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Tolkien’s Shire: The Ideal of a Conservative-Anarchist Distributist Governance Yannick Imbert ABSTRACT This article seeks to explores the political significance of Tolkien’s Shire through consideration of both his works and his historical background. Even though the nature of politics in The Lord of the Rings has already been much discussed, there is, given the scarcity of Tolkien’s political references, further investigation is still needed. In a first part, this article will look at the interaction of Tolkien and the “movement” known as Tory anarchism. This article’s thesis is that this particular species of anarchy was an immediate background to Tolkien’s political views represented in his writings, especially in his mythological corpus as well as in his shorter stories—as in Farmer Giles of Ham. In a second part, this article investigate the meaning of Tolkien’s self-described attachment to “unconstitutional monarchy.” Here, comparison with the Shire’s political structure will be instructive, as will be the influences of Chesterton and Belloc’s political philosophy. In this regard, their work The Party System, is of special significance. In conclusion, this article will defend that Tolkien’s Shire is best seen as a Distributist conservative anarchy. ‘(Tolkien) will talk to you alright: but the subject of his remarks will be whatever happens to be interesting to him at the moment, which might be anything from M.E. (Middle English) words to Oxford politics’. 1 In such manner did C.S. Lewis describe Tolkien to Charles Huttar, certainly referring to Tolkien’s concerns about the politics of Oxford University. Apart from these comments on university politics, it does not seem that Tolkien discussed politics 1 C.S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, ed. Walter Hooper, vol. 3 (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2007), p. 1329.

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Tolkien’s Shire: The Ideal of a Conservative-Anarchist

Distributist Governance

Yannick Imbert

ABSTRACTThis article seeks to explores the political significance of Tolkien’s Shire through consideration of both his works and his historical background. Even though the nature of politics in The Lord of the Rings has already been much discussed, there is, given the scarcity of Tolkien’s political references, further investigation is still needed. In a first part, this article will look at the interaction of Tolkien and the “movement” known as Tory anarchism. This article’s thesis is that this particular species of anarchy was an immediate background to Tolkien’s political views represented in his writings, especially in his mythological corpus as well as in his shorter stories—as in Farmer Giles of Ham. In a second part, this article investigate the meaning of Tolkien’s self-described attachment to “unconstitutional monarchy.” Here, comparison with the Shire’s political structure will be instructive, as will be the influences of Chesterton and Belloc’s political philosophy. In this regard, their work The Party System, is of special significance. In conclusion, this article will defend that Tolkien’s Shire is best seen as a Distributist conservative anarchy.

‘(Tolkien) will talk to you alright: but the subject of his remarks will be whatever happens to be interesting to him at the moment, which might be anything from M.E. (Middle English) words to Oxford politics’.1 In such manner did C.S. Lewis describe Tolkien to Charles Huttar, certainly referring to Tolkien’s concerns about the politics of Oxford University. Apart from these comments on university politics, it does not seem that Tolkien discussed politics

1 C.S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, ed. Walter Hooper, vol. 3 (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2007), p. 1329.

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much. In fact, when looking up ‘politics’ in any given Tolkien index, one conclusion becomes obvious: Tolkien never publicly spoke about English political life. However, stopping at the superficial level would be a terrible mistake, for Tolkien had a lot to say about politics, especially as pertains to The Lord of the Rings.

The nature of politics in The Lord of the Rings has already been much discussed, giving rise to Marxist, Liberal, and even neoconservative readings of the Shire’s political structure.2 All these discussions highlight the relevance of politics in Tolkien studies. Other scholars have seen, in the The Lord of the Rings, an example of aristocratic or royalist government, whether it be in the Shire or in the human, dwarvish, and elvish kingdoms. In fact, in a previous draft of the prologue ‘Concerning hobbits’, Tolkien had imagined for the head of the Took family a more official title, one more politically conventional: Shirking. Christopher Tolkien then adds: ‘Shirking is of course a reduction of Shire-king with shortening … but this was a joke that my father decided to remove—perhaps because the choice of the word ‘king’ by the Hobbits seemed improbable’.3 As Stoddard concludes, ‘the Shirefolk showed no inclination to appoint their own king, nor to engage in large collective ventures apart from the occasional defensive war’.4 Putting aside the possibility of royal rule in the Shire, Tolkien moved towards a non-aristocratic Hobbit government, thus making the identification with a specific mode of

2 ‘Discovering Tolkien’s political teaching in The Lord of the Rings is especially challenging because the novel form through which he articulates his ‘dim apprehensions’ complements and compounds his subtlety and prudence. Tolkien never speaks directly to his audience’. Joseph V. Brogan, ‘Tolkien on res publica’, Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia Marriott Hotel, Philadelphia, August 28—August 31, 2003, http://citation.allacademic.com (accessed July 26, 2012), p. 13.

