Democracy and the Problem of Civil Disobedience

If Sophocles were alive today to recast the dilemma of Antigone in contemporary, if less sanguine, terms, he might well seize on the problem of the citizen who refuses to answer questions put to him by a congressional investigating committee. Antigone, you will recall, was torn between two loyalties. Her religion commanded her to bury the body of her brother, while her state commanded that his body be left, unburied and unmourned, to be eaten by dogs and vultures on the open plain outside the city walls. As a loyal citizen, Antigone was required to yield her conscience to the state, to guide her conduct not by her rational moral knowledge but by the precepts of the law. As a person bound to her kin by the dictates of her religion, she was required to subordinate the instructions of Creon the king to those of her faith. She chose to obey her conscience and paid the penalty. Socrates, who—according to a traditional interpretation of the Crito—would doubtless have counseled otherwise, was also executed by the state. Thoreau, who at a critical moment followed what has scornfully been termed “the primitive attitude of Antigone, rather than the mature comprehension of Socrates,” found that refusal to obey a law resulted not in loss of life but in temporary loss of physical freedom.