An executive order is issued by the new ruler of a country. A woman defies the order in the name of higher laws. How should we as democrats think about their actions?

I wrote that opening paragraph with reference to Antigone, as presented in Sophocles’s play of that name. Sophocles wrote that play as a citizen of ancient democratic Athens, to be produced with civic funding as part of its cycle of annual festivals. Although Antigone as a character lived in ancient royally governed Thebes, the play was born in the context of Athenian democratic politics and participated linguistically and thematically in its debates.

Readers of this blog may also see the opening paragraph of this blog as applying to an exchange in the White House between President Donald J. Trump and Governor Janet Mills of Maine on February 5 (2025), when Governor Mills was addressed by President Trump about an executive order that he had issued that day with the title “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports.” According to the New York Times report of the exchange:

Referring to the executive order, Mr. Trump asked, “Are you not going to comply with that?” “I’m complying with the state and federal laws,” she said, rather pointedly.

Mr. Trump replied that “we are the federal law” and said that “you better do it” or else he would withhold funding from her state.

So, how to think about the relationship between executive orders, offices, and laws? The first issue is to decide which laws are at stake.  In the exchange with Governor Mills, President Trump identified himself as “the federal law” (using the plural in a form known as the “royal we”). Then, in a separate remark made on social media ten days later, the President asserted: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” He implied that existing laws must be interpreted in consonance with a higher principle that would absolve someone who would otherwise be convicted of breaking them.

What about Antigone? In the play of that name, she famously asserts that she has acted in accordance with “agrapta…nomima,” which can be translated “unwritten legal ordinances,” or, as the phrase is often rendered in discussions of the play: “unwritten laws.”

(Geeking out on classical Attic Greek for a moment: ta nomima (plural) is a word with a somewhat wider and vaguer reach than hoi nomoi (plural), the latter being a more standard word for laws. However, the distinction between them is not sharp: nomima can sometimes be translated as “laws,” while nomoi can sometimes be translated as “customs”.)

This is why Antigone has become for many thinkers an icon of civil disobedience: she is often read as opposing the state in the name of values that count as higher laws (which in the play she ascribes to the Greek god Zeus and the spirit of Justice that is embedded in the divinely governed underworld).  And because Antigone appeals to these higher laws, she is often assumed to be opposing them to ordinary everyday laws.

On such readings, the moral of Antigone is that it shows her as a champion of civil disobedience to unjust ordinary laws, which are identified with the state and its new ruler, Creon. But is that the best or only reading of the play?

I would call attention to other moments in the play that challenge the civil disobedience reading. (I do so not to undermine the place of civil disobedience in democratic theory, but rather, to question whether that is the right or only frame in which to interpret Antigone.) In the same speech in which she refers to “unwritten laws,” Antigone insists that what she has broken is not an existing civic law, but rather, an edict issued by Creon as a decree: an executive order, as it were. She makes that point twice, using both a verb (kērussō) and a noun (kerugma) for orders proclaimed by heralds (lines 450-455). This vocabulary of edicts is not vocabulary that was standardly used to identify or describe ancient Greek laws.

In fact, Creon had himself originally referred to his own order with the same verb, as a proclamation, in the sense of an edict or decree (lines 191-193), though in the exchange with Antigone he tries to use the vocabulary of edicts and laws interchangeably (lines 447, 449). So what Antigone is doing in her response is emphasizing Creon’s own original view of his prohibition as a decree—not a law. And therefore, while opposing that order to the agrapta…nomima of the gods, she is also implicitly contrasting the ruler’s edict or decree to the existing laws of the city.

In other words, on my reading, it is Antigone who stands in solidarity with the existing laws of the city, as well as with the higher laws that she attributes to the gods. And as Creon’s son Haemon (betrothed to Antigone), insists, the city sympathizes not with his father, but with her (line 693). In short, Antigone stages a scenario in which it is the ruler whose executive decree contradicts both the higher laws and the ingrained civic customary laws.

This is an important lesson for democratic thinking. We have become attuned to thinking about situations in which some democratically made laws are unjust, to the point that the task of conscientious citizens becomes to resist them. The theory of civil disobedience has evolved to address those situations and to explain when, why, and to what extent resistance to the laws is sometimes justified. But less attention in philosophical analysis has been paid to situations in which the laws need to be defended against executive orders which transgress them. Instead of granting Creon his desire to identify himself with the state and claim the solo power to issue laws, another way of reading Antigone is as a reminder that in democracies, rulers do not have solo power to make the laws, and their decrees are not tantamount to laws. Rather, according to the chorus leader in Antigone, the power of the ruler is to use the law (lines 213-214), or in the words of the United States’ Constitution (Article II, section 3), “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

The post Executive Orders, Offices, and Laws: Democratic Conundrums in Ancient Greece and Modern America first appeared on Blog of the APA.

Read the full article which is published on APA Online (external link)