The first hint in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit comes from the beloved homeland of the hobbits, the Shire. The pastoral villages have no department of unmotorized vehicles, no internal revenue service, no government official telling people who may and may not have laying hens in their backyards, no government schools lining up hobbit children in rows to teach regimented behavior and groupthink, no government-controlled currency, and no political institution even capable of collecting tariffs on foreign goods.
“The Shire at this time had hardly any ‘government,’ ” Tolkien wrote in the prologue to The Lord of the Rings. “Families for the most part managed their own affairs.” Indeed, the only visible police are the “shirriffs,” who don’t wear uniforms and focus mainly on returning stray animals. In other words, their primary job is to protect private property.
This is significant because Tolkien once described himself as a hobbit “in all but size,” and in the same letter commented that his “political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs).” As he explained, “The most improper job of any man, even saints, is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.”
In the Shire, it seems, Tolkien created a society after his own heart.
Near the end of The Lord of the Rings, Frodo, along with his friends Sam, Merry, and Pippin, returns home to discover that a group of bossy outsiders has infiltrated the Shire. The newcomers are “gatherers and sharers . . . going around counting and measuring and taking off to storage,” supposedly “for fair distribution,” but what becomes of most of the bounty is anyone’s guess. Ugly new buildings are being thrown up, beautiful hobbit homes are spoiled, and for all the effort to “spread the wealth around” (to borrow a phrase from our current president), the only thing that seems to be spreading is the regulatory power of the gatherers.
Here we see a critique of aesthetically impoverished urban development, to be sure. But conservatives and progressives alike also have seen in this section a pointed critique of the modern, hyperregulated nanny state. As Hal Colebatch put it in the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, the Shire’s joyless regime of bureaucratic rules and suffocating redistribution “owed much to the drabness, bleakness, and bureaucratic regulation of postwar Britain under the Attlee Labour Government.” Tolkien showed his contempt for such statist machinations.
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The authors go on to take up the issue of whether Tolkien, like other Catholic intellectuals of his day, were Distributivists, concluding that he certainly was not.
It’s probably too simplistic and anachronistic to say that he was a libertarian, as such. As one of the commenters at the site points out, there are many different societies in the Middle Earth, with different economies. The Hobbits may have had no government, but that means they could not defend themselves when they needed to. Still, we have some interesting mental experiments here.
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