Dr. J.R.R. Tolkien (full name John Ronald Reuel Tolkien) is the most important fantasy writer in all of history and some have argued that he is the most famous writer of all time. His two most famous works – The Hobbit and its sequel trilogy The Lord of The Rings – are the foundation of the entire fantasy genre and such present day writers, such as George R. R. Martin, are merely playing in the sandbox that Tolkien created himself. Tolkien’s books and the movies based off them have, respectively, been major cultural moments in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The themes and ideas of his writings have captivated people for almost a century now and you can spend months and years studying the insights he offers, as evidenced by the multiple universities and multiple societies that offer entire classes and programs devoted to studying his works in depth. No where is his keen insight into the nature of humanity, history, and society better demonstrated than in his writings about government and what we would today called the State. Tolkien in his own private letters identified himself as an anarchist. In this article I will be exploring exactly what he meant by calling himself an anarchist, why we should be paying attention to his insights about government, and the economic ideals he championed, which are fundamentally free market in nature. Using his public works and his private letters as sources, I will demonstrate that Tolkien was, in modern terms, an anarcho-capitalist.
Theyocracy
The following letter, broken up by commentary but which can be read as one continuous whole only omitting the final few sentences, was written by Tolkien to his son Christopher on November 29, 1943. Christopher had just turned eighteen and had been drafted into the Royal Air Force to fight for Great Britain in World War II. Tolkien tells his son:
My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) – or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inanimate realm of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate! If we could get back to personal names, it would do a lot of good. Government is an abstract noun meaning the art and process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so as to refer to people. If people were in the habit of referring to ‘King George’s council, Winston and his gang’, it would go a long way to clearing thought, and reducing the frightful landslide into Theyocracy.
The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, pg. 74, Letter 52.
Here Tolkien declares himself an avowed anti-statist. The entire concept of a Nation or People who have a Voice or a Destiny is anathema to Tolkien. As opposed to the propaganda people are raised upon that indoctrinates them into believing the State they live in is benevolent and necessary and good, Tolkien knows the State for what it truly is – an organized criminals organization, a gang, that exists to extort wealth from the masses under threat of violence and to wage turf wars against any other gang (like Germany or the United States) that tries to muscle in on its territory. I love his term for the State – “Theyocracy” – for two reasons. First, it clearly seems to be a riff on the term theocracy, which suggests that Tolkien either explicitly or intuitively understood the cultic/religious nature of the State. Secondly, it describes well the kind of learned helplessness that comes from being raised in a statist (“state-ist”) society. Instead of realizing that we, the individuals, hold the sovereign political power, the ability to compel the government to do what we want by merely choosing to obey it or not, and the ability to transform our lives through our own choices, being raised in a statist society teaches us to believe that the only way to accomplish things is through government action and through government actions which we must obey. They must order and we must obey.
There is a great example of this towards the end of The Return of the King novel when the hobbits return to find the Shire overrun by a statist government controlled by the tyrannical Sharkey (who is Saruman in disguise.) Again and again the returning heroes are told that they aren’t allowed to do something (whether that be enter the town, eat, talk about something, share their food, smoke pipeweed, or even quit their jobs, among other things) without permission from those in power. They wouldn’t be happy if the rules are broken and They will beat and imprison you if you disobey. (For example, see the exchange with Robin Smallburrow on pages 1311-1312.) Samwise, aptly sums it all up, saying, “All right, all right! That’s quite enough. I don’t want to hear no more. No welcome, no beer, no smoke, and a lot of rules and orc-talk instead.” (pg. 1309) The phrase orc-talk is highly indicative of what Tolkien thought of the modern State and those who support it. In Tolkien’s writings, orcs were created by Melkor (Tolkien’s Satanic figure) and they are cruel, sadistic, stupid creatures who serve first Melkor’s and later Sauron’s (Melkor’s primary lieutenant) totalitarian regimes as the foot soldiers of their militaristic efforts to conquer Middle-Earth. Thus, to talk and think that the State – that They – have the authority to regulate our lives and to punish us if we do not follow their rules, that we have to serve in their armies and do what we are told is orc-talk – it is twisted, sadistic, cruel, stupid, and totalitarian. It is, in fact, the work of the Dark Lord; the State is of the Devil.
