Havel on culture.

In a brief essay for the Canadian magazine, The Walrus, this month, Vaclav Havel encourages us to take a broader view of culture. Rather than restricting culture to something we do on the side, after our 9 to 5, Havel wants us to consider culture as something we are in the constant process of creating. I select this essay because Havel makes a crucial statement that libertarians and classical liberals often forget to emphasize in their defense of markets-- a statement without which the case for freedom and free markets is much less compelling:

"It's worth stressing that entrepreneurship is above all about the creation of values, not about the accumulation of wealth. Of course, material gain-- profit-- is the force that drives the market economy, but it should be understood to a far greater extent as an essential instrument of human creativity, not as an end in itself."

Havel goes on to argue that it is in the best interest of governments to stand back and "create a truly broad space" for markets and free enterprise to distribute wealth, massage values, and "create culture". For Havel, culture is, finally, "not only the sum of cultural creations, nor is it merely the culture of how humans associate or interact, it is also the culture of entrepreneurship understood as the creation of values that have, and aim at having, a meaning-- the culture of how businesses run themselves, and ultimately, the culture of economics as an organic part of civi society, a society that is infused with that ethos, and strengthened by it."