Q

50 years after it’s publication, The Dispossessed remains relevant as ever. Le Guin presents to us a world of anarchy — not dystopian chaos as the word has come to connote (itself telling in our world’s mistrust of decentralization) — but a functioning society without centralized rule, not without its failings.

Le Guin writes with shocking clarity of what a viable anarchy could look like through the eyes of Shevek, a theoretical physicist in anarchic Anarres. Perhaps the true genius lies in her clever juxtaposition with Urras, a capitalist society not unlike ours, to which Shevek travels.

I can do no true justice to this novel through an analysis, and will instead share some choice observations of Shevek, a view of our society through the eyes of a true anarchist.

On anarchic Anarres:

“He could not rebel against his society, because his society, properly conceived, was a revolution — a permanent one, an ongoing process. To reassert its validity and strength, he thought, one need only act, without fear or punishment and without hope of reward: act from the centre of one’s soul.”

“But what keeps people in order? Why don’t they rob and murder each other?”

“Nobody owns anything to rob. If you want things you take them from the depository. As for violence, well, I don’t know; would you murder me, ordinarily? And if you felt like it, would a law against it stop you? Coercion is the least efficient means of obtaining order.”

On capitalistic Urras:

“He had not been free from anything [in Anarres]: only free to do anything. Here, it was the other way round. Like all the students and professors, he had nothing to do but his intellectual work: literally nothing. The beds were made for them, the rooms were swept for them, the routine fo the college was managed for them.”

“The matter of superiority and inferiority must be a central one in Urrasti social life. If to respect him [an Urrasti] had to consider half the human race [women] as inferior to him, how then did women manage to respect themselves—did they consider men inferior? And how did all that affect sex-lives?”

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