He continued:
Politicians—at least the wiser ones—will not reject such activity but, on the contrary, will welcome it. I, for instance, would welcome hearing, in this country, a really strong and eloquent voice coming from my colleagues, one that could not be ignored no matter how critical it might be, a voice that did more than merely grumble or engage in esoteric reflection but became a clear public and political fact.
He then concluded with an eloquent appeal for us all to stand up for Salman Rushdie, for Wole Soyinka, and for Bosnian intellectuals.
Emboldened by this speech, the assembled PEN delegates could begin their usual round of reports, resolutions, and the all-important business of supporting persecuted and imprisoned writers—work in which Czech writers who had themselves long been persecuted or imprisoned could now join. But you could see at once (though I’m not sure how many of the international PEN delegates did see at once) that Havel’s speech was addressed to the domestic audience as much as to us. And it was a blow—a pen thrust—at Klaus, whom Czech readers, radio listeners, or television viewers would immediately understand not to be among those “wiser” politicians who would welcome independent intellectual criticism.
Indeed, that very day, Czech readers could find in the newspaper Lidové Noviny a column by Václav Klaus rejecting, in the name of liberalism, the demand recently made by a group of intellectuals that the showing of violence on television be regulated by the state. President Havel had come out in support of the intellectuals’ petition.
In the evening, the prime minister, who as a regular newspaper columnist and essayist is himself a member of Czech PEN, gave a reception for the PEN delegates. His speech of welcome was also in part an answer to Havel’s welcome speech in the morning, thus producing further symptoms of slight bafflement among those delegates who thought they were just attending a writers’ congress. As we left the reception, officials distributed free copies of two books (in Czech) by Klaus, almost as if to say, “Look, fee writes books too!” One of the books is called Why Am I a Conservative? and begins with a glowing tribute to Margaret Thatcher, entitled “Inspiration.”2
The next day there was a panel discussion on the very general theme of “Intellectuals, Government Policy, and Tolerance” in a large hall at the foreign ministry. The most prominent panelist was none other than the writer-premier Václav Klaus. He was joined on the platform by the Hungarian essayist György Konrád (himself a former president of International PEN and someone who has written extensively on the role of intellectuals), the Czech novelist Ivan Klíma, writers from Germany, Sweden, and Turkey, and myself. Extracts from the discussion were to be broadcast on Czech television. Good press coverage for the prime minister among these intellectuals would no doubt enhance his public image, which might be useful in the imminent local-government elections. In fact, the prime minister was going straight from this discussion to campaign for his party in the provinces.
Before the discussion, we were handed copies of an essay on tolerance, nicely printed in five languages. And whom was the essay by? Comenius? John Locke? Voltaire? No, by Václav Klaus. That philosopher of tolerance then opened the discussion with a remarkable short statement in which he announced that in a free country, such as the Czech Republic had now become, the distinction between “dependent” and “independent” intellectuals no longer had any real importance. Some intellectuals were in politics, others not. Expert advice was always welcome. But it made no sense to speak any more about a special role for “independent” intellectuals.
Now the critic was hauled onstage. For this sally could not go unanswered. I began my reply by saying that it was both appropriate and moving to discuss the subject of “Intellectuals, Government Policy, and Tolerance” in Prague, where, for twenty-one long years, from the Soviet invasion of 1968 until the “velvet revolution,” some individual Czechs—and Slovaks—had given us a shining example of what intellectuals can do in opposition to a repressive state. The names of Jan Patočka and Václav Havel must stand for many, many more whom I would have liked to name.
Five years on, however, we happily found ourselves in very different times in Central Europe. What was the role of intellectuals now? I argued, against Klaus, that independence is a crucial attribute of what it should mean to be an intellectual. Not just in a dictatorship but precisely in a liberal, democratic state, independent intellectuals have a crucial role to play.
There should be, I suggested, a necessarily adversarial (but not necessarily hostile) relationship between the independent intellectual and the professional politician. The intellectual’s job is to seek the truth and then to present it as fully and clearly and interestingly as possible. The politician’s job is to work in half-truth. The very word party implies partial, one-sided. The Czech word for party, strana, meaning literally side, says it even more clearly. Of course, the opposition parties then present the other side, the other half of the truth. But this is one of those strange cases where two halves don’t make a whole.
The position of a nonexecutive president or constitutional monarch may, I noted, be a partial exception to this rule. Such a person, standing above party politics, may contribute to setting certain higher intellectual or moral standards in public life. But as a rule, there is a necessary and healthy division of labor in a liberal state between independent intellectuals and professional politicians. Arguably, this is as important as the formal separation of powers between executive, legislature, and judiciary. It is part of the larger and all-important creative tension between the state and civil society.
Having made my main point about “intellectuals,” I commented briefly on the other words in the theme that PEN had asked us to discuss: “government policy and tolerance.” The liberal state—but mainly the legislature and the judiciary rather than the executive branch of government—may sometimes have to limit the freedom of the enemies of freedom. If, say, a private television channel were to mix popular light entertainment with consistent advocacy of the extermination of Gypsies, a liberal state should stop it being used for that purpose. If a writer is threatened from abroad with assassination, like Salman Rushdie, the government has a duty to protect him.
