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.