abstract Dr Stockmann’s endeavor to straddle truth and rhetoric summons up the long-age Platonic division between rational and truth-seeking debate, and manipulative and power-oriented oratory. Identifying the doctor’s speech as a case of tentative deliberative rhetoric, this article speculates over its shortcomings and eventual victory in defeat. It purports to demonstrate how this speech sits uneasily between mass public discourse and morality-framed oratory, and how it fails in either earning the doctor absolute and effective followership, or ushering in a democratic deliberation that could defuse mob violence. This takes the article a step further as it considers how the genre of the play itself steers it in a direction that offers not a reconciliation between truth and power, but rather a polarization thereof. While it draws upon classical philosophy and modern deliberation theory, this article is equally grounded in the playwright’s own socialist outlook on drama as well as in Girardian anthropological explanations of the mechanism of the tragic. The latter is activated in An Enemy of the People by the tragic hero’s parrhesia and the scapegoating he incurs at the hands of the majority, both being the obverse or the tragic pattern of the people’s will in participatory democracy.