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NOTE The Ambiguous Utopias of Ursula K. Le Guin and Samuel R. Delany

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The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with

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Jeff Rigenbach.

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The mid-1970s, meaning, let us say, the five-year period encompassing the years 1973, 74, 75,

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76, and 77, was a heady time for the modern American libertarian movement.

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To those of us who were involved back then, it seemed we were on the verge of a major

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breakthrough.

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The first book on the libertarian movement to be brought out by a major mainstream publisher,

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Jerome Tucciulli's radical libertarianism, had appeared in 1970.

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In 1973, it was joined by two more such books, David Friedman's The Machinery of Freedom

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and Murray Rothbard's For a New Liberty.

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That same year, Harry Brown's How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World became a major

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national bestseller.

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A year later, in 1974, Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia became a major national bestseller

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and the winner of the National Book Award for Non-Fiction.

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Also in 1974, an American science fiction novel was published that was recognized almost

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at once as a major classic of libertarian science fiction.

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The novel was The Dispossessed, an ambiguous utopia by Ursula K. Le Guin.

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Now I should acknowledge immediately that Le Guin is not our kind of libertarian, and

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this isn't just the way I see it, this is the way she sees it too, or at least it's

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the way she saw it in 1975, a year after the original publication of The Dispossessed.

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A great many people in the world of the dispossessed, you see, are followers of a political philosopher

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called Odo, who died many years before the time of the novel.

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As followers of Odo, they are Odonians, and practitioners of Odonianism.

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Odonianism, Le Guin wrote in 1975, is anarchism, not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is

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Terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with, not the social Darwinist economic

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libertarianism of the far right, but anarchism, as prefigured in early Daoist thought and

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expounded by Percy Shelley and Peter Kropotkin, Emma Goldman and Paul Goodman.

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Anarchism's principal target is the authoritarian state, capitalist or socialist.

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Its principal moral practical theme is cooperation, solidarity, mutual aid.

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It is the most idealistic, and to me the most interesting, of all political theories.

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You did catch that reference to the social Darwinist economic libertarianism of the far

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right, didn't you?

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That's us.

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Oh, I know it's not really us.

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We're not social Darwinists.

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Our libertarianism is more than just economic and doesn't need any scare quotes, and we're

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not on the right at all, much less the far right.

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But social Darwinist economic libertarians of the far right is how Ursula K. Le Guin

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sees us, or at least how she saw us 35 years ago, when she was herself 46 years old and

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at the height of her long and distinguished career.

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Le Guin was born Ursula Krober on October 21, 1929 in Berkeley, the daughter of an anthropology

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professor at the University of California and his writer wife.

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She was in the same graduating class at Berkeley High School with Philip K. Dick, the class

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of 47, though they never knew each other during those years.

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She went off to Radcliffe, then Columbia, where she studied French and Italian and Renaissance

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History and Literature, and earned a BA and an MA. After a couple of semesters of taking classes

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toward a PhD, she won a Fulbright Fellowship to study in Europe for an academic year. On the trip

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over aboard ship, she met another Fulbright Fellow bound for France, a young historian named Charles

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Le Guin. They were married a few months later in Paris. Ursula Krober Le Guin was 24 years old.

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In 1958, Charles Le Guin accepted a teaching job at Portland State College, now Portland

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State University in Oregon, and he and Ursula K. Le Guin settled down into a home life that

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must have seemed very comfortable and familiar to her, a home life in which dad went off

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to teach at the local college every day while mom stayed home and wrote.

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There were four kids knocking around the house when she was a girl growing up in Berkeley,

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There were three knocking around the Portland house during the 1960s, otherwise the situations

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were pretty similar.

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There was another difference though, and a crucial one.

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The difference was in what mom stayed home and wrote.

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In Berkeley it was non-fiction, mostly on topics in psychology or anthropology.

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In Portland it was fiction, some fantasy, some science fiction, some realistic fiction

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set in an imaginary Central European country called Orsinia.

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At least one of her works set in Orsinia would probably be of at least passing interest to

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libertarian readers.

