A brief review of The Power of the Powerless, Václav Havel’s discussion of the meaning and importance of dissent in totalitarian societies.

Jonathan Fortier is the director of Lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org. Over the past 25 years he has worked to promote the principles of a free society with many organizations, including Liberty Fund, the Institute for Humane Studies, and the Fraser Institute. He earned his MPhil and his doctorate at the University of Oxford.

Vaclav Havel’s Power of the Powerless (1978) explores the nature of totalitarian government in Czechoslovakia during the Soviet occupation. Havel offers a sustained meditation on the ways in which political persecution leads to silence, complicity, and obedience amongst the people. This behavior, in turn, deepens and extends the reach and power of despotic control. Those who refuse to parrot the regime, who speak the truth and live authentically, present an existential threat to totalitarian government and the ideology that sustains it.

Havel’s insights about late-​stage totalitarianism (what he termed “post-​totalitarian” society) are rooted in his particular circumstances, but apply equally to a wide variety of authoritarian regimes that employ the same tactics of control, censorship, and regulation in violating individual rights and freedoms.

As punishment for writing The Power of the Powerless, Havel was followed, harrassed, repeatedly interrogated, and ultimately spent nearly 4 years in prison as a political dissident. After his release from prison he continued to write and speak in courageous opposition to the violations of individual rights in his country. Shortly after the Velvet Revolution (autumn 1989), Havel became president of Czechoslovakia, and then, in 1993, president of the newly-​formed Czech Republic.

Between the aims of the post-​totalitarian system and the aims of life there is a yawning abyss: while life, in its essence, moves towards plurality, diversity, independent self-​constitution and self-​organization, in short, towards the fulfilment of its own freedom, the post-​totalitarian system demands conformity, uniformity, and discipline.

Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless, p. 19.