I can hear your next question: If Tolkien thinks the State is infernalistic then why does he describe himself as also supporting unconstitutional monarchy? Isn’t that a contradiction? Aren’t unconstitutional monarchs absolutists? In Episode Seven of his podcast Tolkien Chats, Dr. Corey Olsen, the Tolkien Professor, addresses this question and argues that there are some basic assumptions most people today make about Medieval kings that are fundamentally wrong. Dr. Olsen notes that political power in the Medieval period actually wasn’t centralized. The king’s power was far more limited than we think of it now and governments today tend to have far more power than Medieval kings did. Olsen also makes the point that the Shire, the people Tolkien thinks we should most be like, is an anarchist society. To study the decentralized nature of society in the Middle Ages in more detail I suggest starting with the article Decentralization in the Middle Ages by Dr. Jason Van Boom. In that article he explains that Medieval European society was politically, economically, and socially decentralized with multiple loci upon which society operated and none of which held complete or even majoritarian control over law or society. Tolkien, as a Medievalist himself, understood this better than most people today, meaning his comments were of a a minarchist, even libertarian bend and and not an absolutist or monarchist one. This conclusion is confirmed in the following excerpt where Tolkien describes the kind of powers he thinks a monarch should have and how government should occur only in small groups where those being ruled know and can control their ruler(s) directly.
No One Should Rule
Anyway the proper study of Man is anything but Man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity. And at least it is done only to a small group of men who know who their master is. The mediævals were only too right in taking nolo efiscopari as the best reason a man could give to others for making him a bishop. Give me a king whose chief interest in life is stamps, railways, or race-horses; and who has the power to sack his Vizier (or whatever you care to call him) if he does not like the cut of his trousers. And so on down the line. But, of course, the fatal weakness of all that – after all only the fatal weakness of all good natural things in a bad corrupt unnatural world – is that it works and has worked only when all the world is messing along in the same good old inefficient human way.
The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, pg. 74, Letter 52.
The phrase nolo efiscopari is Latin and means, “I do not wish to be bishoped.” It was traditionally believed to be the phrase uttered thrice by Catholic (and later Anglican) clerics who were offered the office of a bishop and who did not want the office. Here Tolkien is making the point that those who seek after authority and power are the ones least likely to be of the moral or intellectual character to have any authority or power at all. He recognizes the reality of what today one might call authoritarian sociopathy, that is only those who want to hurt and kill others are drawn to the power to do so and those given the power to do so are inevitably corrupted by it even if they start out noble and good. The only solution to this is to strip positions of leadership of power or, barring that, only empower people for whom the entire idea of ruling is so antithetical to their nature that they would rather die than use such power in a way that would abuse the rights of others. If you cannot be a complete anarchist then decentralization – less government, less power, less rule – is always better than more.
Tolkien wasn’t the first or last proponent of liberty to favor incrementalism, getting what people were ready for while preparing them for the even greater society that greater freedom brings. This is the theory that Dr. Ron Paul ran under for nomination to the US Presidency: Americans weren’t ready to accept the actual ideals of liberty, but they do have a historical tradition of limited, small government that would be better than what now exists and would be a move in the right direction. So, he made that tradition the centerpiece of his campaigns and while he didn’t win his message found immense popularity and his impact continues today. The ultimate goal is that once people discover the liberation and prosperity found under small, limited government, they would then readily take the next step and recognize the government for the extraneous and useless drain it is and eliminate it altogether.
Next, Tolkien goes on to give a historical example of how a decentralized society can come together and eliminate larger and seemingly greater threats to their safety and prosperity.
