East European Politics and Societies

The guest editors of this special issue on The Power of the Powerless, forty years after its composition, here introduce the collection. They present the rationale for revisiting Václav Havel’s classic essay and explain how this collection was inspired by an “international symposium by correspondence” that Jiří Suk of the Institute for Contemporary History and Kristina Andělová of Charles University, both in Prague, initiated in 2015, resulting in a collective volume entitled Jednoho dne se v našem zelináři cosi vzbouří: Eseje o Moci bezmocných. The guest editors briefly summarize each of the seventeen essays featured in the present collection and contextualize the newly annotated English translation of The Power of the Powerless that concludes it.

This essay explores the paradoxical relationship between Václav Havel’s dramas and his essays, in particular, The Power of the Powerless. Havel’s plays aimed at creating a new community awareness of the “post-totalitarian” system in which people were trapped. His essays employ similar dramatic and analytic techniques to show a way out of that trap by “living within the truth,” that is, living in a way that exposes the mendacity of “post-totalitarianism” and spreads the virus of truth and change throughout society. The present essay argues that the ultimate aim of the “existential revolution” Havel calls for is in fact the regeneration and strengthening of civil society and the creation of institutions that serve people, not power. It concludes by looking at the continuing relevance of The Power of the Powerless today.

Havel’s essay The Power of the Powerless described a unique situation in post-war Europe, when the Communist system of power was exhausted and those deprived of power under it were beginning to know each other and cooperate with each other in a new kind of underground. I describe the spiritual condition of a certain kind of young person in this underground, eager to find another cultural identity than the one offered by the official ideology and anxious to “live in truth.” I suggest that the sudden collapse of Communism and the advent of a new consumer society left those young people in a certain measure bereft.

The author reflects on her experience teaching present-day students about life under totalitarianism. Forty years of Communism is a long time; attitudes and opinions matured and shifted—even (if we examine Havel’s essay) those of his greengrocer. And what should be the focus of the teaching: the terror, the heroism, or the everyday business of living? How can one convey the different levels and subtleties of a world that history presents in black and white? The past could disappear in a hazy memory, but young people, once provoked, ask direct and practical questions that do connect the past to the present.

The writings of Václav Havel are haunted by the character of the seemingly powerless man who nevertheless shares responsibility for the perpetuation of an unjust system. He is the incarnation of what Havel in The Power of the Powerless called the “instrument of a mutual totality, the auto-totality of society” that does much of the policing work of the post-totalitarian state. The greengrocer of that essay’s third section was not the only such embodiment; he had contemporaries in the characters of the famous Vaněk plays. But the cast is not limited to them either; we can find examples of this phenomenon in some of Havel’s earliest essays, and in some of his less known later plays that explore the social dynamics that underpin and undermine political systems.

This article turns to Havel’s contemporaries in the Czech music underground to look at earlier uses of the phrase “living in truth.” I focus on Egon Bondy’s 1976 novel The Shaman, where truth is portrayed in mystical terms as a form of transcendence achieved through solitary spiritual training—a mental state that is divorced from political opposition. Havel repurposes the idea of “living in truth,” avoiding mystical notions in favor of civic engagement, but he also steers clear of the romance of “dissident stories” about people persecuted for such engagement. I explore why Havel’s famous story of the greengrocer is so weak on motivation; rather than painting a scene or creating a three-dimensional character, Havel gestures weakly at the greengrocer’s sudden transformation into an oppositional figure. Havel also consistently uses scare quotes around the phrase “living in truth,” registering his own discomfort with a phrase that is inspiring, yet plays into dissident clichés. I see The Power of the Powerless as delineating a version of dissident truth while remaining skeptical about its transmission; Havel skillfully mixes pathos and irony as he considers the role of “dissidents” caught between Czechoslovak realities and Western expectations.

