The Political Thought of The Lord of the Rings
What Tolkien’s Libertarian Readers Miss
As a one-time student of political theory, I confess that I still cannot help but pick up themes of political philosophy, placed deliberately or not, in popular media. Having recently marathoned Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy (extended editions, of course), I found myself reflecting again on the political themes that can be discerned in the movies and in Tolkien’s books. This time around, though, I noticed an aspect of the story that many of Tolkien’s political readers miss.
Commentators who focus on themes of political philosophy in his works often try to locate Tolkien within the libertarian tradition by highlighting the emphasis on liberty and small, self-sufficient communities in Middle Earth. At the forefront of this position is the vision presented of life in the Shire, taken to be Tolkien’s normative view of the good life.
In fairness to this position, there is plenty of evidence for it. Think of the life of the central characters — the Hobbits. Life in the Shire is an agrarian paradise with extremely limited government — hobbits and their families live in relative harmony and more or less tend to their affairs. This principle extends to their very society itself — there are government officials such as mayors in the Shire, but…