The quarrelsome, conceited Greeks managed to pull it off against Xerxes; but the abominable chemists and engineers have put such a power into Xerxes’ hands, and all ant-communities, that decent folk don’t seem to have a chance. We are all trying to do the Alexander-touch – and, as history teaches, that orientalized Alexander and all his generals. The poor boob fancied (or liked people to fancy) he was the son of Dionysus, and died of drink. The Greece that was worth saving from Persia perished anyway; and became a kind of Vichy-Hellas, or Fighting-Hellas (which did not fight), talking about Hellenic honour and culture and thriving on the sale of the early equivalent of dirty postcards. But the special horror of the present world is that the whole damned thing is in one bag. There is nowhere to fly to. Even the unlucky little Samoyedes, I suspect, have tinned food and the village loudspeaker telling Stalin’s bed-time stories about Democracy and the wicked Fascists who eat babies and steal sledge-dogs. There is only one bright spot and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power-stations; I hope that, encouraged now as ‘patriotism’, may remain a habit! But it won’t do any good, if it is not universal.
The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, pg. 74, Letter 52.
Here Tolkien is talking about the Greco-Persian Wars when the small city-states of decentralized Greece came together to repulse multiple invasions from the highly centralized Persian empire and defeat the largest army in human history up to that time. Instead of learning from this example, and the many throughout history like it, most people try to be like Alexander, the Macedonian prince who built one of the largest empires in history up to his time only for it to quickly collapse upon his death. We keep deluding ourselves that bigger, more centralized, and more powerful is better when it is not. The comment about the drive to empire orientalizing Alexander is the common idea that massive empires are a common feature of Asian history and small local government and individualism is a feature that developed in Western history and that by embracing imperial ambitions Alexander moved from the latter to the former, away from liberty to authoritarianism. This theory has been refuted by modern scholars of liberty and Asia today, but was widely accepted in Tolkien’s era. Tolkien’s larger point here though is still valid – the assumption of power is antithetical to the operation of liberty, security, and peace. It corrupts even the righteous and in the hands of all the rest of us it becomes a tool for destroying the essence of that which we proclaim to love and wish to save.
In “saving” Greece from Persia by conquering Greece and unifying it all under his rule, Alexander actually destroyed everything that made Greece worth saving. This lesson is still highly applicable today. We see a similar outcome in American history when in an effort to preserve the American union at all cost from the threat of secession President Abraham Lincoln launched a massive war that killed more Americans than any other war in all of history and destroyed the constitutional foundation of individual freedom and limited government which made America something worth preserving. The result of this was to create a Vichy-America, a place like Vichy France which maintained the illusion of independence while in reality being a puppet state of the Third Reich, except in America (and ancient Greece post-Alexander) the illusion is that the various states maintain their independence and the people their liberty when in reality both are dominated from the center by those who hold power in the centralized national government, which like the Third Reich, has hegemonic militaristic goals and have no problem murdering millions to achieve them.
The Progressive Dark Age
Well, cheers and all that to you dearest son. We were born in a dark age out of due time (for us). But there is this comfort: otherwise we should not know, or so much love, what we do love. I imagine the fish out of water is the only fish to have an inkling of water. Also we have still small swords to use. ‘I will not bow before the Iron Crown, nor cast my own small golden sceptre down.’
The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, pg. 74, Letter 52.
The “Progressive” Leftist theory of history is that history is one long march towards Utopia and that today is better than yesterday and tomorrow will be better than today. This provides the comforting lies that whatever is being done today is better than everything done yesterday and that there is little or no value in learning about the past because we are superior to it and the people in it. As I have heard repeatedly (in almost the exact words every time, demonstrating how deeply the indoctrination goes), “Why should I care about what a bunch of old, white, sexist, slaveowners had to say?” Tolkien rightly notes that what this produces is not an era of enlightenment but an Age of Darkness – an age in which the willfully blind lead society through the dark, refusing all light, and ignoring all warnings of danger and dread. And they will do so smugly, assured in their self-righteousness that they are right and everyone else is wrong and anyone who questions them is a deviant that needs to be crushed.
In truth, Progressives are fish in water. They are so swept up in their theory, so indoctrinated into their dogmas, that they can not see the obvious truths and crises which lay before them, all created by their active ignorance. Only those who stand outside this ideology, who refuse to be blind, can see truth for what it is – can see what is happening, can see why it is happening, and can see where it will inevitably lead. It is also our doom, like John the Baptist, to be the ones crying out as prophets in the wilderness whose very separation may draw attention but to whom those who fancy themselves progressive and modern will never attend. At least not until it is already too late.
