A liberal stand-off with deplorables: Adapting Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People from Nietzscheanism through Nazism to Neoliberalism

Abstract

A pivotal question since the Enlightenment has been how to promote reason to the masses. Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People and its film adaptations across four countries and seven decades let us examine this discourse across time and geography. Ibsen offers Nietzschean, elitist radicalism to save the public sphere from ignorance. Ein Volksfeind (dir. Hans Steinhoff) insists that only the Nazi Party can straighten out the confused masses. A 1978 version from a screenplay by Arthur Miller (dir. George Schaefer) makes Steve McQueen a hero-martyr for grassroots democracy, while Ganashatru (dir. Satyajit Ray) challenges Eurocentric logocentricity through ‘empathetic humanism’. Norwegian En folkefiende (dir. Erik Skjoldbjærg) declares that in the neoliberal era, people’s resistance to reason threatens our species’ very survival. Such despondency informs today’s populism and democratic apathy, suggesting that humanistic beliefs may have played themselves out and that a new master-narrative could be required to break our twenty-first-century stand-off. As voters are labelled ‘deplorables’ and journalists ‘enemies of the people’, Ibsen’s play has also experienced a renaissance.