Professor Michael Rainsborough: Towards Post-totalitarianism in the West: Some Warnings From the East

“Do we not stand as a kind of warning to the West, revealing to it its own latent tendencies?” So asked Czech playwright Václav Havel in 1978 in ‘The Power of the Powerless’, his epic essay on the nature of dissent in Communist Eastern Europe. Havel argued that the fate of East European countries under Communist tyranny stood as a monument to the debilitating effects of late-stage techno-bureaucratic rationalism – a system focused solely on material existence. This system, he argued, ceased to serve humanity, eroded individual dignity and coldly tore people away from their natural affiliations: their habitat, their family, their community, their nation.