Another example of this and Tolkien’s attitude towards all “progressive” ideas can be found in a letter he wrote to C.S. Lewis about Lewis’s argument that marriage as Christians understand it should be separated completely from the issuing of certificates of marriage by the government. The former, Lewis said, should be lifelong as God intends while the latter, solemnized and based solely upon man’s power, is different and inferior. Tolkien saw the logic of Lewis’s argument, but disagreed about some of his reasons supporting it:
And wrong behaviour (if it is really wrong on universal principles) is progressive, always: it never stops at being ‘not very good’, ‘second best’ – it either reforms, or goes on to third-rate, bad, abominable. In no department is that truer than in sex – as you yourself vividly exhibit, in the comparison between a dish of bacon and strip-tease. You show too that you yourself suspect that the break-down of sex-reticence in our time has not made matters better but worse.
The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter 49, PDF pg. 71
In this quote, and its extended context, Tolkien is discussing how the breakdown of sexual morals in 1943, i.e. divorce was becoming easier, more common, and enabling sexual promiscuity – what people today refer to as “sexual liberation.” Tolkien and Lewis both very clearly sees this development as a bad one that will harm society in the long run. The dehumanization inherent in the movement (turning humans into something to consumed life a plate of food) is but one of the problems discussed in Letter 49 which have come true. Progressives, then and now, are blind to how negative social outcomes are connected to their faulty ideology. Tolkien and Lewis could see it over half a century ago because they were outside of Progressivism and not blinded by its dogmas. I want to emphasize how Tolkien equated “progressive behavior” with “wrong behavior” and, if unchanged then it leads to “abominable” behavior. Thus, to Tolkien, progressive behavior, and implicitly the belief system it was built upon, was an abomination. It was morally “bad”, i.e. evil in nature. Which brings us back to Letter 52 and the Progressive Dark Age.
The last line of the excerpt from Letter 52 deserves special attention.
‘I will not bow before the Iron Crown, nor cast my own small golden sceptre down.’
The “Iron Crown” being referenced here is actually Tolkien quoting another one of his works, a poem titled Mythopeia. That line is the end line of a stanza that starts off:
I will not walk with your progressive apes,
erect and sapient. Before them gapes
the dark abyss to which their progress tends
…I bow not yet before the Iron Crown,
nor cast my own small golden sceptre down.
In referencing this stanza we can further see Tolkien’s view on the “Progressive” theory of history as it progresses no where but further along the path into the abyss. He then goes on to declare that he will not walk this false path and instead will defend his individuality and liberty culminating in the declaration that he will not bend before the Iron Crown or throw his sceptre down. The sceptre is the king’s symbol of rulership and a sign of his authority to carry out his rule. Thus an individual’s sceptre would symbolize the individual’s right to rule his or her own life and Tolkien is here declaring he will not surrender his own supreme individual sovereignty over his own life.
The Iron Crown is a symbol of Melkor. In The Silmarillion, Tolkien’s book about the creation and history of Middle-Earth before the events of The Hobbit, we find that Melkor, now cast down to earth from Heaven and calling himself Morgoth (in similitude of how Lucifer is cast out and becomes Satan) rules the totalitarian empire of Angband and wears an Iron Crown. (see pgs. 176 & 193 for examples) He is the only character in Tolkien’s writings who wears an Iron Crown. So, once again we see Tolkien equating the demands the State places upon the individual to surrender his or her individuality and liberty, to give up the sceptre of sovereignty, with the personification and rule of Absolute Evil in his own works. The State is of the Devil and so are the ideologies that encourage worship of it or service to it.
Are You Free?
This next letter was written by Tolkien to his son Christopher on May 29, 1945 and concerns his work in the Royal Air Force:
My sentiments are more or less those that Frodo would have had if he discovered some Hobbits learning to ride Nazgûl-birds, ‘for the liberation of the Shire’. Though in this case, as I know nothing about British or American imperialism in the Far East that does not fill me with regret and disgust, I am afraid I am not even supported by a glimmer of patriotism in this remaining war. I would not subscribe a penny to it, let alone a son, were I a free man. It can only benefit America or Russia: prob. the latter. But at least the Americo-Russian War won’t break out for a year yet.
