Summary of Vaclav Havel & John Keane's The Power of the Powerless

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 The Power of the Powerless was a book written by Czech writer Václav Havel, who described how his country was able to resist totalitarianism. He believed that the book was also a critique of the Western democracies. #2 Havel’s essay, The Power of the Powerless, is about how we must take responsibility for truth in the world. Truth is what moves us in the world, and how we move the world back. We must take decisions that accord with our personal sense of what matters. #3 Havel’s book, The Power of the Powerless, was published in Czechoslovakia in 1978. It was a collection of essays about dissent, and it exposed the abnormality of normalization. It changed the semantics of the political drama so that typical behavior seemed absurd. #4 Following 1968, the Czechoslovak government allowed the writer Jaroslav Dietl to work as a screenwriter for Czechoslovak state television. He took policies that would have been portrayed by earlier Stalinists as heroic, such as the collectivization of agriculture or the demolition of old town centers, and turned them into the backdrop for soap operas.