While ideology is a central concept in Václav Havel’s master essay, at no point does he operate with a standard definition of the term. Instead, Havel “defines” ideology in metaphorical and performative terms, reframing our understanding of its meaning and power in the modern world by focusing on its pre-political operation. This point has yet to be appreciated by scholars of Havel. To better understand the import of Havel’s approach, this essay details metaphorical contexts for ideology in The Power of the Powerless and draws connections to ideological performativity in Havel’s plays from the 1970s as well as in the cinema of the Czech New Wave.

Philosophical scrutiny of The Power of the Powerless shows that Havel’s key concept “the intentions [or aims] of life” depends on Heidegger’s conception of Dasein’s authenticity, even if Havel replaces Heidegger’s “anticipating death” with “the intentions of life” to fulfill itself in freedom. At the same time, these “intentions” prove to have a self-destructive tendency (as Havel’s plays make very clear). In his political reflections and possibly also in his later political activities, however, this point seems to be underestimated. Political systems do not differ only by the room they allow for free development but also by the degree to and manner by which they protect the intentions of life from their inner tendency to degenerate.

What is the power of the powerless today? By drawing on the philosophy of history that informed Havel’s landmark essay, this piece presents notes for a possible sequel. It assesses the contemporary state of what Havel’s mentor, Jan Patočka, called “technological civilization,” particularly with respect to the growing linkage Patočka perceived between boredom (a product of this civilization) and orgiastic violence. Reflecting on the Havelian panoramas of our time and the ideologies associated with them, the piece situates our present in the multimillennial Patočkan history of human beings’ relation to meaning, violence, and responsibility. Following the logic behind Patočka’s and Havel’s Cassandra-like warnings from the 1970s, the piece concludes by confronting the increasing probability of global catastrophe, but it takes inspiration from their work to outline a program of responsible hope.

This essay juxtaposes two thinkers: the French literary critic and philosopher René Girard (1923–2015) and the Czech playwright, essayist, and dissident Václav Havel (1936–2011). In particular, the text examines Havel’s 1978 essay The Power of the Powerless through the lens of Girard’s structuralist model of mimetic desire, violent sacrifice, and a cultural order sustained by prohibition, ritual, and myth. Arguing against the French structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009), Girard insisted on a reality behind the text: myths disclosed real victims. Girard and Havel shared a merciless anti-populism: society was guilty. They shared something else as well: in an age of a loss of faith in Marxism and all grand narratives, and of skepticism about the possibility of any stable meaning, subjectivity, and truth, Havel and Girard insisted on the ontological reality of both truth and lies, and on the ontological reality of the distinction between them.

Two ways of reading Havel’s classic essay are proposed. According to the first, the focus is on the peculiarities of the post-totalitarian system, inhabited by the famous greengrocer, where slogans, ritual communication, pervasive manipulation, and arbitrariness prevail and power operates as if automatic and anonymous. The lines of conflict run though each person: everyone is both victim and supporter. Comparison is made with Michel Foucault’s (early) view of power, which similarly rejected seeing power as exercised by some over others, stressing power’s anonymity and pervasiveness. For Foucault, at that stage of his thinking, however, power constitutes “regimes of truth,” whereas for Havel the “power of truth” is a force that has the potential successfully to resist and subvert domination. The power of truth is that of the greengrocer and others “living within the lie” to expose and shatter the world of appearances. Havel calls on them to end their complicity. This might seem moralistic, but Havel’s view was that under post-totalitarian conditions, morality would prove the best strategy. The second reading suggests that the post-totalitarian system is the “extreme version of technological civilization and the industrial-consumer society.” But this account of power is at odds with the first, since in this view the powerless would have no prospects of resisting and overcoming domination. Havel’s account is thus political and relevant to other political contexts, raising several empirical questions concerning the dynamics of power and the conditions for the success of morally fueled protest and normative questions concerning power and responsibility.

