Le Guin’s Socratic Political Theory and the Utopian Tradition

In this paper I argue that a species of science fiction belongs to the Utopian tradition, and that in belonging to it, science fiction inherits and extends a modeling practice I call "Socratic political theory." By this I mean the ongoing theoretical exploration of models of comparative institutional frameworks that are humanly possible but held out of reach by the transition problem: how a population raised under bad institutions could ever get from the present status quo to an ideal political future. Plato's Republic articulates and instantiates this modeling practice, and Ursula Le Guin's Hainish cycle, I claim, is its continuation — even as Le Guin sets herself against what she takes to be Plato's politics. Section I is focused on modeling in the Republic. Contemporary theorists use model-building as a description of what they do. David Wiens, for instance, credits Plato with anticipating two such functions, the normative and the comparative. I argue the Republic exhibits at least six. The added four — heuristic, dynamic-pattern, feature-isolation, and embodied-exemplar — are what let the Utopian tradition do genuine social-theoretic work, not just norm-setting. I close that section with an interpretation of Socrates’s placing his foundational model in the heavens (592b). I argue he ended up also inviting what would later be called a genre of science fiction — here treated as involving a mode of theorizing that models the possible by situating it among the stars. Section II locates Socratic political theory in twentieth-century social theory by focusing on Le Guin's treatment of Lévi-Strauss’s contrast between expansionist "hot" societies and steady-state "cold" ones — a contrast that already echoes the Republic. I show that a cold society's demand for consensus does real modeling work: by foreclosing disagreement it renders the transition problem not merely unsolved but unthinkable, as Le Guin’s short story, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" (1973) illustrates. I also show that Le Guin endorses what one may call a ‘mixed’ or ‘lukewarm’ modeling type that one can show is also to be found in Lévi-Strauss and Republic. Section III interprets parts of the Hainish cycle itself. I explore an example of a cold society at its limit (e.g., The Left Hand of Darkness), where environment and language between them foreclose modality; I analyze an example of federation across scales (e.g., The Dispossessed, whose neglected theme it is); and the persistence of the friend–enemy distinction even under an ideal of galactic equality ("Forgiveness Day") read with Fanon and against Schmitt.