Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: Real anarchy has never been tried

2025-04-29

A brilliant physicist grows disenchanted with the stifling anarchist society of his home planet, defecting to a capitalist world in the hopes of finding true freedom...but what he finds only horrifies him. Cam says Ursula K. Le Guin's 1974 award-winning piece of sociological fiction is a leftist pamphlet. Benny and Rich call bs. who's right? let us examine the textual evidence. On incentives: Are social sanctions powerful enough to get everyone to work voluntarily? Can an economy function without price signals and division of labour? How does crime and...

Cam says Ursula K. Le Guin's 1974 award-winning piece of sociological fiction is a leftist pamphlet. Benny and Rich call bs.

who's right? let us examine the textual evidence.

On incentives: Are social sanctions powerful enough to get everyone to work voluntarily? Can an economy function without price signals and division of labour? How does crime and justice work with no police or courts? Do we have any existence proofs of flourishing anarchist societies?

On family life: Is having your children raised by other people as grotesque as it sounds? How about mere copulation without monogamy? Or living in communal dorms? The boys are much more sympathetic to the idea of ditching compulsory education, but wonder if unschooling etc is a luxury belief.

And the million-dollar question: from behind the veil of ignorance, would we rather be born on Anarres or Urras?

A fun wonky discussion of the central ideological clash. In part 2 we'll try to talk more about the characters and the story.

Also: a humiliating question in the reader mailbag! bold of you to assume we actually read books outside of the podcast.

CHAPTERS

(00:00:00) an ambiguous anarchist utopia
(00:09:33) communal parenting, unschooling, and luxury beliefs
(00:19:10) soft coercion through social norms
(00:33:18) the free-rider problem and central planning
(00:42:52) capitalism as the root cause of all antisocial behaviour
(00:48:02) crime rate is zero if you don't have any laws hehe
(00:59:42) has real syndicalist anarchism ever been tried?
(01:04:37) how good is le guin’s worldbuilding
(01:15:21) reader mailbag: which new releases from living authors do we read immediately?

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