The Art of the Impossible: Politics as Morality in Practice.

President Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic is one of the great spokesmen for the "return to Europe" of countries formerly compelled to inhabit that political nowhereland called "Eastern Europe." He is an urbane intellectual, a playwright, and a moralist. That he is also the president of a nation-state is for him one of life's great ironies, even miracles, and he claims that he can scarcely believe it most of the time: one day an infamous dissident slated for harassment and incarceration; the next a famous dissident addressing hundreds of thousands gathered in Wenceslaus Square in defiance of a corrupt, authoritarian regime; and then a bit further on, the president of (then) Czechoslovakia proclaiming, on January 1, 1990: "People, your government has returned to you!"

It has not been an easy return. Havel knew it would not be. In October 1992, in a conversation with a small group gathered in Prague, Havel was sober to the point of being somber. The two republics were breaking up. The process of crafting a new constitution was then frustrated - so much so that Havel declared that he felt rather like locking up a group of clever constitutional lawyers and not permitting them to leave the building until they had forged a draft constitution. And, as well, Europe, his part of Europe, had "entered the long tunnel at the end of the light." This was a brilliant reversal of a standard metaphor. Havel has never been a utopian; indeed, much of his life has been dedicated to defeating all utopian politics, all ends-of-histories and overarching world views that promote ugly social engineering and destroy human freedom, mutual self-help, and even minimal decency.

And yet the title of this book is The Art of the Impossible. What, then, does Havel mean? He means hopefulness, a kind of canny insightfulness, energy for the tasks ahead. So much has happened so fast. How can one not believe in "miracles" [his word]? But such miracles are not wholly within our grasp. At best, we can see the possibilities immanent in a situation and screw up our courage in order to act, knowing that human events are not wholly under our own control. Much of this collection of speeches and essays written between 1990 and 1996 traverses the in-between - in-between quiescence and arrogant overreach. That is Havel's terrain. How well does he traverse it? Passing well, I would say, although he does seem to falter from time to time and he thinks aloud about the reasons why. He struggles with Oxford fellow Timothy Garton Ash's critique of intellectuals in politics, for example. Ash had worried in print about the confusion of independent intellectual and practicing politician that he believed plagued post-1989 Europe: become one or the other, Ash more or less urged. Either stay outside and maintain your intellectual independence or take up a post and start to act, well, Weberian. (Weber, remember, distinguished between an ethic of "ultimate ends," too good for this world, and an "ethic of responsibility," one that is forced to choose between imperfect alternatives.)

Many of the most interesting reflections in this volume show Havel grappling with Ash's criticism. He understands "how difficult it is for an independent intellectual to adjust overnight to the world of practical politics when he has spent his whole life critically analyzing the world and defending certain chemically pure tenets." And there is a tendency for the intellectual to "resort to philosophical meditation, which in most cases makes things worse" than they would have been if he had just opted for an alternative, even a bad one. Another temptation is to launch into "complex reflections that voters find difficult to follow" - a charge lodged frequently against Havel - when what he ought to be about is saying "in clear and unambiguous terms that he is running for office because he is the best person for the job...." He shouldn't spend a lot of time hesitating, doubting, refusing to fight, questioning his own motives - again the sort of thing Havel is taxed with. He should shoulder the burden that is his and just get down to it.

Practical politics, yes, but never a politics shorn of morality. Havel's great fear is that relinquishing a politics of high morality often leads to a politics of brute instrumentality; thus, he rejects politics that is simply "the art of the possible." No, one should lift up politics. It is a nobler craft and a more demanding art than the technicians and power mongers allow. Politics has to do with hope and with purpose, with the articulation of a "spiritual dimension." It has to do with accepting responsibility, not of a total and unlimited sort, but of a carefully defined sort, and going on to approach that responsibility neither from a "will to power nor an ideological vision of the world but, rather, a moral stance."

What does Havel have in mind here? The verities and virtues he embraces are basic decencies, Christian in origin, but honed and shaped through the struggles with human dignity, rights, and power in modernity. Havel is clear that the source of the sense of responsibility he embraces is "metaphysical." This probably doesn't win many votes, and it frustrates some of his admirers and friends, especially when he starts to talk about "the order of Being" and the like. These Heideggerian turns of phrase turn lots of folks off. And I must say that the references to "Being" at times seem rather off-hand in these writings. Perhaps Havel needs to flesh out a bit more the conceptual and moral work his frequent references to Being play in his overall moral and political thinking.

That having been said, it is refreshing to read the words - most of them spoken aloud - of an erudite thinker and writer and political leader who unabashedly celebrates certain universal truths and rebukes "moral relativism" and "the denial of any kind of spirituality, a proud disdain for everything suprapersonal," and other features characteristic of the late modern West. For Havel, human beings need a "transcendental anchor,... the only genuine source of [their] responsibility and self-respect." Without these we forfeit much of the credibility of our own political affirmations and we blight our spirits. Havel manages to say all this in a way that avoids tub-thumping and breast-beating. But he is insistent. If we pit politics and morality against one another, we give politics over to the devil. We lose "the moral integrity of society" and relinquish "responsibility for human lives."

There are those who believe Havel's moment has come and gone. I don't think we've arrived at that moment yet.

Jean Bethke Elshtain is the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago.