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.

自启蒙运动以来的一个关键问题是如何向大众宣传理性。亨利克·易卜生的《人民公敌》及其在四个国家和七个十年间改编的电影让我们可以跨越时间和地理来审视这一话语。易卜生提供了尼采式的精英激进主义，以拯救公共领域免于无知。Ein Volksfeind (dir. Hans Steinhoff) 坚持认为只有纳粹党才能理清困惑的群众。由 Arthur Miller（导演 George Schaefer）改编的 1978 年版本让 Steve McQueen 成为草根民主的英雄殉道者，而Ganashatru（导演 Satyajit Ray）则通过“移情人文主义”挑战以欧洲为中心的标志中心主义。挪威人Enfosefiende（dir. Erik Skjoldbjærg）宣称，在新自由主义时代，人们对​​理性的抵抗威胁着我们物种的生存。这种沮丧反映了今天的民粹主义和民主冷漠，这表明人文主义信仰可能已经发挥了作用，可能需要一种新的大师叙事来打破我们 21 世纪的僵局。随着选民被贴上“可悲分子”和记者“人民公敌”的标签，易卜生的戏剧也经历了复兴。