No Liberty without Responsibility: Hayek and Havel

Though rarely compared, Frederich Hayek and Václav Havel shared one fundamental concern: that the erosion of personal responsibility would result in its substitution by the overwhelming force of the state backed by an army of bureaucrats and hijacked by an autocratic thug. However, each focused on different elements of responsibility, with Hayek emphasizing responsibility as an evolutionary and economic concept, and Havel, in contrast, focusing on the existential and moral underpinnings of responsibility. Both arrived at the conclusion that liberty cannot persist without a corresponding ethos of individual responsibility.

Friedrich August von Hayek was born in 1899 in Vienna, then part of the Austro-​Hungarian Empire. Under the intellectual mentorship of the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, Hayek recognized the threats that communism and fascism presented to liberalism. Throughout his career, Hayek became one of the world’s most renowned defenders of liberalism, publishing books and articles about economics, history, law, psychology— the list goes on and on. Far from being swept away by the emerging enthusiasms for communism or fascism, Hayek was dismayed and concerned. He moved to London and did not return to Austria, citing Hitler’s rise to power as a good reason to stay far away. In his landmark work The Road to Serfdom, Hayek wrote, “Few are ready to recognize that the rise of fascism and Naziism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period but a necessary outcome of those tendencies” (Hayek 2009, p. 59). Hayek was lucky to escape the nightmare that his homeland endured.

Václav Havel was born in 1936 in Prague, part of what was then Czechoslovakia. This new nation had declared its independence from Austria-​Hungary in 1918. Only two years after Havel’s birth, Czechoslovakia was occupied by the Nazis. But the defeat of the Nazi regime did not restore Czechoslovakia’s independence. In 1948, Soviet Union forces swapped places with the ousted Nazis and became the new occupying force for the next 41 years. Unlike Hayek, Havel could not flee his nation, now surrounded by watchtowers and barbed wire. Despite these circumstances, Havel became a successful playwright and poet. Under the tutelage of Jan Patočka, Havel joined Charter 77, an informal civic initiative formed by Czech and Slovak intellectuals, artists, and writers, who would criticize the Communist regime for failing to respect human rights provisions that it had publicly agreed to, such as the 1960 constitution of Czechoslovakia. Charter 77 eventually inspired a political movement that resulted in the 1989 Velvet Revolution, a non-​violent transition of power from a one-​party communist state to a constitutional democracy. Havel became the president of Czechoslovakia and, later, the Czech Republic, when Chzechoslovakia was peacefully dissolved into two countries effective January 1st, 1993.

Though Hayek was a prolific writer, biographer and scholar Bruce Caldwell has dubbed his influential 1960 book, The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek’s most essential and enduring work. Hayek wrote The Constitution of Liberty intending to illustrate that social sciences cannot apply the same methodology as natural sciences to find solutions to problems of political organization. This overzealous scientism, Hayek warned, would leave increasingly large parts of our lives to the unaccountable discretion of so-​called expert opinion. Despite his background as an economist, he wrote, “I have come to feel more and more that the answers to many of the pressing social questions of our time are to be found, ultimately in the recognition of principles that lie outside the scope of technical economics or of any other single discipline” (Hayek 2011, p. 49).

Eighteen years after Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty, Havel wrote “The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-​Eastern Europe,” an essay dedicated to his recently deceased mentor, Jan Patočka. In this essay, Havel notes the totalitarianism of the Czechoslovakian state has evolved to the point that it could be called post-totalitarianism, which some understand as “late totalitarianism”. The post-​totalitarian state no longer needed to rely on brute force and violence. It had new means: an overwhelming and pre-​eminent dogma. Havel wrote that the post-​totalitarian state “commands an incomparably more precise, logically structured, generally comprehensible and, in essence, extremely flexible ideology that, in its elaborateness and completeness, is almost a secularized religion” (Havel 2016, p. 3).

The fifth chapter of The Constitution of Liberty is entirely dedicated to the nature of responsibility and freedom. Hayek makes the case that one cannot separate freedom from responsibility. Freedom means that every individual has simultaneously both the opportunity and the burden of choice. Freedom is valuable, but it comes with responsibility, and demands varying personal discipline in all spheres of life.

Hayek feared that amongst intellectuals, individual responsibility “has become an unpopular concept” (Hayek 2011, p. 133). He ascribes the decline in popularity of individual responsibility to the discoveries of natural science being improperly applied to social sciences. The scientific view expounded that natural phenomena are explained by prior events subject to recognizable and repeatable laws. If this is valid, humans are part of nature and subject to the same laws.

Hayek lamented this trend of applying principles of natural sciences to social sciences, writing, “The intellectual history of the last few generations gives us any number of instances of how this determinist picture of the world has shaken the foundation of the moral and political belief in freedom” (Hayek 2011, p. 135). The belief that scientific methods can be applied to human relations has led to countless attempts at managing, bureaucratizing, and ultimately controlling the lives of millions of people. Unable to take advantage of the knowledge available through markets in a free society, totalitarian societies fail to bring sustained economic progress.

