Abstract
The secondary literature on The Dispossessed mostly treats the novel as a conveyer of ideas, and Le Guin herself has frequently objected to this. I wish to situate The Dispossessed within a tradition of ambiguous literary utopias by linking The Dispossessed with Plato’s Republic. According to Leo Strauss, Plato isn’t writing a blueprint for a perfect society. Instead, he’s writing about the unrealizability of utopia. The anarcho-syndicalist state of Anarres contains an element of similar unrealizability. Borrowing from Peter Kropotkin, Le Guin retains a post-Hobbesian view of human nature as something related to enlightened self-interest, while also endorsing a Habermasian view of communicative rationality that, according to Strauss, Socrates in The Republic considers impossible.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
As Burns shows, Le Guin’s categorization of her own novel seems to have evolved. The phrase “literary utopia” is a retroactive label not initially available to Le Guin, so Burns builds his argument around Le Guin’s early worries, expressed mostly in Dancing at the Edge of the World (1989), that the genres of “novel” and “utopian literature” are logically incompatible. Notably, the contribution by Isabelle Stengers to this volume of essays, “Thinking in SF Mode,” gives a sense of what reading “novelistically” might mean for SF. Rather than the de-contextualized thought experiments common within modern philosophy and the social sciences, SF offers “situated” thought experiments that shows abstract ideas in their living, breathing applications among people. This quality, let me suggest, also permeates Plato’s work.
- 2.
Krishan Kumar, for one, agrees that Socrates’s City-in-Speech does not provide a “blueprint for … some future reformer” (1987, p. 24), yet he still sees the dialogue primarily as providing “illustrations of philosophic categories expressing the nature of justice” (187, p. 25). For an in-depth presentation of The Republic as an earnest utopian blueprint, see George Klosko in Jacobins and Utopians (2003).
- 3.
This “impossibility” reading, as suggested, runs counter to how most political scientists—down through and including Aristotle—have read Plato’s dialogue. The strongest evidence that Aristotle took Plato’s Republic seriously occurs in Book 2 of The Politics (1986), where he dismisses Plato’s proposed communism of wives, children, and property, and in Nicomachean Ethics where he denies that a universal, absolute Form of the Good can apply in common to multiple things (2004, 1096b–1097a). Many also cite Plato’s Seventh Letter as evidence that he intended The Republic seriously—this epistle, whose authenticity is debatable, recounts his failed attempt to transform Syracuse’s newly ascended tyrant, Dionysius the Younger, into a philosopher king. Among modern analytic philosophers, Simon Blackburn offers a typically dismissive response to the Straussian view, which he thinks appeals only to “weak-minded commentators in love with the idea of hidden, esoteric mysteries penetrated only by initiates” (2006, p. 5). As I proceed, I hope to motivate the compelling character of the Straussian position given its applicability for The Dispossessed.
- 4.
For example, traditional family structures and private property are abolished, and both utopias mandate communal living. Of course, Plato’s Republic features a heavily centralized government whereas Anarres does not. Likewise, the City-in-Speech cares nothing for personal happiness or the individual conscience; such things obviously matter a great deal to the Anarresti.
- 5.
For an example of a utopia that denies human nature, see Samuel R. Delany’s Triton. This novel assumes that human nature is infinitely malleable rather than only partially malleable, which no one would deny. This differing attitude partly explains why Neil Easterbrook considers Triton an “authentic anarchy” but Anarres a mere humanist liberal isotopia. “What makes one an anarchist,” says Easterbrook, “is the philosophical disavowal, the renouncing and debunking of extrahistorical (transhistorical) or extrapolitical (“natural”) grounds upon which one might theorize a better state” (1997, p. 71). My own concerns, of course, are less about delineating the parameters of “authentic” anarchy than in how Le Guin’s and Plato’s respective visions of human nature permit ambiguity to enter their utopian loci.
- 6.
Although Burns insightfully ties “Le Guin’s interest in fundamental ethical dilemmas … with Greek tragic drama” (2008, p. 9), he never seems to consider, when removing The Dispossessed from the utopian literary tradition, how the Straussian reading of Plato might apply to Le Guin’s novel. Although Burns once co-edited (with James Connelly) an essay collection meant to introduce Strauss to British political science (Burns and Connelly 2010), Strauss’s name never appears in Burn’s monograph.
References
Aristotle. 1986. The Politics. Trans. William Ellis, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books.
———. 2004. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. F. H. Peters, New York: Barnes & Noble.
Blackburn, Simon. 2006. Plato’s Republic: A Biography. London: Atlantic Books.
Bloom, Allan. 1991. “Interpretative Essay.” In Plato, The Republic of Plato, 2nd ed., trans. Allan Bloom, 305-436. New York: Basic Books.
Burns, Tony. 2005. Science and Politics in The Dispossessed: Le Guin and the “Science Wars”. In The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, ed. Laurence Davis and Peter Stillman, 195–215. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
———. 2008. Political Theory, Science Fiction, and Utopian Literature. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Burns, Tony, and James Connelly, eds. 2010. The Legacy of Leo Strauss. Exeter: Imprint Academic.
Delany, Samuel R. 1977. The Jewel-Hinged Jaw. New York: Berkeley Publishing.
Easterbrook, Neil. 1997. State, Heterotopia: The Political Imagination in Heinlein, Le Guin, and Delany. In Political Science Fiction, ed. Donald M. Hassler and Clyde Wilcox, 43–75. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press.
Guin, Le, and K. Ursula. 1994. The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia. New York: HarperPrism.
———. 2005. A Response, by Ansible, from Tau Ceti. In The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, ed. Laurence Davis and Peter Stillman, 305–308. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Jameson, Frederic. 2005. Archaeologies of Knowledge: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. New York: Verso.
Klosko, George. 2003. Jacobins and Utopians: The Political Theory of Fundamental Moral Reform. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.
Kumar, Krishan. 1987. Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Moylan, Tom. 2014. Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination. Ed. Raffaella Baccolini. Oxford: Peter Lang.
Plato. 1991. The Republic of Plato, 2nd ed. Trans. Allan Bloom. New York: Basic Books.
Plaw, Avery. 2005. Empty Hands: Communication, Pluralism, and Community in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. In The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, ed. Laurence Davis and Peter Stillman, 283–304. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Smith, Philip E. 1979. Unbuilding Walls: Human Nature and the Nature of Evolutionary and Political Theory in The Dispossessed. In Ursula K. Le Guin, ed. Joseph D. Olander and Martin Harry Greenberg, 77–96. New York: Taplinger.
Somay, Bülent. 1984. Towards an Open-Ended Utopia. Science Fiction Studies 11 (1): 25–38. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4239585. Accessed 8 October 2018.
Strauss, Leo. 1952. Persecution and the Art of Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 1957. What is Political Philosophy? The Journal of Politics 19 (3): 343–68. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2126765. Accessed 24 September 2019.
———. 1963. The City and Man. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Wise, D.W. (2021). Utopias Unrealizable and Ambiguous: Plato, Leo Strauss, and The Dispossessed. In: Robinson, C.L., Bouttier, S., Patoine, PL. (eds) The Legacies of Ursula K. Le Guin. Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82827-1_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82827-1_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-82826-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-82827-1
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)