3 Christopher Tolkien, ed., The History of Middle Earth, vol. 12, The Peoples of Middle-Earth (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), p. 6. Hereafter HoME.

4 William H. Stoddard, ‘Law and Institutions in the Shire’, Mythlore 70, Autumn 1992, http://www.troynovant.com (accessed July 26, 2012).

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government in the Shire a difficult task.5Other political science scholars have tried to explore the politics

of the Shire not by determining which form of government it is based upon, but by unearthing influences in political theory. Joseph Brogan, for example, analyses the politics of the Shire from a Platonic standpoint. To him, ‘Tolkien’s political thought in The Lord of the Rings is the product of a profound encounter with Plato’ and he reads the work as a commentary primarily concerned with justice.6 Comparisons between The Republic and The Lord of the Rings provide the framework through which government in the Shire is evaluated:

The opening chapters of The Lord of the Rings are a brilliant homage to the opening of The Republic. Tolkien takes the themes cultivated by Plato as seriously, but develops them in a comedy at once less urbane and more appropriate to hobbits. It is a comedy about justice, education, and statesmanship.7

After this generous introduction, Brogan then moves on to a critical consideration of the main governmental offices of the Shire and points out the deficiencies of such a minimalist government unable to protect the Shire in its direst times under the tyrannical rule of ‘Sharkey’:

The only other significant position of political authority within the Shire, the Mayor of Michel Delving, had devolved

5 Of course, at this point one might ask if such a judgment does not understate the role of family heads among important hobbit families such as the Tooks or Brandybucks. In fact, affirming that the Shire is a non-aristocratic government is not antithetic to the clannic structure of large hobbit families. It is important to make a distinction between the organization of the smallest political unit, (clan, family) and the “government.” While the former might approximate an aristocratic structure (and only for the more important hobbit families), the larger political unit (the Shire) seems to be exempt of aristocratic influence.

6 Brogan, ‘Tolkien on res publica’, 3. On the platonic reading of Tolkien’s political views, see also Mary Keys, ‘Tolkien’s Tales and Political Philosophy in Liberal Democracy’, http://citation.allacademic.com (accessed July 26, 2012).

7 Art. cit., p. 14.

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into a comic caricature of itself. The Mayor’s most significant duty was understood to be presiding at banquets. He also ran the post office and supervised the Shirriffs, but the latter had themselves become “in practice rather haywards than policemen” (I:19). When trouble does come to the Shire at the end of the Third Age, its “good fortune” has deprived it of the political leadership necessary for its survival. It will lose its peace, prosperity, and freedom.8

To state, as Brogan does, that the position of Mayor was but a caricature of itself is to show a deep misunderstanding of the political nature of the Shire. To begin with, nothing indicates that the Mayor has ever had any other responsibilities that those summed up in The Lord of the Rings (including the Prologue). Further, the responsibilities of the Mayoral office are quite consistent with the social structure of Hobbit society in which everyone minds his own business.

This, however, begs the question: is it a matter of lack of leadership or the nature of Hobbit common sense that prevented Mayor Will Whitfoot from opposing his enemy? Was his failure in really perceiving the true nature of his enemy? In fact, it must be asked whether it was a case of failure at all. What Brogan sees as failure is in fact the incapacity to resist Saruman’s control of the Shire by force. This, however, is to forget that passive resistance is resistance nonetheless—for one must remember Mayor Whitfoot spent a good deal of time in prison.9 Not all figures of resistance should be of ‘Churchillian stature’.10

8 Art. cit., p. 34.9 J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 3 vols. (London: HarperCollins, 1997),

III:6.ix, p. 998. Hereafter, LoTR. The fact that the offices of Mayor and Shirriff were not, at the time of The Lord of the Rings, caricatures of what they should have been is further indicated by what happens after the ruffians are driven out of the Shire. Says Tolkien: ‘The only thing that he (Samwise) did as Deputy Mayor was to reduce the Shirriffs to their proper functions and numbers’. Hence, governmental structure at the beginning of The Lord of the Rings is no comical caricature but the ordinary form of Shire minimalist government.

10 Contra Brogan, ‘Tolkien on res publica’, p. 34.

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Brogan’s misconception about the political form of government in the Shire serves as a good example of the difficulties that scholars face when asked about the politics of the Shire. Given Tolkien’s knowledge of Greek, Latin, and Nordic literature, we should expect the possibility of finding several more or less clear ‘influences’ in his works. However, this is not sufficient ground for answering the question at hand.

