In 1872, Dostoyevsky published his most intensely political novel, a work long known in English as The Possessed (although more recently dubbed The Devils or Demons ). A century later, Ursula K. Le Guin unleashed her own political novel, embedded in a sci-fi framework, The Dispossessed . The Russian novel looks at the ruminations and actions of conspirators hoping to topple oppressive political structures and create a quasi-anarchic utopian state. Its science fiction successor can be read as a clinical analysis of what happens when that kind of utopia is actually realized in practice.
But the similarities between the two books end there. Doestoevsky's characters are passionate, brooding, intense and extravagant in their response to situations and adversaries. Their heirs, who inhabit Le Guin’s anarchic moon Anarres are rational, cooperative and tolerant. She could just have easily entitled her novel The Dispassionate .
The settlers of Anarres, the moon of the planet Urras, established their non-coercive anarchic society two centuries before the events described in The Dispossessed . No centralized government authority exists, nor do political parties strive for control, or aim to change the ground rules of this utopian society. Meanwhile on the nearby home planet Urras, two contesting political models battle for supremacy—one based on capitalism, the other built on authoritarian institutions that claim their power is an expression of the will of the proletariat. Le Guin is clearly modeling her world on Cold War political structures, even to the point of including a Vietnam-type flareup in Benbili, her equivalent of Southeast Asia.
In most sci-fi novels, political ideologies are typically dealt with as excuses for individual or national conflicts, preferably with ultra-high-tech weaponry and faster-than-light spaceships. The nitty gritty details of how political institutions evolve and interact with other social phenomena are rarely addressed in genre books. Even the dystopian novels, so central to the sci-fi tradition, typically treat the evil authoritarian governments as a given, requiring no elaborate explanations of how or why they exist. Nor do readers need much convincing on this front. Who doubts, based on even the most meager reading of history if not the daily news, that governments sometimes take on totalitarian tendencies, and their leaders implement evil policies?
See also The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
But Le Guin faces a much more complicated challenge in writing her novel. If the jaded readers of a modern day find dystopia familiar and credible, they bristle at attempts to depict a realistic utopia. Le Guin anticipated this skepticism, and hedged her position accordingly. Her novel has sometimes been published with the subtitle "an ambiguous utopia," and in other settings she has described the political structure described in her work as "a utopia of sorts." In the course of the novel, she discloses tension lines and failings in her ideal society—no doubt realizing that simplistic utopian fiction will strike many readers as a naïve fairy tale.
The ruling philosophy of Anarres, embraced by all, is Odonianism . Le Guin later described its guiding principles in the following terms:
"Odonianism is anarchism. Not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with; not the social-Darwinist economic 'libertarianism' of the far right; but anarchism, as prefigured in early Taoist thought, and expounded by Shelley and Kropotkin, Goldman and Goodman. Anarchism's principal target is the authoritarian State (capitalist or socialist); its principal moral-practical theme is cooperation (solidarity, mutual aid). It is the most idealistic, and to me the most interesting, of all political theories."
But if cooperation makes for a superior society, it provides a feeble framework for fiction, which thrives on conflict. Le Guin addresses this by removing her hero, the physicist Shevek, from her cooperative Garden of Eden into the Earth-like world of Urras, where he hopes to further his research. This contact between representatives of opposing worldviews also sets off discord back in Paradise. Residents of Anarres are fearful of the impact of increasing contact with outsiders, and Shevek's research into advanced methods of trans-world communication is especially troubling because it threatens to disturb the equilibrium of their peaceful, isolated society.
Shevek's observations as an outsider in a culture much like our own, as well as his experiences as a quasi-dissident in quasi-Utopia, provide Le Guin with a promising platform for social commentary. But the phlegmatic personality of her protagonist limits her at every step. With a different main character, The Dispossessed might have been a comic novel or social satire. But Shevek is, as one critic has complained, a "humorless bore." And his fellow citizens back on Anarres are much the same. We must give them credit for volunteerism and generosity, but they also combine smugness and groupthink to an unsettling degree. If this were a reality show instead of a sci-fi novel, the contestants from Anarres would be the first ones voted off the island.
But are Shevek and his ambiguously utopian society even vaguely plausible? A host of political scientists, from Hobbes to Nozick, have shown the inherent instability of anarchy as a political system. Empirical data confirms their findings. Perhaps the closest equivalent to anarchy in the historical annals is the ‘Wild West’ towns in the period before these terrorities became US states. But even in those settings, a sheriff presided over the town, and if he died or left, another one was soon found. Nature abhors a vaccuum, and society abhors a power vacuum. I doubt that a peaceful society of any sizable population could exist without government for 200 days, let alone the 200 years Le Guin describes.
Le Guin, to her credit, tries to find a way around these objections. She draws on the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, which postulates that linguistic practices can shape behavior. She can thus claim that the citizens of Anarres are no less realistic even if they act in ways unsubstantiated by our political theories and empirical data. Their language and education, and other social factors, have given them options closed to us, as well as allowed them to avoid our humanly foibles.
I am unconvinced. To my mind, Le Guin has tried to rewrite political science from the perspective of a hippie commune, circa 1967. She has cleaned the place up, put away the tie-dyed shirts and pot brownies, and shifted the setting to outer space; but the summer-of-love ambiance is unmistakable. Yet even if I remain a skeptic while gazing at her ambiguous utopia, I still applaud her forthright novel. This book won't provide any blueprints for a future society—heaven help us if it did!—but it will continue to provoke hard thinking, and probably some heated arguments. I'd love to assign this book to a group of smart political science grad students, and watch them bicker over the implications. Those peaceful folks in Anarres would certainly not approve, but—as Le Guin makes unambiguously clear—they don’t really care what we think anyway.
Ted Gioia writes on literature, music and popular culture. His next book, Love Songs: The Hidden History is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.