Post-totalitarianism and thePromise of Living in Truth.

This paper is an effort to understand the implications of the opposition strategies to Eastern European totalitarianism for our contemporary view of a democratic, free society. Vaclav Havel’s views are indispensable to any analysis of the Eastern European opposition to totalitarianism for at least one essential reason: the road he charted seems to have been the one taken by events in most of the 1989 revolutions. By elucidating the terms of the opposition strategy proposed by Vaclav Havel in the context of the post-totalitarian system” (the variety of totalitarianism specific to Eastern Europe until 1989) I endeavor to identify Havel’s profile of the independent individual - the necessary precondition for a free society. Havel’s insights are not only a map for opposition, they also contain valuable prescriptions for what should be, in his view, the authentic basis of society. It is thus necessary to correctly identify the foundation of his opposition strategy in order to truly understand the implications of his outlook for civic and political life. The main question this paper tries to answer is how can the condition of the introspective, moral individual can be reconciled, in Havel’s view, with the condition of citizen, of participant in collective political action? The thesis of this essay is that such reconciliation calls, in Havel’s perspective, for resurrecting individual freedom from within and projecting it into daily actions - by living within the truth. Havel’s strategy for effective opposition calls for individual self-emancipation that is both aimed at breaking the vicious circle of apathy and at avoiding the morally damning effect of violent action. Havel presents this strategy as one logically deducible from his particular understanding of the post-totalitarian system. This essay will subsequently endeavor: 1. to present Havel’s understanding of the unique features of the Eastern-European communist system, which he labels the post-totalitarian order; 2. to account for what Havel sees as their effect on individuals in the post-totalitarian society; 3. (and on these basis)to explain what Havel considers the only promising strategy for overturning the post-totalitarian system and 4. to explain how that leads to the necessary basis for a society of free individuals. Understanding all these elements rescues Havel’s view of opposition from the standard criticisms of idealism and philosophical speculation, and depicts it, for any “friend of civil society”, as a thoroughly consistent and convincing one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]