Tolkien’s Tory anarchism

In fact, as we have already indicated, this conclusion fundamentally misrepresents the political structure of the Shire because it largely ignores Tolkien’s immediate political context which is given by Tolkien himself in an oft-quoted letter to his son: ‘My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning the abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs)—or to “unconstitutional” Monarchy’.11 For Tolkien to call himself a philosophical anarchist can lead to numerous misgivings. To understand fully what Tolkien has in mind here, it is necessary to define further what exactly is the ‘philosophical anarchy’ he refers to. Rex Martin has provided a broad definition of philosophical anarchism as being the ‘self-regulation of a social order or of a group of persons or of the single individual, where self-regulation was distinguished from coercive regulation by institutions of the State…In a word, anarchism would be a desirable state of society without government’.12 In his Dictionary of Modern Politics, David Robertson defines anarchy by two main propositions: that society does not need government, and that no government is legitimate unless truly, and in detail, consented to by the individuals

11 Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), p. 63.

12 Rex Martin, ‘Wolff ’s Defence of Philosophical Anarchism’, Philosophical Quarterly 24.95 (1974), pp. 140-149 (here p. 140).

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governed.”13 For others, a necessary part of the definition of anarchism is the rejection of coercive state institutions.14

Indeed, anarchy is not synonymous with the absence of social order but with the limitation or absence of state-regulated social order. In fact, the total absence of social order is not anarchy proper but what Durkheim called ‘anomy’.15 Tolkien is thus not arguing for social revolution, nor is Tolkien unpatriotic in the expression of his anarchist feelings. Despite what some have claimed, anarchism is not incompatible with patriotism—even though they do not usually co-exist.16 Such misunderstandings about Tolkien’s self-labelled anarchism often come from a complete ignorance of historical context. Reading Tolkien’s self-qualification as a ‘philosophical anarchist’, one must first ask what an early twentieth-century Englishman would have understood by this. This, in turn, proves a difficult task for there were of course several brands of anarchism, from revolutionary anarchism of the 1830s to Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread (1892)17 or Herbert Read’s The

13 David Robertson, A Dictionary of Modern Politics (London: Taylor and Francis, 2004), p. 15.

14 Bill Jones, Dictionary of British Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), p. 6.

David Goodway indicates that the ‘anarchist tradition characterized by the following concepts: autonomy (individual and communal), mutual aid and cooperation, organization bottom-up, opposition to hierarchy, direct or participatory democracy, federation, self management, decentralizatuon, anti statism, anti parliamentarism, spontaneity, resistance to war, sustainability and ecology’. David Goodway, Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow: Left-Libertarian Thought (Oakland: PM Press, 2012), p. 2.

15 Robertson, Modern Politics, p. 16.16 Peter Kreeft, The Philosophy of Tolkien: The Worldview Behind The Lord of the Rings

(San Francisco: Ignatius, 2005), p. 164. 17 Bevir remarks on Kropotkin’s influence: ‘Kropotkin’s followers espoused

a new anarchism which resembled other bohemian beliefs of the romantic nineties more closely than it did the radical individualism of Seymour and the Socialist League. Kropotkin appealed to them not because they wanted to assert the rights of the autonomous individual, but because they believed a new life was emerging from the decay of the old order, and they identified this new life with anarcho-communism’. Mark Bevir, “The Rise of Ethical

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Paradox of Anarchism (1941), and anarchism has been associated with other branches of political theories. However, few would consider connecting anarchism with conservatism. Such is, however, the brand of philosophical anarchy Tolkien came in contact with. Such is the first thesis of this article.

In fact, to limit Tolkien’s statement to the conclusion that, as Hart suggests, “for Tolkien’s anarchism, I think it obvious he meant it in the classical sense: not the total absence of law and governance, but the absence of a political archetes—that is, of the leadership principle as such,” is too superficial.18 Tolkien’s anarchism was more than mere anarchism, but in order to see more clearly what he meant, we must heed Barker’s comments on the great diversity of competing political traditions in early twentieth-century Britain. Furthermore, these traditions are ‘sometimes to be found in the courts as it was in judgments on suffrage cases, in the theatre with the plays of George Bernard Shaw or Arnold Wesker, in the poetry of Auden, or Yeats, or Belloc, in novels such as Chesterton’s The Napoleon of Notting Hill …’19 In mentioning in one breath Auden, Belloc and Chesterton, Barker has summarised the influences behind Tolkien’s reference to anarchism.20 Belloc and Chesterton provide, this article

Anarchism in Britain, 1885-1900’, Historical Research 69 (1996), pp. 143-165 (here p. 146).

18 David B. Hart, ‘Anarcho -Monarchism’, First Things (November 12, 2010) http://www.firstthings.com, (accessed July 26, 2012).

19 Rodney Barker, Political Ideas in Modern Britain: In and After the 20th Century (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 10.

