Abstract
The Antigone tragedy of Sophocles was a new drama at the time of the world’s first known democracy in ancient Athens some 2500 years ago. Through the millennia, the action brings us a set of political insights relevant today. Juchler begins this chapter by analyzing the links between theater and democracy. After providing a short résumé of the action of Antigone, he examines the epistemological skepticism underlying the play’s theme of judgment. This chapter focuses also on the clash generated when sovereign authority is met by determined resistance. Juchler shows how this fundamental conflict of values was fought out in such other historical contexts as the Third Reich in Germany and the civil rights movement in the United States. The chapter’s final pages consider “the national interest” as raison d’état in new clothes and propose interdisciplinary applications for the Antigone material.
Translated from German with permission from Spinger Fachmedien Wiesbaden. Original publication: Juchler, Ingo (2015) Sophokles: Antigone. In: ibid. Narrationen in der politischen Bildung, Springer VS, pp. 15–44.
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Juchler, I. (2018). Sophocles: Antigone. In: Political Narrations. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70755-6_2
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