While Hayek wrote The Constitution of Liberty, many intellectuals were still publicly enamored with Soviet-​style communism. Hayek believed that applying an overzealous, scientifically informed, deterministic philosophy had stunted his generation of intellectuals, limiting their imaginations through the absence of any theory of the spontaneity of human action, leading them naturally to abstract and utopian ideals of social engineering, pulling them into the orbit of Communist views.

The erosion of individual responsibility leads to an increasing reliance on the state to solve the needs of individuals and communities, something the state, with its limited knowledge and even more limited rule-​making flexibility, cannot achieve. For Hayek, individuals are not generic units that can be swapped in and out of any given system or situation on a whim. They are people with knowledge and experience of particular circumstances and conditions, which can be leveraged to maximize the productivity and knowledge of society to solve new problems; it is paramount we allow people to be responsible for their own fate, free to experiment, explore, and even flounder at times.

Hayek recognizes the burden that freedom imposes. He theorizes that the never-​ending pressure of being responsible has become one of the primary sources of dissatisfaction in the developed world. However, many of our painful responsibilities are inseparable from freedom. Hayek believed free societies have always had the highest regard for individual autonomy and responsibility. Still, he worries that freedom’s burdens will cause people to veer towards the state, slowly suffocating responsibility and eventually individual freedom.

Unlike Hayek, Havel lived under a totalitarian system when he wrote “The Power of the Powerless” in 1978. “Power of the Powerless” dips into theory, but it was meant to catalyze a moral revolution through the example of Charter 77’s members “living in truth,” a phrase Havel cribbed from fellow dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in Russia. Havel’s essay does not cover the same breadth of topics as Hayek’s much longer work, but he dedicates just as much care to the subject of individual responsibility.

Havel is against anything that obscures individual responsibility. The main culprit is the phenomenon of “ideology,” a system of ideas that can hypothetically answer nearly any question posed. Ideology aids in negating a sense of personal responsibility. For Havel, ideology takes many forms and plays many roles. It can act as an illusion that tricks, a veil to hide behind, or the glue that holds the whole social system together. Havel even describes ideology as a low-​rent home, as it offers an immediately available place of (false) belonging. Havel writes, “Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them” (Havel 2016, p .5).

But no matter the dire circumstances, Havel believed the oppressed always have within themselves the power to remedy their own powerlessness. Havel identified the Communist Party ideology as a “hypnotic charm” that allows people to comfortably bridge the gap between reality and falsehoods by creating excuses that abdicate individual responsibility (Havel 2016, p. 3). Havel’s solution was for people to reject ideology and live in truth.

Living in truth sounds very lofty and noble, but in Havel’s circumstances, living in truth meant discarding comfortable certainty. There were constant reprisals against dissidents and their families. Responsibility is a burden. Havel himself wrote that, “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” (Havel 2016, p. 40). Havel believed that all of us have responsibilities to our surroundings and those that inhabit them; these responsibilities are not the generalized prescriptions of ideology but specific, unique circumstances to which each person must react in their own way.

For Havel and Hayek, the greatest illusion of modernity was that humans could objectively understand and mould the world around them by applying specific patterns and overly rationalistic principles. In an earlier chapter of The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek criticizes what he calls the “French Rationalist” tradition of theorizing, which relies upon abstract reasoning. Our everyday lives are governed by rules and practices that arise spontaneously throughout the market and civil society due to human action, but not human design. Hayek believed that rationalist approaches held such sway in thinking about politics because they readily supply “flattering assumptions about the unlimited powers of human reason” (Hayek 2011, p. 108). Hayek was not arguing against reason, but the use of reason necessitating the “exclusive and coercive powers of government” (Hayek 2011, p. 132).

Similarly, Havel also believed modern rationalists promised a bright future but ushered in disastrous regimes backed by the state’s power. From personal experience, Havel identified that autocratic regimes hid their true intentions of domination in utopian projects masquerading as vehicles for the betterment of humanity. Like Hayek, Havel saw salvation in civil-society institutions and individual responsibility. In 1977, members of Charter 77 declared, “The decisive instance for us will always remain our own conscience and the consciousness of civic responsibility” (Skilling 1980, p. 15). Havel’s long-​term goals as a dissident were to lay the foundations of civil society run by individuals, not ideology or party.

Though not often paired, Hayek and Havel share the same central contention that life in a free society entails individual responsibility. With a mutual appreciation for civil society and spontaneity and a mutual disdain for excessive rationalism and the abuse of scientific language, Hayek and Havel share a common vocabulary of responsibility, though both take different approaches. For Hayek, responsibility is an evolutionary adaptation for making people obey rules without coercion.

For Havel, responsibility is an existential urge to find what no other can do in one’s place. According to Havel, the post-​totalitarian system of Czechoslovakia was so effective because it subverted individual responsibility and replaced it with the personal imperative to serve the regime, thus bestowing on each individual a collective responsibility for the dire circumstances that ultimately emerged. Overarching ideology removed individual agency and individual responsibility and Havel tirelessly advocated for a mass re-​awakening of individual responsibility, which would be a prelude and a prerequisite to the overthrow of the post-​totalitarian system.