20 It is also possible to wonder whether Tolkien’s reference to anarchism was not also influenced by his reading of William Morris who had been deeply hostile to both commercial materialism and governmental hierarchy and whose impact on public life ‘was an eloquent exponent of the reaction against the quality of mid-Victorian society, and his early poems such as “The Defence of Guenevere” written in 1868, or ‘The Earthy Paradise” written between 1868 and 1870, are works of romanticism, almost escapism’. Barker, Political Ideas in Modern Britain, 81. It should of course be remembered that Tolkien had a thorough knowledge and interest in Morris, spending his award money for the Skeat Prize on three books by Morris, The Life and Death of Jason, The House of the Wolfings, and his translation of The Völsunga Saga. Christina Scull and Wayne

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claims, one of the main interpretative frameworks for considering Tolkien’s political position.

To begin, then, it is common to say that, at the opening of the twentieth century, Britain witnessed a rise of political suspicion against state control coming from a broad range of the political spectrum. Concerns were raised from the left, of course, as in Herbert Spencer’s Man versus the State in which he ultimately argues that ‘since man’s social life was natural and not artificial, it was, he argued, best left alone’.21 ‘Leftist’ criticism often brought forward the necessity of communitarian life, decidedly moving in a socialistic-communistic direction. But criticism also came from the right, here emphasising the necessity of personal freedom over against state control.

However, Tolkien did not move towards individual anarchy of the brand theorised by Stephen Reynolds, for Tolkien was very much concerned about communal life.22 Further, if nineteenth-century anarchism was bent towards revolution and individualism, the situation in the twentieth century was radically different because,

by the outbreak of the First World War, another very different type of anarchism was becoming equally well recognised. The new anarchists still opposed the very idea of the state, but they were communalists not individualists, and they sought to realise their ideal peacefully through personal example and moral education, not violently through acts of terror and a general uprising.23

G. Hammond, The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide, vol. 1, (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), p. 51.

21 Barker, Political Ideas, p. 60.22 When we use the expression ‘communal’, it is by contrat with the Communist’s

communitarian perpective in which the community is still under government control. See Stephen Reynolds, Tom Woolley and Bob Woolley, Seems so!: A working-class view of politics (London: Macmillan, 1911). Reference to Reynolds nonetheless directs us again to Belloc and Chesterton for Reynolds greatly admired Belloc’s The Servile State.

23 Bevir, ‘Ethical Anarchism’, p. 143.

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Whereas the Communist-anarchism of Kropotkin ‘believed the higher individualism will emerge inevitably as the outcome of the evolutionary process’,24 such was not the case for those closer to Tolkien’s worldview. Fascinated neither by Communism nor by evolutionary progress, Tolkien was closer to another brand of anarchy already mentioned: conservative anarchy, sometimes ambiguously called Tory anarchism.25

‘Tory Anarchism’ was an expression coined by George Orwell to describe Jonathan Swift’s position in his essay ‘Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver’s Travels’, in which Orwell states that Swift was ‘a Tory anarchist, despising authority while disbelieving in liberty, and preserving the aristocratic outlook while seeing clearly that the existing aristocracy is degenerate and contemptible’.26 However, Orwell also pointed out that ‘Swift’s greatest contribution to political thought, in the narrower sense of the words, is his attack, especially in Part III, on what would now be called totalitarianism. He has an extraordinary clear prevision of the spy-haunted ‘police State’ …’27 This same vigorous social criticism Orwell would attain in both Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

24 Art. cit., p. 151.25 The qualification ‘Tory’ must here be read in the light of Lord Hugh

Cecil’s contemporary definition of conservatism: ‘It is a disposition averse from change; and it springs partly from a distrust of the unknown and a corresponding reliance on experience rather than on theoretic reasoning; partly from a faculty in men to adapt themselves to their surroundings so that what is familiar merely because of its familiarity becomes more acceptable or more tolerable than what is unfamiliar’. Lord Hugh Cecil, Conservatism (London: Williams & Norgate, 1912), 9. Of crucial importance here is Cecil’s reference to ‘familiarity’ or ‘commonality’. This is also taken up by Dawson in his own lecture on conservatism in which he significantly states that ‘Conservatism has never identified itself with a class. The strength of Toryism was neither in the aristocracy as with the Whigs, nor in the middle classes as with the Liberals, but in the common Englishman …’ Christopher Dawson, ‘Conservatism’, The Political Science Reviewer 39 (2011), pp. 232-262 (here p. 245).

26 George Orwell, ‘Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver’s Travels’, Polemic 5 (September 1946), n.p.

27 Art. cit.

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Even though there is an apparent contradiction in using conservative and anarchism in the same expression, this conservative brand of anarchism rightly deserved its name. And even if anarchists of this kind ‘tend not to share the ideals of anarcho-syndicalists, anarcho-communists and so on’,28 they nonetheless shared ‘a conservative moral and cultural critique of the modern world rather than a right-wing political ideology, and it is in this sense that Waugh and Orwell share common ground’.29 Surprisingly for some, Orwell described himself, at least for a time, as a conservative anarchist.30 Hence, conservative anarchism referred to an undefined group of people often unrelated to each other, but who shared common interests and concerns even though they were “politically” from either the left or the right, from the Conservative or Liberal parties. Such were Orwell and Waugh, and at times, Chesterton.