The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, pg. 131, Letter 100.
The propagandists would have you believe that democracy equates to liberty and that having a democracy means having freedom. This, of course, is nonsense. As Dr. John T. Wenders explained, democracy and freedom are two entirely separate things. Democracy is about which mechanisms are used to make political decisions in the country and freedom is about the ability of individuals to voluntarily live howsoever they choose without state regulation and outside of state control. If democracy undertakes the regulation of human life then it is just as authoritarian as any dictatorship. As Lysander Spooner succinctly explained, ““A man is none the less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years.” This Tolkien well understood which is why he, despite as a British citizen and living in one of the oldest functioning democracies in the world, clearly understood that he was not a free man.
If he and his son Christopher had been free men they would not have been compelled by law to surrender all their liberties during the war and certainly Christopher Tolkien would not have been drafted into the war and forced to murder and kill in defense of the ruling powers. Whenever you live in a society where the government regulates your private life and does anything other than work to ensure your maximum ability to fully live each and every single right you natural have then you are not a free man, whether you live in a democracy or not is irrelevant. Indeed, today most democracies claim more authority, more power, and are more authoritarian than any king in history ever was, which really overthrows the mock horror some exhibit when they read Tolkien’s words about unconstitutional monarchy from before. Their love of democracy is a promotion of something far more authoritarian than unconstitutional monarchy as Tolkien described. America may be more democratic than ever before, but that doesn’t mean that it is more free than ever before.
Turning Men Into Orcs
His comments in the last excerpt about the imperialist nature of the war and his opposition to it, about not having even a glimmer of patriotism in support of it, comparing the British Royal Air Force to Sauron’s Nazgûl (the Ringwraiths), all exhibit an antiwar, antistatist strain in his thinking that he had expounded upon in more detail to Christopher in a latter dated May 6, 1944:
Life in camp seems not to have changed at all, and what makes it so exasperating is the fact that all its worse features are unnecessary, and due to human stupidity which (as ‘planners’ refuse to see) is always magnified indefinitely by ‘organization’. …However it is, humans being what they are, quite inevitable, and the only cure (short of universal Conversion) is not to have wars – nor planning, nor organization, nor regimentation. Your service is, of course, as anybody with any intelligence and ears and eyes knows, a very bad one, living on the repute of a few gallant men, and you are probably in a particularly bad corner of it. But all Big Things planned in a big way feel like that to the toad under the harrow, though on a general view they do function and do their job. An ultimately evil job. For we are attempting to conquer Sauron with the Ring. And we shall (it seems) succeed. But the penalty is, as you will know, to breed new Saurons, and slowly turn Men and Elves into Orcs. Not that in real life things are as clear cut as in a story, and we started out with a great many Orcs on our side. ….Well, there you are: a hobbit amongst the Urukhai. Keep up your hobbitry in heart, and think that all stories feel like that when you are in them.
The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, pg. 90, Letter 66.
Here we see Tolkien’s disdain for central planners and his recognition that all their efforts turn out the same. For all the good they claim they want to accomplish, their methods are always the same. They want to plan, organize, and regiment, all of society and eliminate individual initiative and liberty completely from the picture. They want to take Men and Elves (and Hobbits) and torture them, twist them, and indoctrinate them until they become orcs, which as we discussed earlier is to turn them into the cruel and sadistic servants of Evil. This is why Tolkien forthrightly proclaims the work the military is doing as an ultimately evil job. The military is turning men into soldiers, men into orcs. In fighting the Nazis through military force those in power were doing nothing better than fighting Sauron with the One Ring. By attempting to fight Power with Power you are doing nothing less than fighting Evil with Evil.
