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Clemson: Václav Havel and the Problem of Dissent
February 22, 2022 @ 5:30 pm - 6:30 pm
On February 22, 2022, the Lyceum Program at Clemson University hosted JMC fellow Flagg Taylor for a virtual lecture on Václav Havel and his insights into communism:
In 1975 the Czech playwright-dissident turned statesman, Václav Havel, got “tired of being tired” and wrote a public letter to the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Around this same time, Havel began to write a trilogy of plays about a dissident writer called Ferdinand Vaněk. In these writings Havel explores the social and political realities he and his fellow citizens faced and articulates both the necessity and difficulty of mounting a challenge to Communist tyranny. In this lecture Dr. Flagg Taylor will elucidate Havel’s portrait of the problem of dissent and explore what lessons we might learn from Havel’s writings.
Tuesday, February 22, 2022 • 5:30 PM EST
A virtual event • Clemson University
Free and open to the public.
Click here to watch on Youtube>>
Flagg Taylor is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Skidmore College, where he specializes in political theory. He is the co-author, with David Alvis and Jeremy Bailey, of The Contested Removal Power, 1789-2010 (University Press of Kansas, 2014). He is editor most recently of The Long Night of the Watchman: Essays by Václav Benda, 1977-1989 (St. Augustine’s Press, 2018). He is currently writing a book on Czech dissent in the 1970s and 1980s.
Professor Taylor is a JMC fellow.
Learn more about Flagg Taylor >>
Open to incoming freshmen, the Lyceum Program, a JMC partner program, is the first college program in the United States to use a Great Books approach to studying liberty, capitalism, the American Founding, and moral character. All Lyceum Scholars are assigned faculty “Socratic Tutors” who guide their intellectual development for their entire four-year education. The Program draws inspiration from the Lyceum School founded by Aristotle in ancient Greece. Lyceum Scholars study the moral principles of a free society, the political ideals of the American Founding and the economic foundations of capitalism.
Click here to learn more about the Lyceum Scholars Program >>
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