Politically speaking, conservative anarchists were critical and suspicious of politicians—all politicians. As Chesterton remarked in 1918: ‘When a politician is in opposition he is an expert on the means to some end; and when he is in office he is an expert on the obstacles to it’.31 But conservative anarchists criticized not only politics but also the erosion of liberty which was the direct consequence of contemporary politics. In economic matters, they tended to reject material commercialism and financial concentration, and were patriotic and in love with their nation,

28 Peter Wilkin, The Strange Case of Tory Anarchism (Faringdon: Libri Publishing, 2010), p. 33.

29 Op. cit., p. 12. 30 ‘At that time, when he was beginning to make his way into left-wing journalism

in London, he was apparently describing himself as a “Tory anarchist”—according to his friends Rayner Heppenstall, in Four Absentees (1960), and Richard Rees, in George Orwell: Fugitive from the Camp of Victory (1961)—although when he described his political position in public he always seems to have identified himself with some kind of socialism’. Nicolas Walter and David Goodway, Damned Fools in Utopia, p. 196.

31 G.K. Chesterton, Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton, vol. 31, Illustrated London News, 1917-1919 (Ignatius Press, 1989), p. 278.

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even though they remained critical of its culture (especially of its imperialistic culture), and they highly valued rural England.32 Finally, conservative anarchists tended to be socially traditionalists, having a high regard for family values and holding up individual rights against the state.33 All these characteristics were germane to Tolkien’s Roman Catholic worldview. One of the real differences within conservative anarchism had to do with the place and role of religion. In fact, one can discern two main trends within conservative anarchism: that of Evelyn Waugh’s Catholicism and Orwell’s ‘humanism’.34 However, both were reclaiming the necessity of universal foundations as systems of ethics and belief in order for England to survive and for Englishmen to be free.35 It is no surprise then to find that Tolkien could readily be associated with the former version of conservative anarchism.

All these characteristics of conservative anarchism can be found in Tolkien’s Shire. Even if the Shire is, indeed, not anarchy taken as absence of order, it is conservative anarchy, a self-regulated government where government is, as Tolkien himself stated, ‘an abstract noun meaning the art and process of governing’. Government is nothing less, says Tolkien, ‘and it should be a capital offence to write it with a capital G or so as to refer to people’.36

32 ‘… Lamenting the impact of the expanding urban environment is commonplace amongst Tory anarchists’. Wilkin, Tory Anarchism, p. 16.

33 ‘Socially, Tory anarchists tend to be traditionalists, respecting the family and the rights of privacy of the individual, particularly against the state. They also recognise the centrality of class to an understanding of society, with figures such as Waugh and Ingrams viewing classes as central to an ordered and good society’. Op. cit., p. 15.

34 ‘God and religion loom large in the world of Tory anarchists both as figures of reverence and fun. The importance of religion for the Tory anarchist believers, and in particular Catholicism, is that faith in the true religion is the only thing that can guide us through a chaotic and nihilistic world … Despite this, Orwell was praiseworthy of many writers he saw as being explicitly Catholic such as Greene, Waugh, Belloc and Chesterton’. Op. cit., p. 84.

35 Op. cit., p. 17. 36 Tolkien, Letters, p. 63.

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In fact, the Shire, indicates Tolkien, ‘meant an ordered district of government and business—the business of growing food and eating it and living in comparative peace and content’.37 As is made clear at several occasions, government in the Shire simply does not exist. For example, commenting on the arrival of the Hobbits at the inn of the Prancing Pony, Tolkien indicates: ‘The landlord does not ask Frodo to ‘register’! Why should he? There are no police and no government … If details are to be added to an already crowded picture, they should at least fit the world described’.38 Clearly to Tolkien, government or ‘state’ regulations are not merely absent from his work, but are fairly inconsistent with the political structure of the Shire and its environs.

In the prologue of The Lord of the Rings, ‘Concerning Hobbits’, Tolkien actually indicates that ‘the Shire at this time had hardly any ‘government’. Families for the most part managed their own affairs’.39 Such is the real value of Shire government in which laws were few and simple: they kept the laws of free-will. What governing meant to Hobbits was ‘love peace and quiet and good tilled earth: a well-ordered and well-farmed countryside was their favourite haunt’.40 Nothing much more was needed for the self-governance of the people of the Shire, and certainly no official representatives were needed beyond those elected for a precisely defined and limited task.41 In the Shire, there are three such officials: the Mayor, the Shirriff and the Postmaster. Even in earlier drafts of

37 Christopher Tolkien, The Peoples of Middle-Earth, p. 9.38 Tolkien, Letters, p. 272. 39 Tolkien, LoTR, I:9.40 Tolkien, LoTR, I:1.41 Chesterton remarked, in A Miscellany of Men: ‘Self-government arose among

men (probably among the primitive men, certainly among the ancients), out of an idea which seems now too simple to be understood. The notion of self-government was not (as many modern friends and foes of it seem to think) the notion that the ordinary citizen is to be consulted as one consults an Encyclopedia … He and his fellows are to be, within reasonable human limits, masters of their own lives …’ G.K. Chesterton, A Miscellany of Men (London: Dodd, Mead and Co.), p. 133.