This essay criticizes Havel’s famous “living in truth” paradigm and parable of the greengrocer as morally wrong, politically false, and complicit in the later emergence of a backlash against liberal intellectuals and democracy. By vilifying the weak, Havel disregards the role resources play in enabling opposition. By insisting that the opposite of living in truth is “obedience,” he disregards the particular weapons of the weak. Havel’s approach is contrasted with Polish versions of independent civic activism, whose intellectual theorists, understanding their privileged resources and making a calculated play for political influence, urged people to disobey but never derided anyone for not doing so. In the end, “living in truth” is seen as of little relevance to the success of past opposition, and Havel’s approach dangerous to hold up as a model.

This is a personal reflection on the effects of The Power of the Powerless on students living in post-tyrannical societies—the Czech Republic in 1993 and Iraq in 2010. Czech students read the essay as an indictment of Marxist ideology, one-party rule, bureaucratic stagnation, and their former educational system. Havel was a symbol of resistance, human rights, and courage. Iraqi students found a different lesson. The Power of the Powerless does not excuse tyranny, but it does explain the way people trying to live a normal life rationalize their compliance with repression. Havel’s essay made Iraqi students comprehend how complicated choices are under difficult circumstances. Perhaps, as its author intended, the essay proved upon reflection to be a source of compassion.

This essay considers the notion of bearing witness as an analytical path for assessing and applying the legacy of Havel’s essay The Power of the Powerless. Havel’s account of disempowerment is connected to the role of ideology in creating the “environment of power” as a tool that enables participation in one’s own disempowerment. Havel dissects the process of becoming powerless and then reconstructs empowerment by reflecting on the journey of the archetypal post-totalitarian subject, the greengrocer. In Popescu’s view, reconstruction is based on the mechanism of bearing witness to one’s own presence in the world and its constitutive effects on the lives of others. To bear witness requires a search for evidence of the ontological match between world, self, and human meaning. In this context, acts of dissenters are the exemplary manifestation of a potentiality that seems to reside in us all. Dissenters bear witness to alternatives—reflecting what Havel considers a baseline of humanity: the natural multiplicity of human experience.

Speaking truth to powers-that-be and overthrowing a “regime of lies” were both dissident trademarks during the Cold War era. But what if overreliance on such an idealized and static notion of Truth can be a problem in an age of post-factual politics and information warfare? In this essay, I first problematize the idea that “truth will set us free” and re-read Václav Havel’s The Power of the Powerless together with a contemporary work—the film Camouflage by Krzysztof Zanussi—to find other foundations for political strategies, beyond the “struggle for truth,” that might transcend the post-totalitarian situation and inform our normative choices and political agency today. In a reality over-flooded with information, where spreading doubt and forging counter-narratives has become a weapon, and where conspiracy theories seem to gain ground, relying on a self-evident distinction between Truth and Lies no longer has the power for political mobilization. It is individual conscience—nesting moral and political responsibility within the individual—rather than an externally existing Truth that might prove a more productive compass in a world of multiple vantage points and continuous re-interpretations.

Havel’s essay The Power of the Powerless is a key expression of Havel’s views on responsibility, particularly as personified in the greengrocer taking responsibility for his actions and his decision to authentically “live in truth.” Havel’s “responsibilityism” undergirds his argument that the powerless do indeed have power—although assuming this heavy responsibility is not for the faint-hearted. As a defense of “bottom-up” politics and a call to action in both authoritarian and depersonalized bureaucratic regimes, moreover, the essay remains relevant today, an important contribution to the canon of political theory.

The author looks at Havel’s The Power of the Powerless in the context of Czech twentieth-century political fiction and the criticism that his writing and political activity has received. He also introduces other works, essays and plays, by the author that aid the assessment of statements made in The Power of the Powerless. The last quarter of the article discusses Havel and New Age ideas and endeavors to look at The Power of the Powerless in that light, but also to understand how a person who argued most of his life against the elements of ochlocracy in his own country could in spiritual matters become something of an ochlocrat himself.