Discussed in this essay:

The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Le Guin. Harper Perennial. 400 pages. $16.99.

The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 704 pages. $35.

I first heard of anarchism around forty-five years ago, as a teenage member of the Science Fiction Book Club. One day the U.S. Postal Service delivered a novel by Ursula K. Le Guin called The Dispossessed, which I read as soon as it arrived and immediately declared my favorite book—even better than Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End or Loren Eiseley’s The Immense…