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the narrative, the offices of Mayor and Shirriff were the only one referred to by Hobbits. Such is the case even in earlier drafts of “The scouring of the Shire.”42

Of all these offices, the office of Mayor is the most prestigious, having regulation over the Shirriffs (being officially First Shirriff) and the Postmaster. Attached to the mayoralty were the Messenger Service and the Watch, both having only minimal duties. The Mayor, in his capacity of self-governing regulation, had himself only limited duties, and at the time was almost exclusively concerned with ‘presiding banquets’. As for the Shirriffs, one should not understand their office as being similar to today’s police officers. They had more work with the ‘straying of beasts than of people’.43 Such was the need of a police body in the Shire that the four farthings included a total of only twelve Shirriffs within the borders of the Shire. Outside the borders, the Shirriffs were a larger body but they were still more concerned about foreigners than about the Hobbits themselves.

This limitation of government disqualifies, for some, the use of ‘anarchism’ to qualify the political structure of the Shire. But again, this is missing the point. The point in Tolkien’s brand of anarchy is not the disappearance of government altogether, but the absence of a centralized Government as an abstract representative body of the people. Hence, the temptation to see the Shire as a minimalist Liberal state must be resisted. The presence of a Mayor and Shirriffs is not inconsistent with conservative anarchy: it is inconsistent with the minimal state theory in which, by definition, Government is necessary. This distinction is important because it also explains Tolkien’s rejection of Parliamentarism.

42 Christopher Tolkien (ed.), The History of Middle Earth, vol. 9, Sauron Defeated (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), p. 79.

43 Tolkien, LoTR, I:10.

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Hobbit anti-parliamentarism

In this second part of this article, I would like to comment further on Tolkien’s reference to ‘unconstitutional monarchy’ quoted above. Digressions have been made regarding ‘anarchy’ considered in a very specific context, that of early twentieth-century Tory anarchism, also labelled conservative anarchism. Tolkien’s reference to ‘unconstitutional monarchy’ is even more difficult to understand unless we contrast it with ‘constitutional’ politics. Indeed, what Tolkien has in mind here is not monarchy in and of itself but constitutionalism or, to use a different word, parliamentarism. The rest of the already quoted reference to anarchism continues with Tolkien commenting that ‘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’.44

Surprisingly for some, the criticism directed at Parliamentarism is not here about the non-elective choice of the Prime Minister—by distinction with the presidential system.45 Rather, criticism is made on the basis of the creation of a supposedly representative body, the Parliament. Perhaps the best succinct description of the dangers of Parliamentarism or constitutional representation, is set forth in Belloc’s The Party System, written in collaboration with G.K. Chesterton’s brother, Cecil:

A method of government has grown up in our country under which the representatives of the people are divided into two camps which are supposed to represent certain broad divergences of opinion. Between these two the choice of the election lies, and the side which secures the largest measure

44 Tolkien, Letters, p. 63. 45 For a brief comparison of the governance under a parliamentary or

presidential system, see Arend Lijphart, Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 117 ff.

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of support forms a Government, the minority undertaking the work of opposition.46

This form of government, one that was according to the authors foreign to England, is what they called the Party System, one that divided politics in England along ideological lines.47 Parliamenta-rism, in Belloc and Cecil Chesterton’s view, was to be identified with a political structure that replaced the people with two ideologi-cal parties represented in a Parliament, and so divided Englishmen into either Liberals or Conservatives. In the English context, they also identified the change in administration with the gradual loss of power by the House of Commons, continually superseded by the global parliamentary structure.48 There only remained two ideo-logical parties, Liberal and Conservative, that were, in the end, one and the same: a ‘Theyocracy’. Hence, ‘the whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Con-servatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected’.49

Furthermore as Christopher Dawson, one of the best Catholic historians of the twentieth-century, argued, the issue in the early

46 Belloc and Chesterton, The Party System (Norfolk: IHS Press, 2007), p. 27. 47 A good illustration was found in the traditional boat races: ‘Perhaps the best

parallel to the attitude of the general public towards politics is to be found in the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race. Of the crowds that line the towing path every year from Putney to Mortlake there are few that have ever been to either University, have ever known anyone who has been to either, have even the remotest of most shadowy connection with either. Yet they take sides enthusiastically, and would almost be prepared to shed blood for their “fancy”’. Op. cit., p. 29.

