By Keith Preston

December 4, 2020

In order to understand the political views of J.R.R. Tolkien, it is first necessary to consider the historical era in which he lived. Born shortly before the commencement of the 20^th century, Tolkien experienced the rise of the public administration state during the industrial age and the related bureaucratic tentacles that accompany such a mode of statecraft. The 20^th century was a transformative as well as a transitional era in the history of statecraft as it was a time in which traditional manifestations of the state began to give way to modern state formations. Prior to the onset of World War One in 1914, most of the world’s nations continued to have monarchic, aristocratic, or oligarchic forms of government. In the aftermath of the “Great War,” Woodrow Wilson’s “war to make the world safe for democracy,” the traditional governments of many countries were replaced with modern democracies. However, these new democracies rapidly fell into dictatorship and, in some cases, the new phenomenon of totalitarianism. It was within this political context that the views of J.R.R. Tolkien were formed.

In contemporary discourse, it is often fashionable to characterize all non-democratic political structures as “fascist” or “communist” depending on the ideological predilections of the accuser. However, such lazy rhetoric reflects a deep ignorance of political history. In virtually all states that existed prior to the 20^th century, the established form of government was a monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchy, theocracy, or some combination of these. During the consolidation of the Industrial Revolution in the late 19^th and early 20^th century, traditional forms of government continued their dominance. Even the handful of constitutional republics and parliamentary monarchies that existed in the pre-World War One era, such as England, America, France, Holland, and Switzerland, maintained a much more limited franchise. In the United States, for example, women did not receive voting rights until 1919. In 2000, Larry Diamond of the Hoover Institute observed, “In 1900 there was not a single country in the world that would qualify as a democracy by today’s standards. As of January 2000, there were 120 democracies, the highest number in the history of the world.”

Many traditional governments were destroyed as a result of the war, including Wilhelmine Germany, the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire.  The efforts toward democratization which occurred in many countries following the end of World War One proved to be disastrous. The brief experiment in democracy which took place in Russia following the February Revolution of 1917 gave way to the Bolshevik dictatorship in less than a year. The introduction of democracy in Germany at the conclusion of the war likewise proved to be short-lived and was eventually replaced by the National Socialist dictatorship in 1933. The 1930s witnessed the fall of democratic republics in Spain and France as well. The pitiful performances of democratic regimes during the interwar period and the viciousness of the dictatorships that replaced them led many thinkers of the era to adopt the view that critics of democracy from antiquity and the medieval period, such as Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas, had been correct in their assessment of democracy’s shortcomings. The traditional critique of democracy postulated that popular government simply replaced the rule of the corrupt few with the incompetent many, with the public being susceptible to the suasion of demagogues capable of offering simplistic solutions to complex problems involving promises of utopia or unrealizable fantasies. It was argued by intellectual critics of democracy in the 20^th century that experiments in democracy as they were practiced in Germany, Russia, and elsewhere had been reckless and improvident, inviting all manners of corruption, decadence, and anarchy in the pejorative sense, leading to their dissolution and collapse into horrifying dystopias.

J.R.R. Tolkien was one of many thinkers who adopted such views, the ranks of which include figures as diverse as Jose Ortega y Gasset, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Eric Voegelin, Carl Schmitt, and Leo Strauss. Tolkien was not primarily oriented toward politics, and did not write extensively on the subject. Therefore, insights into his political views are mostly limited to his personal correspondence. The most comprehensive statement of Tolkien’s political outlook is contained in a 1943 letter that he wrote to his 18-year-old son, then a member of the Royal Air Force, at the height of World War Two. In the letter, Tolkien wrote,

“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.”

Tolkien appears at once to be lamenting the decline of traditional monarchy while proclaiming himself to be an anarchist. It is for this reason that Tolkien has often been characterized as an “anarcho-monarchist.”

