of a Czech greengrocer in the 1970s requires a leap of historical and philosophical imagination that challenges black/white generalizations.

A number of the contributions to this volume examine The Power of the Powerless from the perspectives of literary history and intertextual criticism. Kieran Williams situates the essay in Czech literature and theater, and he discusses the inspiration for Havel’s greengrocer as well as the many parallels between the greengrocer and Havel’s dramatic characters. Jonathan Bolton places Havelian truth in a longer Czechoslovak dissident tradition, including especially the work of Egon Bondy, and he interrogates just how little we know of the greengrocer’s eventual epiphany or inner motivation. David S. Danaher shows how Havel’s essays, poems, and plays illuminate modern human beings’ pre-political attraction to ideology, which manifests itself as “ritualized performance that distorts an individual’s sense of self”; the essays and poems accomplish this through extensive use of metaphor, while the plays succeed in depicting the phenomenon more directly.

Not without reason is Havel’s Power of the Powerless recognized as an important contribution to political philosophy. Although hardly a conventional treatise, as Lenka Karfíková points out, the essay offers rich and multiple readings, and Havel’s ideas of truth, authenticity, and the “intentions” of life are both a variation on and a response to Martin Heidegger. James Krapfl revisits the philosophy of history of Havel’s mentor, Jan Patočka, to whose memory The Power of the Powerless was dedicated, and suggests how Patočka’s ideas might inspire a contemporary sequel to Havel’s essay. Marci Shore uniquely reads The Power of Powerless through the work of René Girard, a critical theorist not often enough discussed with respect to Communism, given his focus on mimesis, ritual sacrifice, and the scapegoating of an excluded “other.”

The central parable of Havel’s greengrocer is a recurring theme in these essays, yet it is also the subject of some debate. Steven Lukes, who wrote the introduction to the first English-language edition of The Power of the Powerless in 1985, notes that in the normalized world that Havel describes, both the prime minister and the greengrocer share power and therefore responsibility, albeit to differing degrees. Havel thus shares Michel Foucault’s understanding of power as something that permeates society rather than something imposed by one side on another, but whereas Foucault argued that power constitutes “regimes of truth,” Havel insists that truth which expresses the hidden aims of life exists independently of power systems and can, when conditions are ripe, demoralize them. David Ost, by contrast, argues that the difference of degree matters, and that Havel and his interpreters are therefore unjustly elitist in pinning responsibility for the power system on the working-class greengrocer, for whom conformity is a safer strategy than “living in truth.” Yet in James F. Pontuso’s experience, Havel’s greengrocer is a figure to whom readers in post-tyrannical societies can relate with compassion; Pontuso’s Czech students in 1993 personally identified with the greengrocer and his moral transformation, while Iraqi students in 2010 recognized the greengrocer as someone who, like their parents, had rationalized support for a repressive regime out of desire to live a normal life.

Several authors take The Power of the Powerless as a point of departure for thinking about individual responsibility in the contemporary world. Delia Popescu takes examples from such contemporary developments as the Arab Spring to reflect on what it is that makes “something in the greengrocer snap”; she shows how bearing witness to the clash between our inner humanity and the lived experience of oppression can become an anchor of selfhood and a means of empowerment in the face of institutional subordination of meaning and responsibility. Kacper Szulecki addresses the difficulty of finding objective truth in the weaponized “flood of information” that characterizes contemporary technological civilization, and he argues that in the resulting moral crisis our ultimate guide to truth can only be each individual’s conscience. Barbara J. Falk suggests that a “thick” notion of Havelian responsibility is a productive call to action; in her view, the everyday ability of the powerless to assume responsibility on smaller or greater levels contributes to the essay’s universality.

In a final essay, Robert B. Pynsent demonstrates how The Power of the Powerless builds upon a tradition of twentieth-century Czech political fiction, and he assesses Havel’s enduring contribution to Czechoslovak and world history in light of today’s dramatic reversals in the post–World War II global order. Pynsent suggests that following Havel’s election to the presidential office, where he became a global celebrity, his talent for penetrating critique receded to the background. The quintessential Havelian concepts of truth and love, which in The Power of the Powerless and other essays impress as values, could easily become kitsch in the form of presidential slogans and symbols, like the illuminated pink heart on Prague Castle.

Paul Wilson’s newly annotated translation of The Power of the Powerless concludes the collection. Wilson initially found it difficult to see the text with fresh eyes, so in addition to pointing out alternate translations of particular passages in the essays of other contributors, one of the guest editors carefully read the Czech original against the translation and presented Wilson with a comprehensive list of words and passages for which an alternate translation seemed worth considering. Wilson evaluated each one, sticking with his original wording in most cases but adding footnotes to address some. (In a few instances we discovered typographical errors in the originally published translation; these have been corrected in the text and flagged with an asterisk.) This collaborative process made clear that no single translation can be considered definitive. The original Czech text contains ambiguities and contradictions, incredibly convoluted sentences, and concepts that cannot be easily or elegantly rendered in English. Depending on the strategies a translator adopts, Havel can be made to come across as modernist or post-modern, a liberal or a radical, a dreamer or a visionary. One must also choose between a translation that appeals to a general audience, for whom Havel’s writing may need to be streamlined to make it appealing, and a translation that would satisfy a scholarly audience, who may want to scrutinize each word from a variety of angles. Wilson originally prepared what he calls an “interpretive translation” for the former audience, and though the new annotations will answer some academic questions, a genuinely critical English-language edition of The Power of the Powerless—as desirable as it might be—would require more time and multilateral collaboration than we could arrange for this special issue. Critics who wish to conduct close readings that carefully examine word choice and logical (in)consistency, therefore, must still rely on the Czech original. In any case, the impossibility of a “definitive” translation reflects the power of Havel’s text: it can bring together people of markedly divergent views, so long as they are sympathetic to the basic “dissident” program that he describes as “responsibility to and for the world.”

Havel’s illuminated heart eventually made its way from Prague Castle to the European Parliament in Brussels, and more recently a refurbished building of the same institution in Strasbourg was named in his honor. ⁷ The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe has created the Václav Havel Human Rights Prize (in partnership with the Václav Havel Library and the Charter 77 Foundation), while the Human Rights Foundation in New York annually awards the Václav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent to celebrate “those who, with bravery and ingenuity, unmask the lie of dictatorship by living in truth.” ⁸ Though such gestures reaffirm the “pre-political” longing for the transcendence of alienation that Havel’s work addresses, they also carry the risk of trivializing or fossilizing the dissident president and his legacy (even of becoming substitutes for the greengrocer’s sign). As Havel recognized in his final play, Odcházení, ⁹ institutionalization can provide an avenue for promoting and realizing good ideas, but if one is not careful it can also reduce, bureaucratize, and sterilize those ideas, paradoxically alienating them from the messy but living soil in which they grew.

The essays in this collection are not hagiographic. Rather than placing Havel on a pedestal, they bring his work to life by dialogically engaging with it in nuanced, critical ways. To The Power of the Powerless they return freshness and complexity rooted in lived experience, with all its paradoxes and imperfections. Though Havel’s essay on the constitution of power and the potential power of the powerless now occupies a recognized position in the Western canon of political theory, it remains provocative and inspiring in ways that are still being discovered. In circumstances that have changed dramatically in the past forty years, both in central Europe and around the globe, The Power of the Powerless can still help us interpret our daily encounters with power and evaluate possibilities for personal and collective action. The essay can still inspire those who pledge, like the Charter 77 signatories who were its first readers, to work together so that all might “work and live as free human beings.” ¹⁰ It is in this spirit that we present this special issue.