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The novel Malafrina, published in 1979, tells the tragic tale of a passionate young liberal

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in early 19th century Orsinia who is too early with his revolutionary message and sees his

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His hopes and dreams crushed by a state not much inclined to put up with his propagandizing

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in favor of limits on its power.

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But it was her science fiction and fantasy that ultimately made Ursula Le Guin's reputation

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as a fiction writer, and it is her 1974 science fiction novel, The Dispossessed, an ambiguous

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utopia, that is, to this day, not only one of her two most famous works, but the work

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Work of Hers Most Likely to Interest Modern Libertarians of Our Sort.

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In The Dispossessed, the action takes place in a two-planet system.

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Each planet is, in effect, the other planet's moon.

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The larger of these two planets, Eurus, is a world much like the Earth we know, divided

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among a number of competing governments, the best of which permit private property ownership

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and a relatively free market, though subject to heavy taxation.

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The smaller planet, Anares, is a desert world, rich in minerals and well worth mining, but

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a harsh environment for human habitation.

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For the past 200 plus years, Anares has, however, been populated by humans, Odonian colonists

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from Urus and their descendants, people who were, in effect, expelled from Urus by governments

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Eurasians afraid they might be undermined by the Odonian Revolution.

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As the novel opens, there are some 20 million humans living on Anares.

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One of them is a physicist, Chevec, who starts out as conventional, even priggish in his

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thinking as any individual reared on either of the two planets.

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When an adolescent friend suggests that perhaps what they hear about Euras on Anares is not

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not necessarily the whole truth, that perhaps they are being propagandized by the bureaucracy

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called the PDC, for Production and Distribution Coordination, the bureaucracy that serves

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as the government any resident of Anares would assure you doesn't exist there.

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Chevec is shocked, he indignantly defends the PDC, but his mind has been open to crack

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against His Better Judgment, and the rest of the novel is, in a sense, the story of

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the further opening of Shevek's mind.

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Ultimately, it opens so far that it lets in not only the truth about the PDC and anarchism

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on his home planet, but also the truth about Eurus, which he discovers for himself when

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he becomes the first resident of Anares to set foot on its sister planet in more than

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150 years.

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In the end, Scheveck learns that the truth is more ambiguous and nuanced than he had

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ever realized, and that choosing between the utopian society in which he grew up and the

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evil propertarian society on Urus is, after all, not so easy as he had always supposed

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it would be.

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Le Guin fearlessly and accurately depicts the poverty that any libertarian of our sort

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knows must be the prevailing condition in any society at all resembling the one on an

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R.A.S., a society that has to struggle along without private property ownership and without

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money to facilitate productive exchange.

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Le Guin, of course, gives no sign that she sees anything in the social system on an R.A.S.

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that might account for the poverty there.

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She seems to think that this poverty is caused by poor soil, brutal weather, lack of easily

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Accessible Fresh Water and so forth. She seems to think that Eurus is rich and

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Anares is poor because Eurus is rich in certain natural resources which Anares

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lacks. Of course, the opposite is true as well, though Le Guin never seems to see

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certain of the implications of this fact. Similarly, she never seems to see how

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anomalous it is that the bureaucrats in the PDC on Anares should choose among

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The same cannot be said for the society depicted in another classic libertarian science fiction

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novel published in the mid-1970s, Samuel R. Delaney's Triton, An Ambiguous Heterotopia,

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which first appeared in print in February 1976.

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Delaney told an interviewer ten years later that,

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I believe I read the Dispossessed somewhere either between the first draft of Triton and

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the second, or perhaps between the second and the third.

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Was I halfway through the second when a copy of Le Guin's book from Harper and Row reached

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me in London by mail?

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Having read The Dispossessed, Delaney conceived the idea of changing a few things here and

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there in his own partially finished novel, and clarifying a few things here and there

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that Le Guin's book directed me to think about.

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When I first looked through The Dispossessed, it occurred to me that the two books generated

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an interesting dialogue with each other.

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My added subtitle was an attempt to put the two novels clearly into a dialogue I felt

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was already implied.

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The action in Triton takes place mainly on Triton, a satellite of Neptune that has been

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populated for several generations by colonists from Earth and their descendants, as have

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a number of other satellites of the outer planets of our solar system.

