Václav Havel’s 1978 essay The Power of the Powerless is eerily relevant today
- Written by Darius von Guttner Sporzynski, Professor of History, Australian Catholic University
When Czech political dissident, playwright and poet Václav Havel wrote The Power of the Powerless in October 1978, he was not offering a manifesto in any conventional political sense. Nor was he outlining a program for opposition or regime change.
Instead, he set out to analyse a distinctive form of domination that did not rely primarily on terror, spectacle or charismatic authority, but on routine compliance and the internalisation of untruth.
His central claim was disarmingly simple.
Systems of coercive power endure not only because of police power or elite control, but because ordinary people participate in them by acting as if they believe what they know to be false. They live, as Havel put it, “within a lie”.
His most famous example was of the greengrocer who displays the slogan “Workers of the world, unite!” – not to express revolutionary zeal but to signal conformity. The sign communicates obedience and a willingness to perform the expected ritual – thus helping to sustain a system whose strength lies in habituation. What matters is not belief, but participation. The slogan functions less as political content than as a social password, marking the bearer as safe and nonthreatening.
Havel’s originality lay in shifting attention away from rulers and institutions towards everyday behaviour. Tyranny, in his account, is not only upheld by party elites or security services, but by countless small acts of acquiescence that create what he described as a “post-totalitarian” order.
Such systems normalise untruth.
Sceptical of heroics
Havel saw the fall of communism, ultimately becoming the president of both Czechoslovakia (in 1989–92) and of the Czech Republic (1993–2003). He died in 2011.
His essay is often misread as a celebration of heroic dissent or moral exceptionalism. In fact, it is sceptical of heroics. The power of the powerless, he suggests, does not lie in spectacle, numbers or immediate success. It lies in example.
Truth operates politically not because it commands obedience, but because it awakens recognition. It speaks to what Havel described as the “hidden sphere” of social consciousness, the half-suppressed awareness that life organised around falsehood is corrosive and degrading.
This helps explain why Havel dismissed conventional measures of political effectiveness in societies dominated by totalitarian power. Elections, parties and platforms mean little when the public sphere itself has been hollowed out and emptied of genuine contestation.
What matters instead is the slow reconstruction of moral agency.
Independent cultural activity, unofficial networks and samizdat publishing, for instance, were not substitutes for politics, but its necessary groundwork. They preserved spaces in which truth could be spoken without immediate translation into slogans or coercive power.
A contemporary invocation
Carney’s argument at Davos turned on a familiar contradiction. Political leaders, diplomats and institutions speak the language of rules, reciprocity, and shared norms, while tolerating practices that hollow out those norms. Trade regimes are described as rules-based even as economic coercion becomes routine. Security arrangements are framed as collective while asymmetries of power grow more explicit.
Mark Carney speaking at Davos.
Gian Ehrenzeller/AAP
The problem, in Havel’s terms, is not simply that rules are broken, but that everyone continues to behave as if they still function as advertised. This collective performance sustains an order that no longer delivers what it promises.
In this reading, the international order begins to resemble Havel’s post-totalitarian system. The slogans differ, but the logic is familiar. Language masks fear, dependency and imbalance. The global greengrocer hangs the sign not because he believes it, but because not hanging it appears too risky.
Carney’s proposed response was not withdrawal or isolation, but a call for what he described as “middle powers” to stop pretending. To live in truth at the level of international politics means acknowledging openly where the system fails, refusing convenient fictions and building coalitions grounded in actual shared interests rather than abstract formulae.
The danger of abstraction
Yet there is a risk that “living in truth” becomes an elevated moral injunction detached from the conditions of everyday life.
Havel’s greengrocer is not a philosopher or an essayist. He is a worker responsible for opening a shop, supplying scarce goods and navigating a collectivised economy. For him, refusal carries immediate and concrete consequences: such as loss of employment, harassment or exclusion.
By contrast, intellectuals such as Havel, writing three decades after the communist takeover, occupied a different position. Their capacity to articulate critique in essays, however restricted the audience, rested on forms of cultural capital and social insulation unavailable to most citizens. Havel understood this tension, but it remains a persistent problem in the reception of his ideas.
The same risk attends contemporary invocations such as Carney’s. Those preoccupied with meeting basic needs, managing precarious employment or coping with rising costs are unlikely to be moved by abstract calls for moral clarity in global governance. For them, the performance of ritual may appear not as cowardice, but as survival.
This does not invalidate Havel’s argument, but complicates its application. Revolutions and transformations do not arise from ideas alone. They occur when ideas intersect with lived experience in ways that make existing arrangements untenable. Havel’s insight acquires political force only when “living in truth’” ceases to sound like moral exhortation and begins to articulate shared grievances and recognisable realities.
The question is not whether truth matters, but how it is made audible to those whose compliance sustains the system in the first place.
In that unresolved tension lies the continuing relevance of The Power of the Powerless. It offers no guarantees, refusing consolation. It insists that participation is never neutral and even the smallest refusal carries ethical weight. Whether that refusal can once again ignite broader change depends on whether truth speaks to the conditions of ordinary life.
Authors: Darius von Guttner Sporzynski, Professor of History, Australian Catholic University