And yes, you may win, but it isn’t because you’re righteous and good. Tolkien readily recognizes that his government and its allies are just as corrupt and evil as those they are fighting. The victors will not be the more just, more ethical, more virtuous nations. The victors will be those that most turns its men into orcs and slaughters the most people. The victors will be those who managed to breed a form of more powerful, brutal, and savage orc than ever before – because you’ve managed to create the Uruk-hai. In other words, you became the superior evil. The outcome of all central planning is the regimentation of life, the elimination of liberty, and the transformation of humans into obedient orcs. The especial result of military central planning is to turn humans into Uruk-hai, an orc more powerful and violent than any and all other orcs.
The ultimate results of this is not to eliminate Evil, but simply to create new Evils, new Sauron’s to take the place of the old ones. The history of the 20th century bears this out explicitly. World War I, fought to eliminate the German Kaiser, formed the conditions for the creation of Hitler and the Third Reich, which in turn created World War II. WWII created the conditions for the Cold War and the planetary faceoff between the United States and the Soviet Union. The end of the Cold War saw the rise of international terrorism as a reaction to Western military actions in various parts of the Cold War designed to undermine the Soviet Union. This led to 9/11, the Afghanistan War, the Second Iraq War, the rise of ISIS, so forth and ever onward.
The efforts to eliminate the current Sauron by using the Ring of Power against him only led to the creation of the new Sauron, whose threat had to be met with brutal and overwhelming force, no matter the cost, which in turn only ensured the cycle continues ad infinitum. Here again, Tolkien readily recognizes the true answer to the problem of Sauron and the way to defeat him truly – universal Conversion. Only by embracing and truly living the Gospel ideals, including love of, mercy for, and service to your enemies can you counter the powers of darkness. And this in exclusion to and rejection of the statist orc-ish ideals and orc-talk that seek to indoctrinate us, regiment us, organize us, and plan our lives for us in service to the worldly powers of nation and state. We can be orcs or we can be Men. We cannot be both.
Tolkien The Capitalist
There is little in Tolkien’s direct writings that have him openly saying that he is a free market capitalist. Nevertheless, the fact that he was, or that he was at least sympathetic to free market ideas, can be deduced from his letters and writings. On the topic of Socialism he absolutely detested it, writing:
I think there will be a ‘millenium’, the prophesied thousand-year rule of the Saints, i.e. those who have for all their imperfections never finally bowed heart and will to the world or the evil spirit (in modern but not universal terms: mechanism, ‘scientific’ materialism. Socialism in either of its factions now at war).
The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, pg. 124, Letter 96.
It seems obvious that you dislike anything you class as being part of the influence of the “evil spirit” – i.e. the influence of Satan – upon the world. I additionally love that Tolkien recognizes that by World War II both sides fighting were merely factions of Socialism, even the United States. War Socialism is Socialism and it would maintain a great deal of its power after the end of the war even in the United States where the transition from World War II to Cold War happened almost seamlessly. World War II was a war between differing factions of Socialism and after it so was the Cold War. In a later article Tolkien explains one of the main reasons he detests Socialism:
I am not a ‘socialist’ in any sense — being averse to ‘planning’ (as must be plain) most of all because the ‘planners’, when they acquire power, become so bad – but I would not say that we had to suffer the malice of Sharkey and his Ruffians here. Though the spirit of ‘Isengard’, if not of Mordor, is of course always cropping up.
The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, pg. 253, Letter 181.
From everything we have discussed thus far, it should be clear that Tolkien absolutely opposed centralized planning. The government having power to regulate and control people’s lives always turns men into orcs. It is therefore no surprise that he openly rejects Socialist completely as even its “anarchist” forms require some form of mass planning (see, for example, the embrace of democracy, which inherently means the majority plans for the minority, among anarcho-socialists/communists). Here again he connects central planning, including Socialist planning, to the spirit of Mordor, and thus back to Sauron and Melkor/Morgoth, that is to say to Absolute Evil. Here though he adds a reference that I have only briefly touched upon previously – that is Sharkey/Saruman and the spirit of Isengard. Earlier, we discussed Sharkey/Saruman in terms of how he ruled the Shire by attempting to regulate the lives of the hobbits there – telling them what they were and were not allowed to do and beaten, imprisoning, and even killing those who disobeyed. A greater understanding of this, how it connects to Socialism, and how it elucidates Tolkien’s view of Socialism can be found by returning to the text of The Return of the King. Merry has just asked Hob Hayward, another hobbit, for a nights lodging:
‘I am sorry, Mr. Merry,’ said Hob, ‘but it isn’t allowed.’
