Abstract

This paper argues that Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People constitutes one his most ambitious literary and political achievements. In literary terms, the play seeks to reinvent the genre of history drama in a manner deliberately opposed to Hegelian aesthetics. Ibsen does so by systematically deepening the play’s central conflict. What at first appears to be a problem grounded in personal rivalries, reveals itself to be a social and political struggle, which in turn yields a moral crisis, to, finally, a problem of history. In this manner, Ibsen combines two positions that at first sight seem incompatible: the most relativistic impulses of the historicism of his day and a metaphysical form of tragedy that he identifies with Shakespeare. Politically, Ibsen stages what might be characterized as a profoundly pessimistic form of messianism. On that view, it is necessary to categorically reject any existing political project and instead champion the possibilities articulated by those in society who have no investment in the present. This is not because those individuals have greater access to utopian ideals that should be actualized, since any political success automatically invalidates the ideals in question. Instead, the defense of the socially marginalized is grounded in the view that their saving power lies with their ability to articulate ideals that have no stake in the persistence of our world. Against this background it becomes possible to fully understand the structure and continuing significance of this play.