48 ‘That is the Party System as it exists today, and by it the House of Commons has been rendered null, and the people impotent and without a voice’. Belloc and Chesterton, The Party System, p. 37. Dawson, writing in 1932, went further and argued that parliamentarism, along with constitutionalism and democracy, that is, the whole system of European politics, was ‘in a state of dissolution’. Dawson, ‘Conservatism’, p. 239.

49 G. K. Chesterton, Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton, vol. 33, The Illustrated London News, 1923-1925 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), p. 313.

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twentieth-century was not choosing between Democracy and Dictatorship but with ‘a change in the whole social structure of the modern world’, seen in England as a move towards radical Parliamentarism.50 Dawson, writing in 1939, famously concluded that there was a totalitarian trend even in England and that ‘in so far as democracy involves the standardization and mechanization of culture and the supremacy of the mass over the individual, it is a positive danger’.51 Parliamentarism, then, would lead England towards a greater standardization of life and values under the mechanized regime52. Here, it might be helpful to quote from Tolkien’s On Fairy Stories in which he refers to this age of ‘improved means to deteriorated ends’ or even the ‘rawness and ugliness of modern European life,’53 both taken from Dawson’s work.54 Dawson himself considered that the mechanisation of culture was being encouraged by English Parliamentarism or constitutional monarchy. In fact, from his perspective, English Parliamentarism, French Democracy and German Nationalism formed the contemporary political ideological trinity of this new age.55

However, this ‘ideologization’ of politics was not the only danger of Parliamentarism. The first thing to be affected by the change of political structure was man himself, insofar as the common Englishman was in danger of losing his individual liberty.56 The

50 Christopher Dawson, Beyond Politics (London: Sheed and Ward, 1939), p. 3.51 Op. cit., p. 49.52 This standard mechanization would, concluded Chesterton, turn to oppressive

rule: ‘As it is, engineering and engines are the rule; and are even the grinding and oppressive rule’. G.K. Chesterton, The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, vol. 5, The Outline of Sanity (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), p. 157.

53 J.R.R. Tolkien, On Fairy Stories, edited by Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson (London: Harper Collins, 2008), p. 72.

54 Christopher Dawson, Progress and Religion: an Historical Inquiry (London: Sheed and Ward, 1937), p. 68.

55 Dawson, Beyond Politics, p. 42.56 As Stephen Clark well underlines, the issue of individual liberty was of primary

concern: ‘Most of the proletariat, Belloc thought, would accept contracts for their working lives to avoid insecurity and insufficiency. What would be lost

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‘Chesterbelloc’, as the intellectual alliance between Chesterton and Belloc soon came to be known, indeed considered that assimilating all political debates and representations into one parliamentary structure would lead, despite the illusion of universal democratic participation, to the final demise of personal liberty—especially that of property.57 However, even with a greater number of citizens being direct participants in the democratic parliamentary process, the dangers inherent in this form of governance were not erased. Quite the contrary, for it only served to hide the dramatic conclusion that what triumphed in Parliamentarism was not democracy or the people but the Parliament itself.58

was liberty’. Stephen R. L. Clark, G.K. Chesterton: Thinking Backward, Looking Forward (West Conshohocken: Templeton Foundation Press, 2006), pp. 115-116.

57 ‘… more and more citizens have been admitted to vote for members of Parliaments … this process should clearly have meant an increase in the power of democracy, and it has been practically universally assumed that it did mean this. But in fact it is extremely dubious whether the mass of the people have as much political power today as they had before the process began’. Belloc and Chesterton, The Party System, p. 33. Eventually, the Chesterbelloc was defeated for, as Maisie Ward correctly notes, ‘The Chesterbelloc had begun a mental revolution, but even the mind cannot be turned upside down in a moment of time; and then there is the will to be considered’. Maisie Ward and Andrew M. Greeley, Gilbert Keith Chesterton (Oxford: Sheed and Ward, 2006), p. 437. Unfortunately, the general will was already willingly obedient to the Servile State.

58 The concluded further that: ‘The Parliament did not represent the people; indeed, it hardly professed to do so. It was jealous of any publicity given to its debates, it gloried in the private possession of seats in Parliament by particular magnates, and perhaps the most significant symptom of its character was the comparative effacement of the House of Lords’. Belloc and Chesterton, The Party System, p. 31. Dawson, not the least critical of modern democracy, concluded that under the new regime, democracy would also dehumanise the “citizen.” As Russello underlines: ‘The total democratic state is, in the end, also an inhumane one. Dawson contended that a culture without a religious core must dissolve: it cannot survive on economic prosperity or political tolerance alone. Indeed, these would ultimately fail, too, either from the weak loyalties inspired by a secular culture and the concomitant mass- state or from outside pressures’. Gerald J. Russello, ‘Christopher Dawson and the Coming Conflict’, The New Criterion 28/7 (March 2010), 14-18 (here p. 17).

