Charter 77 and Jefferson’s Revenge

In 1977, while Americans celebrated their Declaration’s bicentennial, Czechoslovak
dissidents performed an ironic inversion of revolutionary legitimacy that exposed a fatal
contradiction in Marxist-Leninist governance. Charter 77, signed by 242 citizens including
author Václav Havel and philosopher Jan Patočka, revealed how Jefferson’s natural rights
framework could dismantle ideological systems more thoroughly than it challenged hereditary
monarchy. By deploying the Declaration’s logic of inalienable rights against a system that
presumed to liberate humanity itself, Charter 77 demonstrated that totalitarian ideology is
vulnerable to its own universalist pretensions.

Jefferson grounded legitimacy in consent and natural rights that preexist government: “to
secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the
consent of the governed.” This formulation presumes a distinction between the people and their
government – a gap where dissent can emerge. Marxist-Leninism, however, claimed to have
abolished this distinction through the vanguard party’s scientific understanding of historical laws.
Charter 77’s genius lay in prying open the very gap that communist ideology denied could exist.

The document accomplished this through strategic appropriation of the regime’s own
legal commitments. Charter 77 opened by noting that Czechoslovakia had ratified the
International Covenants on Civil and Political Rights, making them “binding… and take
precedence over law.” The signatories meticulously documented the chasm between promise
and practice: “The right to freedom of expression, for example, guaranteed by article 19 of the
first-mentioned covenant, is in our case purely illusory. Tens of thousands of our citizens are
prevented from working in their own fields for the sole reason that they hold views differing
from official ones.” Where the Declaration accused George III of specific violations—”He has
dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly” – Charter 77 revealed systematic contradiction:
“Freedom of religious confession, emphatically guaranteed by article 18 of the first covenant, is
systematically curtailed by arbitrary official action.” A workers’ state denied workers the right to
strike, a people’s republic imprisoned citizens for unauthorized speech, a signatory to human
rights covenants banned religious education.

This strategy exploited what Hannah Arendt identified as totalitarianism’s central
paradox. Unlike traditional tyranny, which rejects universal principles, totalitarian systems
“claim to have found a way to establish the rule of justice on earth – something which the
wisdom of the ages deemed to be beyond human reach.” By claiming to embody justice, such
regimes become vulnerable to demonstrations that they violate their own standards. Charter 77
could accuse the Czechoslovak regime of betraying socialism’s stated commitment to human
liberation – an ontological charge that struck the regime’s claim to legitimacy.

The signatories understood they were performing what philosopher J.L. Austin termed a
“performative utterance” – language that constitutes action. The Charter’s conclusion declared:
“We believe that Charter 77 will help to enable all citizens of Czechoslovakia to work and live as
free human beings.” By claiming their commitment to human rights “as free citizens,” the
signatories enacted the freedom they claimed. This distinguishes Charter 77 from the
Declaration. The American colonists declared independence from a regime whose authority they
rejected entirely. The Czechoslovak dissidents declared independence while remaining
physically subject to the regime’s power. As Havel wrote in “The Power of the Powerless,” the
greengrocer who refuses to display party slogans “steps out of living within the lie. He rejects the
ritual and breaks the rules of the game. He discovers once more his suppressed identity and
dignity.” By “living within the truth,” the Charter signatories “shattered the world of
appearances, the fundamental pillar of the system.”

The regime’s response illuminated the threat. Jan Patočka died in March 1977 followingeleven hours of police interrogation; other signatories faced imprisonment, loss of employment,
and constant surveillance. The press described Charter 77 as “an anti-state, anti-socialist, and
demagogic, abusive piece of writing,” and individual signatories were labeled “traitors and
renegades.” This repression paradoxically validated the Charter’s thesis. If the signatories were
merely misguided citizens, why not engage their arguments? Brutality revealed the regime’s tacit
admission that an alternative moral universe existed beyond its control. Where traditional
tyranny suppresses dissent to maintain power, ideological totalitarianism must suppress dissent
to maintain the pretense that dissent cannot exist. Charter 77 made the pretense untenable.
Some historians argue that Charter 77 never mobilized mass support and that
communism’s collapse owed more to economic failure. Yet this misunderstands Charter 77’s
achievement.

The Declaration succeeded through political rupture – establishing a new
government. Charter 77’s achievement was epistemological rupture: it demonstrated that
Czechoslovak citizens could think beyond official ideology, that universal principles transcended
historical materialism’s claim to have superseded them. As Havel explained, “living within the
truth” possesses “singular, explosive, incalculable political power” because it reveals to others
“that it is possible to live within the truth.” Economic crisis created conditions for regime
collapse, but Charter 77 created the intellectual framework within which collapse could become
liberation rather than chaos.

The comparison reveals the Declaration’s transhistorical power and its particular efficacy
against Marxist systems. Jefferson’s framework proves adaptable because it articulates a
relationship between legitimacy and human dignity that cannot be subsumed by any ideological
totality. Marxism-Leninism claimed that once class contradictions were resolved, rights would
become unnecessary – the state would wither away as humanity achieved true freedom. By
insisting that citizens possessed rights the regime could not abrogate regardless of historical
stage, Charter 77 reasserted precisely the distinction between state and society that
Marxism-Leninism claimed to have transcended.

When Havel became president in 1989, he credited the Charter with proving “that not
everything was lost, that there was still something to fight for, that people are not mere cattle to
be driven hither and thither.” The Declaration’s influence on Charter 77 demonstrates how
natural rights discourse – far from being bourgeois mystification as Marx argued – provided the
most effective weapon against regimes claiming to have discovered the scientific laws of human
liberation. In 1776, the Declaration severed political bonds with a monarch claiming authority by
inheritance. In 1977, Charter 77 severed something more fundamental: the totalitarian fantasy
that politics could eliminate the need for rights by perfecting society itself.

Nina Morey, a student at Nina Morey, authored this article as part of VOC’s Student Essay Contest.