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At one point, a resident of Earth falls into conversation with Sam and Bron, residents

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of Tethys, Triton's biggest city.

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They're always telling on the news about all those hundreds of political parties you have

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on each satellite out where you guys are from, the earthling says.

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They're not hundreds, Sam said, sipping his broth, only about 30 to 37, depending on which

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satellite you're on.

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And when you have an election, none of them ever wins?

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Bron watched Sam decide to laugh.

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No, they all win.

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are governed for the term by the governor of whichever party you vote for.

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They all serve office simultaneously, and you get the various benefits of the platform

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your party has been running on.

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It makes for competition between the parties, which in our sort of system is both individuating

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and stabilizing.

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At another point in the novel, another Tethys resident, Charo, expresses a view of taxation

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any libertarian of our sort would love to read.

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Well, she says, we were brought up to think of taxes as simply a matter of extortion by

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the biggest crooks who happen to live nearest to you.

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Even if they turn around and say, all right, we'll spend the money on things you can use,

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like an army or roads, that just turns it into glorified protection money as far as

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we're concerned.

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And then there's the section of Tethys that is officially known as the unlicensed sector,

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or colloquially, the U.L.

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As Delaney explains the concept, at founding each outer satellite city had set aside a

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city sector where no law officially held, since as the Mars sociologist who first advocated

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it had pointed out, most cities develop of necessity such neighborhoods anyway.

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These sectors fulfilled a complex range of functions in the city's psychological, political

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and Economic Ecology, problems a few conservative earthbound thinkers feared must come, didn't.

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The interface between official law and official lawlessness produced some remarkably stable

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unofficial laws throughout the no-law sector.

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Minor criminals were not likely to retreat there.

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Enforcement agents could enter the U.L. sector as could anyone else, and in the U.L. there

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There were no legal curbs on apprehension methods, use of weapons or technological battery.

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Those major criminals whose crimes, through the contractual freedom of the place, existed

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mainly on paper, found it convenient while there to keep life on the streets fairly safe

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and minor crimes at a minimum.

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Samuel R. Delaney was born 69 years ago last week, on April Fool's Day 1942 in Harlem.

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He grew up there, the son of a prosperous funeral director and a clerk at the New York

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Public Library.

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He attended the exclusive Dalton School and the Bronx High School of Science, then spent

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a brief time at City College before leaving without a degree.

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He began publishing science fiction and fantasy in the early 1960s, expanding into memoirs,

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literary criticism and mainstream fiction as the years went by.

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He began teaching in the late 60s, took his first full-time faculty position at a university

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in the 1980s, and since 2001 has been a professor of English and creative writing at Temple

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University in Philadelphia.

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His ambiguous heterotopia is a heterotopia because, like heterosexual lovemaking, it

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embraces opposites.

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Opposite sexes, opposite political preferences.

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Tethys on Triton is a place, a topia, in which the unlicensed sector exists, where anyone

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can do business in any way he or she prefers, and in which services like protection and

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justice must be provided by each individual as he or she sees fit, and to the extent that

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he or she can do so.

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On the other hand, outside the unlicensed sector in Tethys, money and marriage are illegal,

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and the State provides all desired goods and services to whomever requests them.

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A union of opposites.

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As for the ambiguity in Delany's fictional society, that seems to lie in the inability

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of either of Triton's opposite social systems to bring happiness to its members, its participants.

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Indeed, the overarching theme of Delany's novel seems to be the proposition that individuals

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Socialists must find their own happiness and understand that no social system, however

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anarchistic or paternalistic, will provide it for them.

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Ursula Le Guin seems to have looked at her two societies in the dispossessed in much

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the same way, the nominally anarchistic one that is inexorably drifting toward authoritarianism,

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and the propertarian one that her protagonist, Chevec, finds so unexpectedly luxurious and

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and Comfortable and Inviting.

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Shevek's dilemma, at the end of The Dispossessed, is brought about by the need to look within

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himself to discover what will best please him, what social arrangements will best comport

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with his own personal happiness, something neither social system, no social system, can

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possibly provide on its own.

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This is Jeff Riggenbach.

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The Theory of Money and Credit

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The Theory of Money and Credit

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The Theory of Money and Credit