Beyond this, however, the contribution of politicians in power to “tolerance” lies less in specific acts or policies than in a certain attitude and style of political conduct. No politician likes being criticized. Mrs. Thatcher often complained about “the media.” Her successors blame “the chattering classes,” which, I noted, is the current English phrase for intellectuals. Yet the closer the politicians can stick to the attitude summed up in the famous phrase “I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,” the more secure freedom will be. This, I suggested, is where the business of PEN and the business of prime ministers meet.
Now if these thoughts were expressed around a seminar table at Harvard or Oxford they might be questioned for their simplicity or banality, but they would hardly be thought provocative.3 Here, with the Czech television cameras rolling and the famously arrogant prime minister locked in this strange intellectual-political wrestling match with his own president, they were accounted so.
Dr. Klaus was not amused by my comments. He wanted to reply immediately. He sat fuming while our strong-minded American chairwoman let all the other panelists have their turn. Then he let rip. In his essay on tolerance, he had written, “The responsibility of a tolerant person is to listen attentively to others and to attempt to understand what they are saying.” This was not my experience of Dr. Klaus. Instead, I found him a sharp political debater, happy to twist an argument in order to score a point. But then, what else would you expect of a politician sitting in front of TV cameras at the beginning of an election campaign?
Yet by behaving in this way, he actually made my point far more effectively than I could myself. If he had listened attentively and then calmly made a reasoned argument in response to mine, he would have brilliantly illustrated his own proposition
that there is no fundamental difference or clear dividing line between the roles of independent intellectual and professional politician. There he would have been: a professional politician, yet arguing as an intellectual among intellectuals.
But, instead, he began by exclaiming, in his peculiarly effective tone of aggressive exasperation, that he found what I had said “incredible.” He knew me as an intellectual, an essayist, he said, but I had just delivered a “political speech.” But there again he was, in a backhanded way, making my point. For the criticism has meaning only if there is, indeed, a fundamental difference between an intellectual speech and a political speech, between the way intellectuals use words and the way politicians do.
He went on to say that there is nothing worse than an intellectual delivering a political speech. Politicians may not like to be criticized, he observed, but do intellectuals? And he also found “incredible” my observation that politicians “live in half-truth.” This was a rather revealing misquotation, since one of the most famous leitmotifs in the whole Central European debate about intellectuals and politics is Václav Havel’s pre-1989 formula “living in truth.” But what I said was that politicians work in half-truth.4 The phrase characterizes the professional party politician’s job, not his life.
No politician worthy of the name will seriously maintain in private that what he has said in a public, party-political speech is the whole truth on a particular issue. It may possibly have been the truth; it might even have been nothing but the truth; but it is most unlikely to have been the whole truth—or he will not be a very effective party politician. Every time a politician says to a journalist, “Off the record,” he is recognizing this elementary fact about his profession. Off the record, Václav Klaus would doubtless acknowledge this.
Here I need to explicate two issues that were not clarified in the subsequent discussion—partly, I would have to add as a critic, through my own fault. Both were raised by Ivan Klíma, in interventions that effectively supported his prime minister. First, Klíma objected to what he saw as the implication that intellectuals are morally superior to politicians or somehow possessed of “Truth” with a capital T. We have heard too much of these claims, especially in Central Europe, suggested Klíma, in a discussion which we had begun earlier and subsequently continued in private.
Look what a mess intellectuals in power have made of things! Look at the damage done by their utopias! And look what monsters they have been in their private lives! In which connection he quoted Paul Johnson’s book Intellectuals. The charge about private lives is probably the least pertinent, but there is much in the rest of the indictment. Intellectuals obviously do bear a heavy load of responsibility as architects or accomplices of some of the greatest political crimes of the twentieth century. As George Orwell caustically observed of fellow-traveling intellectuals, “No ordinary man could be such a fool.”
Yet I am not making any such high moral, let alone ideological or metaphysical, claim for intellectuals. Many politicians are no doubt better people than many intellectuals. They may also be more intelligent, better read, more cultured. My argument is only that they have, and should have, a different role, which is reflected, crucially, in a different use of language. If a politician gives a partial, one-sided, indeed self-censored account of a particular issue, he is simply doing his job. And if he manages to “sell” the part as the whole, then he is doing his job effectively.
If an intellectual does that, he is not doing his job: He has failed in it. The intellectual is not the guardian or high priest of some metaphysical, ideological, or pseudoscientific Truth with a capital T. Nor is he simply the voice of the “ethics of conviction” (Gesinnungsethik) against the politician’s “ethics of responsibility” (Verantwortungsethik), to use Max Weber’s famous distinction. But he does have a qualitatively different responsibility for the validity, intellectual coherence, and truth of what he says and writes.
I therefore have an answer to the question that Ivan Klíma injected into the discussion: “What do you mean by an intellectual?” What I mean is a person playing a particular role. It is the role of the thinker or writer who engages in public discussion of issues of public policy, in politics in the broadest sense, while deliberately not engaging in the pursuit of political power.
