Václav Havel

Havel's political philosophy is at its core a personalist commitment to the irreducible dignity and responsibility of the embodied person. The greengrocer's sign in "The Power of the Powerless," "Living in Truth," and the Olga letters are all expressions of the personalist tradition. In the Czech context this flowed through Masaryk and the Hussite-Protestant-Christian-humanist inheritance, mediated through Patočka's phenomenology of responsibility — but the substantive commitment is personalist before it is methodologically phenomenological.

"The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and human responsibility." (Speech to the U.S. Congress, 21 February 1990)

A Christian-existentialist register (without confessional commitment) that prizes the individual's authentic stand against the anonymous forces of the post-totalitarian system. The greengrocer's sign in The Power of the Powerless is the textbook case.

"Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out." (Disturbing the Peace, ch. 5)

Havel was deeply influenced by Jan Patočka, the Czech phenomenologist and Charter 77 spokesman who died after police interrogation in 1977. Phenomenology is the method through which Havel's personalist commitments are articulated — the substantive analysis of how regimes of lies degrade the human lifeworld is recognisably phenomenological.

"You do not become a 'dissident' just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. … You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances." (The Power of the Powerless, IV)

A patient political realism about the operations of late Soviet-bloc authoritarianism and about the institutional difficulty of post-1989 transition. Havel was no naive moralist; the Summer Meditations are unsentimental about what politics actually involves.

"Lying can never save us from another lie. Falsifiers of history do not safeguard freedom but imperil it." (Letter to Alexander Dubček, 1969)

The early plays are recognisably within the Theatre of the Absurd tradition; the late political writing carries this sensibility forward as the diagnostic of post-totalitarian political life.

"Anyone who takes himself too seriously always runs the risk of looking ridiculous; anyone who can consistently laugh at himself does not." (Disturbing the Peace)