This article examines the ties between the work of Václav Havel and his dissident mentor Jan Patočka. Havel's political theory consists largely of an evocative, literary reformulation of a number of themes developed by Patočka, the student of Husserl and Heidegger generally recognized as the most significant Czech philosopher of the century. Insofar as Patočka's work continues to be ignored in the West, the intuitively appealing essays of Havel will themselves fail to be fully understood. This study offers an analysis of Havel's debt to Patočka, as well as an explication of the latter's political thought. With Patočka's phenomenological interpretation of ancient and contemporary thought, of Socrates and Heidegger, a bridge is built between the classical and the postmodern that seeks to ground ethics and politics without recourse to the foundationalism of metaphysical accounts of reality.