Naming a Star: Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and the Reimagining of Utopianism

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12250
• Published date: 01 November 2018
• Author: Katherine Cross
• Date: 01 November 2018

Naming a Star: Ursula Le Guin’s The

Dispossessed and the Reimagining of

Utopianism

By Katherine Cross

abstraCt. More than most of her works, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The

Dispossessed feels unfinished, its perspective blurred. But through its

flawed aperture one nevertheless sees why: its subject is all that is left

unsaid and undone after a revolution. In this tale of two worlds,

anarchist Anarres and statist Urras are implacably opposed. Yet each

is continuous with the other. For its flaws, The Dispossessed, as a

sociological novel, brilliantly analyzes where emancipatory politics

can go wrong, using insights that were new even to social scientists in

the early 1970s: the notion that power need not be formally titled or

openly hierarchical in order to be effective and oppressive. In short,

this is a novel about the dangers of informal power, and how

revolutionary dogma can rhetorically mask it. But it stands out among

Cold War era fiction for not portraying a flawed leftist society as a

dystopia. Instead, Le Guin’s vision of Anarres is of a society that has

become complacent, that has forgotten the permanence of revolution,

where bad actors take advantage of political dogma and “non-

hierarchical” stations to exercise power in grotesque ways. Power

never goes away, and Le Guin’s genius in The Dispossessed lies in

showing us the myriad ways it endures.

Introduct ion

“The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State r ecognizes no

coinage but power: and it issues the coins it self.”

“I earned [rations] by making lists of who should star ve … There’s always

somebody willing to make lists. (Le Guin [1974] 2015: 272, 312)

American Jour nal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 77, No. 5 (Novembe r, 2018).

DOI: 10 .1111/ajes.1225 0

© 2018 American Journ al of Economics and Sociology, Inc

*Katherine Cross is a sociologist and PhD student in the School of Information at the

University of Washington, kcross1@uw.edu

1330 The American Journal of Economics and Sociology

Ursula K. Le Guin is best understood as a pioneering theorist of t he

unfinished revolution—a notion of greater urgency and salience than

one would suspect from its rarity as a subject of any work, fiction or

otherwise. Her 1974 book, The Dispossessed, became a landmark in

science fiction for its extended meditations on politica l economy—

particularly on the relative merits of an anarchist world versus a statist

one, as explored by a revolutionary out of place. The anarchist society

is, in the words of Le Guin’s original subtitle for the book, an ambig-

uous utopia. What stands out about it, amidst a century of fiction

strewn with glittering utopias and hellish dystopias, was that Le Guin

settled on a portrait of quotidian str uggle. She did not set out to write

a cautionar y tale, but rat her an authentic sociological ex planation of

how a revolutionary society can be imperiled even as it succeeds in

critical ways. Its greatest lesson lies in how it illustrates what was, in

the early 1970s, a relatively novel and undertheorized concept in the

social sciences: informal power.

The Plot

To understand Le Guin’s literary contribution to the subject, and the

enduring importance of its nuanced analysis of both radical and lib -

eral politics, a brief sketch of the book’s plot is required.

Rarely has the phrase “a tale of two worlds” been so appositely

literal in a work of fiction as in The Dispossessed. There’s the garden

world of Urras, torn asunder by a generations-long ideological conflict

between the capitalist nation of Io and the socialist nation of Thu,

all watched over by the quiet grace of its moon Anarres, a haven for

several million anarchist exiles who scratch out an egalitarian life on

its dusty surface. Held together by the thinnest filament of trade and

barricaded on either end by strict quarantines and ideological bound-

aries, the two worlds lead separate lives.

This is the uneasy arrangement that flows from the revolution that

established Anarres, an anarchist uprising led by a woman named

Odo. Odo lent her name to their movement and never lived to see

the paradise built on Anarres’ distant shores. In exchange for being al-

lowed to mine inexpensive lunar resources, the “propertarian” nations

of Urras leave the Anarresti anarchists alone to live an Odonian vision.