Politics and Conscience (Speech)

"Politics and Conscience" is the speech Václav Havel prepared for the University of Toulouse, which awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1984. The Czechoslovak authorities refused him permission to travel, and the speech was read by someone else in Havel's absence—a fitting irony for an address about the gap between official forms and lived reality. The speech distinguished between two fundamentally different approaches to politics. The first, which Havel associated with modern technocratic governance, treats politics as the management of systems—the optimization of inputs and outputs, the regulation of flows, the administration of a machinery whose fundamental logic is accepted as given. The second, which Havel called "anti-political politics" or "politics from below," begins with conscience: with the individual's perception of the gap between what is and what should be, and with the willingness to act on that perception despite the system's pressure to substitute calculation for conscience. Havel argued that the technocratic approach, however sophisticated, cannot address the most fundamental political question: what is the system for? The question cannot be