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

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.