The Return of the King, pg. 1308 (e-book edition)
‘What isn’t allowed?’
‘Taking in folk off-hand like, and eating extra food, and all that,’ said Hob.
‘What’s the matter with the place?’ said Merry. ‘Has it been a bad year, or what? I thought it had been a fine summer and harvest.’
‘Well no, the year’s been good enough,’ said Hob. ‘We grows a lot of food, but we don’t rightly know what becomes of it. It’s all these ‘‘gatherers’’ and ‘‘sharers’’, I reckon, going round counting and measuring and taking off to storage. They do more gathering than sharing, and we never see most of the stuff again.’
The spirit of Isengard then, the spirit by which Saruman rules the Shire in the name of “gathering” from the rich and “sharing” with the poor, is Socialism. In Episode Seven of his podcast Tolkien Chats, Dr. Corey Olsen, the Tolkien Professor, discusses what this means around the 32:00 minute mark. In Tolkien’s writing the bureaucracy of the state always causes greater inequality and greater shortages than if the people are left alone to solve their own problems privately. When the government undertakes Socialist programs – to gather what it decides is unneeded “extra” resources and to “share” said resources with those whom it decides most need it – the result of this is totalitarian regulation of peoples lives (telling them what they are allowed to do and not to do with their selves and property) and mass shortages throughout society. The results of Socialism are Sharkey and what he does to the Shire – totalitarianism and mass famine.
If then, true “fair distribution” of property, goods and services, is not achieved through government economic planning or through Socialist welfare programs then what else is left other than free market capitalism? All other economic programs rely upon central planning and government bureaucrats to function. Only anarcho-capitalism, free market economics without any interference or regulation from the government, fits Tolkien’s described economic system where there are no central planners, there is no socialistic redistribution of wealth (in the form of taxes or anything else), and people are left alone to lives their lives, control their property, and buy, sell, and trade with whomsoever they want without anyone else telling them what they can or cannot do with their property.
Summary
Tolkien is still lauded as one of the greatest writers in modern history. Undoubtedly we will one day talk about him in the same hallowed tones that today we use for Shakespeare. Outside of the pure power of his works, one of the main reasons for this is the insight and wisdom he had into the modern world. As he repeatedly taught, this is because fairy-stories teach truth in powerful ways through story (see Letter 181 or the longer explanation in his On-Fairy-Stories for more detail.) But it is also because the man himself had a keen mind and was capable of great discernment, he saw things as they truly are and was able to communicate those truths to those who were otherwise deceived by the propaganda of the modern age. In no areas is his forceful intelligence better demonstrated than in his comments about war, government, and economics.
Unlike many then and now, Tolkien understood that the propaganda reasons given for World War II were mostly lies. He understood that it was not a war of liberty versus tyranny. He knew he was not a free man and that his rulers were not good people. They were orcs, gangsters, monsters, willing to slaughter millions of innocent civilians in order to eliminate any perceived threats to their power and turf. He understood that the very nature of power itself is evil and that the State is founded upon evil ideals. Its goal is not to turn Men into Elves, but to turn Men and Elves into orcs – to corrupt them and twist them into obedient thugs willing to beat, imprison, and kill others at the command of those in power.
In opposition to this he declared himself in favor of anarchy and, if that wasn’t achievable, then at least decentralized minarchy. He absolute opposed Socialism in all its forms and rightfully recognized that it is an evil system that produces nothing but starvation and oppression. He completely rejected all political and economic central planning and promoted an economic system where people were left alone to buy, sell, and trade their goods and services with whomsoever they chose, howsoever they chose, whensoever they chose. In today’s jargon, he promoted anarcho-capitalism.
Therefore it is no anachronism or blasphemy to declare that J. R. R. Tolkien was an anarcho-capitalist. From all the evidence it appears to be the truth.