The squares, the austere streets, the low buildings, the unwalled workyards, were charged with vitality and activity. As Shevek walked he was constantly aware of other people walking, working, talking, faces passing, voices calling, gossiping, singing, people alive, people doing things, people afoot. Workshops and factories fronted on squares or on their open yards, and their doors were open. He passed a glassworks, the workman dipping up a great molten blob as casually as a cook serves soup. Next to it was a busy yard, where stonefoam was cast for construction; the gang foreman, a big woman in a smock white with dust, was supervising the pouring of a cast with a loud and splendid flow of language. After that came a small wire factory, a district laundry, a luthier’s where musical instruments were made and repaired, the district small-goods distributory, a theatre, a tile works. The activity going on in each place was fascinating and mostly out in full view. Children were around, some involved in the work with the adults, some underfoot making mudpies, some busy with games in the street, one sitting perched up on the roof of the learning centre with her nose deep in a book. The wiremaker had decorated the shopfront with patterns of vines worked in painted wire, cheerful and ornate. The blast of steam from the wide-open doors of the laundry was overwhelming. No doors were locked, few shut. There were no disguises and no advertisements. It was all there, all the work, all the life of the city, open to the eye and to the hand.
The Dispossessed, Ursula LeGuin
I came on this quote in the process of putting together a list of works of fiction set in libertarian societies. When I read the passage however, what it brought to mind was not libertarianism, but ‘A Pattern Language’. I could see the patterns that had been used to build this town so beautifully described on the pages and I realised, rather belatedly I know, that Alexander’s book is also a libertarian manifesto.
I’m still trying to reconcile my love of ‘A Pattern Language’ with this view, given my almost visceral antipathy to so much of what is touted, on the web at least, as libertarianism. I think the answer probably lies in Alexander’s concern for people. His focus, expressed in ‘A Pattern Language’ and in books like ‘The Production of Houses’ is not on some abstract and grandiose theory, but on the small nuggets of everyday life. His philosophy is so humane and so far removed from the fantasists and fanatics you can find in places like this and this, that it represents almost a different world – and in the hands of Le Guin that world is made real.
Anyone who has read this blog from the beginning may be wondering why libertarian issues have come to the fore so much recently. Equally if you have read from the beginning you will know that my interests veer all over the place. Even so I would argue that there is a coherent set of ideas, but one that isn’t entirely obvious yet - even to me. I think however it is getting clearer, helped along by Le Guin.
