On a non-political politics

The representative of dissent in Czechoslovakia was Vaclav Havel, who in his articles and essays analysed Czech society after 1969. His attention, however, was directed only towards the existential problems of man; the means of solving the crisis he sought outside politics and formulated thus non-political politics. He understood it as an instrument to assert 'life in truth' as an existential problem, but did not connect it with the question of power. Accordingly, he saw the way out of the crisis in existential, not political, revolution. This conception, which has been subject to criticism both before and after November 1989, influenced not only the strategy of the struggle against the normalisation regime, but even its transformation into a democratic system.