{"id":29457,"date":"2015-01-01T03:00:16","date_gmt":"2015-01-01T08:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=29457"},"modified":"2014-12-31T21:43:52","modified_gmt":"2015-01-01T02:43:52","slug":"j-r-r-tolkien-confessed-anarchist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/01\/01\/j-r-r-tolkien-confessed-anarchist\/","title":{"rendered":"J.R.R. Tolkien – confessed anarchist"},"content":{"rendered":"

In The Federalist<\/em>, Jonathan Witt and Jay W. Richards<\/a> wonder if the Shire is a hippie paradise:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Battle of the Five Armies,\u201d the final installment of The Hobbit<\/em> film trilogy, opened last week, and online boards are buzzing with discussions of Peter Jackson\u2019s casting decisions, his use or overuse of computer-generated imagery and what Middle-Earth\u2019s creator, J.R.R. Tolkien, would have thought of the films. Geeky questions, to be sure, but for those who follow both Tolkien and politics, we suggest a still geekier line of inquiry: How would Tolkien vote? That is, what kind of political vision did the Oxford professor carry into his novels?<\/p>\n

His wildly popular novels have, after all, shaped generations of followers, and are shot through with valuable insights about man and government that might not be obvious to a casual reader or fan of the movie versions. Tolkien\u2019s political insights, moreover, are in danger of being lost and forgotten in the capitols of the West. Here, in other words, is a vein worth mining.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

An early hint of this can be found in the beloved homeland of the hobbits, the Shire. Her 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 geometric rows to teach regimented behavior and groupthink, no government-controlled currency, and no political institution even capable of collecting tariffs on foreign goods.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Shire at this time had hardly any \u2018government,\u2019\u201d we eventually learn. \u201cFamilies for the most part managed their own affairs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Significantly, Tolkien once described himself as a hobbit \u201cin all but size,\u201d commenting in the same letter that his \u201cpolitical opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control, not whiskered men with bombs).\u201d As he explained, \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the Shire, Tolkien created a society after his own heart, one marked by minimal government, private charity, and a commitment to property rights and the rule of law.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t to say the Shire is without problems. Near the end of The Lord of the Rings<\/em>, Frodo returns home after a quest to destroy a corrupting ring of absolute power. To his dismay, a gang of bossy outsiders has infiltrated the Shire, \u201cgatherers and sharers … going around counting and measuring and taking off to storage,\u201d supposedly \u201cfor fair distribution,\u201d but what becomes of most of it is anyone\u2019s guess.<\/p>\n

Ugly new buildings are being thrown up, beautiful hobbit homes spoiled. And for all the effort to \u201cspread the wealth around\u201d (to borrow a phrase from our current president), the only thing that seems to be spreading is the gatherers\u2019 power. It\u2019s a critique of aesthetically impoverished urban development, to be sure. But conservatives and progressives alike also have seen in it a pointed critique of the modern, hyper-regulated nanny state.<\/p>\n

As Hal Colebatch put it in the Tolkien Encyclopedia<\/em>, the Shire\u2019s joyless regime of bureaucratic rules and suffocating redistribution \u201cowed much to the drabness, bleakness and bureaucratic regulation of postwar Britain under the Attlee labor Government.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In The Federalist, Jonathan Witt and Jay W. Richards wonder if the Shire is a hippie paradise: \u201cThe Battle of the Five Armies,\u201d the final installment of The Hobbit film trilogy, opened last week, and online boards are buzzing with discussions of Peter Jackson\u2019s casting decisions, his use or overuse of computer-generated imagery and what […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,28,53],"tags":[868,576,420],"class_list":["post-29457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","category-media","category-politics","tag-jrrtolkien","tag-philosophy","tag-thehobbit"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7F7","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29457"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29457\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29458,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29457\/revisions\/29458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}