I'm in no position to criticise Vaclav Havel as I know little about him beyond the popular panegyrics. I dare say he was a mixture of good and bad like the rest of us and I just want to condemn the kind of lionising the author indulges in here. I'm glad at least that she reports Havel stood against right "and" left wing oppression, but I'm disturbed that the backdrop of democracy she deploys, a stagey prop like the flags in the oval office (which presides over unprecedented disparities between rich and poor), is indiscriminate and uncritical. Too often democracy is hoisted as an unquestioned good and I note from the article that Havel was adamant about a fully inclusive democrcay--a distinction she doesn't trouble to emphasise. The Western standard today is an indifferent representative democracy devoted to sloth rather than participation. Moreover I'm sceptical at the way the author implicitly co-opts Havel for this decadent democracy--which is precisely how hegemony is maintained. Whereas it seems to me Havel was for an "ideal" of democracy that's never been achieved, and certainly not the prodigal bastard she appears to want to celebrate.
I would also suggest she edit her work more carefully, as there are numerous mistakes.

Vale, Vaclav Havel...your words, not another's, define you.
"Hope is a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope in us, or we don't; it is a dimension of the soul and not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation...It ia an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world tha is immediately experienced and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. I don't think you can explain it as some derivative of something here, of some movement, or of some favourable signs in the world. I feel that its deepest roots are in the transcendental, just as the roots of human responsibility are...It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out."
'Disturbing the Peace' Vaclav Havel, Faber and Faber, 1990, p. 181

This also defines happiness, when that word is used in place of 'hope'.

Squeers,

In the inventory of a democrat, ‘The State’ is absent.

We know that its inexistence means anarchy.

Yet, anyone whose eyes are not blinked by irrationalities, can see that we are living in anarchy; 'The Anarchy of Power'.

Man cannot go back to a life as ordered by nature and cannot go forth as he has done thus far.

Skeptic,
I'm not sure what point you're making here, can you elaborate.

My point, based on the article's celebratory devotions to democracy, and on the fact that the author is apparently writing a PhD on the institution of democracy, is there seems a conspicuous absence of critique of democracy.
To clarify, I firmly support "inclusive" and "engaged" democracy as a perpetual work in progress. But it cannot be based on capitalism, capitalism and democracy being contradictions in terms. An inclusive democracy, democratic socialism would not be a "systemic" economic rationalism, such as we have now, wherein abstracted profit is the raison d'etre and humanity is the crop, but a system based on philosophical/ethical ideals and social/political responsibility.
I'm talking then about a reflexive and flexible democratic humanism devoted to the good (and sustainable) life as as its goal.
What we have now is not democracy in any qualitative sense, but a vicious and rapacious human plague.
The author of the article seems to see modern "democracy" as all good, indeed consummatum est, whereas I see it as an evil joke.

Hark, Squeers - a lone voice in the OLO wilderness : )

On the subject of freedom in the modern democratic first-world paradigm, here's an article by George Monbiot on the tyranny that shadows it. He cites and links to Isaiah Berlin's 1958 essay "Two Concepts of Liberty".

http://www.monbiot.com/2011/12/19/how-freedom-became-tyranny/

Thanks for the link Poirot.
This from the latest New Left Review:http://newleftreview.org/?view=2914

"There are various ways to conceptualize the underlying causes of the friction between capitalism and democracy. For present purposes, I will characterize democratic capitalism as a political economy ruled by two conflicting principles, or regimes, of resource allocation: one operating according to marginal productivity, or what is revealed as merit by a ‘free play of market forces’, and the other based on social need or entitlement, as certified by the collective choices of democratic politics. Under democratic capitalism, governments are theoretically required to honour both principles simultaneously, although substantively the two almost never align. In practice they may for a time neglect one in favour of the other, until they are punished by the consequences: governments that fail to attend to democratic claims for protection and redistribution risk losing their majority, while those that disregard the claims for compensation from the owners of productive resources, as expressed in the language of marginal productivity, cause economic dysfunctions"

The article goes on to elaborate the current economic impasse--catastrophic private and public debt. The conclusion being that:

"Social science can do little, if anything, to help resolve the structural tensions and contradictions underlying the economic and social disorders of the day. What it can do, however, is bring them to light and identify the historical continuities in which present crises can be fully understood. It also can—and must—point out the drama of democratic states being turned into debt-collecting agencies on behalf of a global oligarchy of investors.... More than ever, economic power seems today to have become political power, while citizens appear to be almost entirely stripped of their democratic defences and their capacity to impress upon the political economy interests and demands that are incommensurable with those of capital owners. In fact, looking back at the democratic-capitalist crisis sequence since the 1970s, there seems a real possibility of a new, if temporary, settlement of social conflict in advanced capitalism, this time entirely in favour of the propertied classes now firmly entrenched in their politically unassailable stronghold, the international financial industry.