A crucial aspect of the above statement by Tolkien involves his recognition that statecraft had undergone a transition during the modern era. Traditional governments had typically been identified with single individuals such as kings or emperors. However, the rise of the modern state was accompanied by corporate forms of government in which the state was considered to be not an individual but an institution or organization. Consequently, states developed permanent lives of their own even as they experienced constant changes in personnel. The identity of the state shifted from the personal to the impersonal. Parallel to this transition was the loss of any sense of responsibility on the part of the state. Government was not a matter of individuals acting for good or for ill, but simply the machinations of an impersonal entity for which no one was ultimately responsible. Democratic governments were particularly susceptible to such diminished accountability because democracies were ostensibly expressions of “the will of the people” with the nebulous “people” merely being responsible for their own oppression or the predations of the states that acted in their name.

The same letter from Tolkien to his son also contained the following observation concerning the nature of modern states.

“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.”

Tolkien is offering a rendition of Lord Action’s observation concerning the corrupting nature of power, and simultaneously pointing out that traditional authoritarian states were not totalitarian in the modern sense of attempting to control every aspect of life and subordinate every institution of civil society to the state itself. As a traditional Catholic, Tolkien preferred the medieval model of political order, which recognized realms of distinction between kings, popes, aristocrats, principalities, guilds, and free cities, with each of these possessing some degree of autonomy from concentrated power, a sharp contrast to the totalitarian regimes of his own era, which essentially resurrected the ancient god-emperor concept in the form of cults of “the party” or “the leader.”

Tolkien was further concerned that democracy and the attendant mass society gave rise to modern totalitarianism with totalitarian leaders becoming godlike figures worshiped by the masses. As Tolkien explained,

“I am not a ‘democrat’ only because ‘humility’ and equality are spiritual principles corrupted by the attempt to mechanize and formalize them, with the result that we get not universal smallness and humility, but universal greatness and pride, till some Orc gets hold of a ring of power–and then we get and are getting slavery.”

Tolkien extended this critique of democracy to the use of science and technology as instruments of political control, and the relationship of these to technocracy with its emphasis on bureaucratically induced “efficiency.”

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 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.

According to Tolkien, technological and scientific innovation has provided pernicious rulers with the means of merely increasing the level of effectiveness displayed in their perniciousness. Modern totalitarian regimes and the technological capabilities they possessed had merely reduced societies to human anthills. Tolkien likewise understood the relationship between modern states, technological forces, and propaganda methods, and the ways in which modern people are inculcated with persistent political propaganda.

“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.”

Tolkien’s quasi-Luddite sympathies were accompanied his opposition to imperialism, noting the cultural degeneration that normally accompanies imperialism, and the emerging tendency toward globalization in his era, observing that the end of frontiers eradicated the means of escaping tyranny.

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.

Tolkien died in 1973, a time when the Cold War was at its apex, with a third of the world’s nations and half the world’s peoples being ruled by the Stalinist model of totalitarianism with its pervasive police states. The rest of the world was experiencing Americanization with its propensity for the practice of soft totalitarianism in the core countries. The crude authoritarianism of the totalitarian regimes was replaced with models of social, economic, and political control rooted in manipulation more than brutality.  The tools of soft totalitarianism are not Gestapo agents or Grand Inquisitors but consumerism, technocracy, highly sophisticated propaganda models, faux “democratic” political theater, cultural philistinism, interpersonal commodification and impersonal institutionalization. The end of the Cold War had the effect of essentially universalizing the American model in the developed world. Meanwhile, American neo-colonialism on the periphery was and continues to be largely characterized by an endless series of bloodbaths in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Tolkien’s “anarcho-monarchism” was largely a regurgitation of the romantic medievalism of figures such as G.K. Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc, with a preference for localized village and parish communities, limited monarchy, and the economics of distributism. He was an opponent of both the hard totalitarianism of his era, represented by the Nazi and Soviet regimes, and the soft totalitarianism developing in capitalist countries with its inclinations toward scientism and technocracy. He understood the limitations of democracy with its tendency toward the rule of fickle mobs led by unscrupulous self-seekers. Tolkien recognized the relationship between mass societies and total wars and the inherent dangers of globalization. His thought has to a large degree been vindicated by subsequent three-quarters of a century of human experience.