I certainly don’t mean all members of the “intelligentsia,” in the broad sociological definition of intelligentsia officially adopted in communist Eastern Europe; that is, everyone with higher education. Nor do I mean the “intellectuals on the road to class power” of György Konrád and Ivan Szelényi’s book of 1974.5 Or the pre-1989 Václav Klaus, an employee of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences under President Husák These were all intellectuals, but in a different sense.
My description of the intellectual’s role, which is both a Weberian ideal type and simply an ideal, certainly has more in common with the self-understanding of the opposition intellectuals in Central and Eastern Europe before 1989; of the pre-1989 Václav Havel (who barely qualified as an “intellectual” in communist sociology, since he had scant formal higher education and for a time did manual labor); of the patriotic Polish, Czech, or Hungarian “intelligentsia,” in their idealistic, pre- and anticommunist interpretation of their own role. Yet it differs also fundamentally from this. In the “abnormal” conditions that have actually been normality for much of Central Europe over much of the last two centuries, intellectuals have been called upon, or have felt themselves called upon, to take roles that they did not take in the West. The conscience of the nation. The voice of the oppressed. The writer as priest, prophet, resistance fighter, and substitute politician.
Since the liberation of 1989, all these extra roles have fallen away with stunning rapidity. This is healthy and long overdue. As Brecht’s Galileo exclaims, “Unhappy the land that has need of heroes.” The role of the intellectual as critic of a democratically elected government cannot be equated with that of the intellectual as leader of the opposition against an alien, totalitarian power. But I am deeply convinced that Hans Morgenthau expressed a universal and not a particular truth when he observed: Truth threatens power, and power threatens truth. That applies not just to totalitarian or authoritarian power, as described in Václav Havel’s great essay “The Power of the Powerless,” but also, albeit to a lesser degree, to democratically elected and constitutionally limited power.
Now, obviously, this ideal of the intellectual has never fully been achieved. Indeed, as the twentieth century closes, the catalog of the trahison des clercs is a thick volume; the list of those who preserved real independence is a thin one. In our own free societies, we see examples of journalists who have been corrupted by their proximity to power. American academics will perhaps know, in their own universities, scholars who have politically trimmed their analyses, or at least their conclusions, in the hope of following Kissinger or Brzezinski to a job in Washington. But to say that an ideal has never fully been achieved is merely to say that it is an ideal.
We have Orwell. We have Raymond Aron. We have other writers, academics, and journalists who have maintained a high standard of intellectual independence while engaging in political debate. Even in a free society, there is still an important part to be played by the spectateur engagé. By the critic on stage.
2
And by the playwright on stage? Václav Havel was, of course, the invisible panelist in our discussion. Klaus certainly interpreted much of what I said in the light of his running argument with Havel. Doubtless many Czech listeners did. And from what I have written so far you might also think that I was, so to speak, taking Havel’s part—breaking a lance for Václav I against Václav II. That would be a misunderstanding.
It is wholly true that I feel strong ties of admiration for and friendship with Václav Havel. It will also be clear that I think he is right to argue that independent intellectuals should take an active part in the public life of a democracy. Yet I also have a serious disagreement with him about the role that intellectuals can p
lay in politics, in the narrow sense of competing for power and holding office. The sharp distinction I drew on that panel between the roles of the intellectual and of the politician is one that ever since Havel became president of Czechoslovakia at the end of 1989 he has consistently refused to accept. As it happened, I went straight from the panel discussion in the foreign ministry to a lively private discussion with the president on precisely this issue, in the more congenial surroundings of a riverside pub. (György Konrád also came from the panel to the pub and joined cannily in the debate.)
Now on this particular issue, a discussion with Havel is obviously far more important than any argument with Klaus. Klaus will be judged on his record as a politician and on his very considerable achievements in the rapid transformation of the Czech economy. Despite his at times almost comical desire to be taken seriously as a writer, his views on intellectuals are, so to speak, an optional extra. By contrast, the subject is central to Havel’s whole life and work. His essays, lectures, and prison letters from the last quarter century are, taken altogether, among the most vivid, sustained, and searching explorations of the moral and political responsibility of the intellectual produced anywhere in Europe. Indeed, it is difficult to think of any figure in the contemporary world who has more cumulative authority to speak on this issue than Václav Havel.
If you said “the intellectual and politics” in the 1960s, the immediate free association might be Sartre or perhaps Bertrand Russell. Say it now, whether in Paris, New York, Berlin, or Rome, and one of the first associations will be Havel. If he is right, what he says will be important not just for the Czech lands; if he is wrong, it matters for the rest of us too.
Fortunately, I don’t just have to rely on a pub conversation for this judgment. Three volumes of Havel’s speeches have now appeared in Czech, and a Prague publisher has just issued a selection in English, entitled Toward a Civil Society. 6 Although the English selection is biased heavily toward his major foreign appearances and to that extent gives a slightly misleading impression of what he has been doing for the last five years, it does contain the most important and systematic statements of his views since he became president. Havel told me that he regards his presidential speeches as the intellectual continuation of the essays, lectures, and prison letters of the dissident years. “Then I wrote essays, now I write speeches,” he said, suggesting that only the form of what he does with words has changed, not the essential content of the intellectual activity.
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