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In fact, Parliamentarism itself was an illusion, for it was never the Parliament itself governing, but the cabinet, ‘the ministers chosen by the oligarchies that controlled the two parties’.59 If even the Parliament was not in charge, it was certainly not the people either. To Belloc, the Chestertons, and even Dawson, Parliamentarism could only give the illusion of a democratic unity and governance, while in fact serving only to enlist the mass of the citizens to the service of the State, that is, the plutocracy. Chesterton himself made this very point in his Short History of England: ‘It is the mark of our whole modern history that the masses are kept quiet with a fight. They are kept quiet by the fight because it is a sham-fight; thus most of us know by this time that the Party System has been popular only in the sense that a football match is popular’.60

The final result of Parliamentarism was not democracy proper but plutocracy governing a Servile State: the governance of the mass by a rich few.61 For Belloc, the promotion of plutocracy through Parliamentarism was clear enough and party strife was mere illusion. As proof Belloc pointed out the family connections of people from opposite political allegiances:

For instance to quote again chance connections that occur to one, the present talented an versatile (“Liberal”) Under Secretary for Home Affairs, Mr Masterman, is the nephew by marriage of the late (“Conservative”) Colonial Secretary, Mr Lyttleton; who, in turn, is closely connected with Mr Asquith, for they married sisters.62

59 Ian Ker, G. K. Chesterton: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 281.

60 G. K. Chesterton, A Short History of England (London: William Clowes and Sons, 1917), p. 214.

61 Dawson also criticised the emergence of a governing plutocracy. In Beyond Politics, he complained: ‘We cannot transform a plutocratic imperialism into a democratic community merely by an extension of government control and a more intensive system of bureaucratic organisation, for this only increases that pressure of social mechanism on human life and spiritual freedom which is the greatest evil of modern civilization’. Dawson, Beyond Politics, pp. 85-86.

62 Hilaire Belloc and Cecil Chesterton, The Party System, p. 40.

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What was created through Parliamentarism or constitutional representation was a party-ocracy, a plutocracy functioning as lobbies throughout all the domains of public and economic life.63 The new Parliamentary plutocracy served only to bring, not democracy, Chesterton argued, but luxury—and luxury for a few.64 Hence, instead of liberty and opportunity for all, England was left with liberty and luxury for a few. Further, this new plutocratic class had to find new finances also sought by another class that happened to be none other than the great landowners and merchants and soon, a newly emerged industrialized portion of English economy.65

As a consequence, the common Englishman would be deprived of lands and liberty. The clearest sign of such a development was that ‘the House of Commons has been rendered null, and the people impotent and without a voice.’66 Chesterton concluded: ‘this strange poetry of plutocracy prevails over people against their very senses’.67 Men would become slaves in the Servile State, liberty would be relinquished for the benefit of the few, and all would come to believe the present condition natural. To argue further, Chesterton and his acolytes put the blame for this loss of liberty on the standardization of state legislation. This, actually, was another characteristic of conservative anarchism: their opposition ‘to the

63 With the goal of opposing this new plutocracy, Chesterton founded G. K.’s Weekly in 1925. The publication ran until his death in 1936. See Ker, Chesterton, p. 715.

64 G.K. Chesterton, Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, vol. 32 (Ignatius Press, 1989), p. 210. Plutocracy is also a main theme in Chesterton’s comparison of the American and English systems in What I Saw in America. See G.K. Chesterton, Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, vol. 21, What I Saw in America (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990).

65 Chesterton himself argued this very point, says Coren, affirming that ‘the inevitable result of industrial progress was the swamping of the individual. Nobody, according to Gilbert, could or would reverse the trend of capitalism becoming increasingly powerful, and placing ever larger amounts of money in ever smaller groups of people’. Michael Coren, Gilbert: The Man Who Was G. K. Chesterton (Regent College Publishing, 2001), p. 242.

66 Belloc and Chesterton, The Party System, p. 37. 67 G.K. Chesterton, Collected Works, vol. 5, Utopia of Usurers, p. 415.

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belief that the state can legislate and effectively act in order to make people morally better beings. For most Tory anarchists, it is not in the state’s power to do this’.68 And indeed, that explains Chesterton’s famous and often misunderstood opposition to the 1906 Liberal Education Bill, a failed attempt at educational reform.69 In opposing this reform, Chesterton took even his supposed allies by surprise but defended himself with the very simple argument that it was not the role of a government to legislate on all and every human issue. In fact,

he worried that any state-mandated character education would only educate children in the virtues of “a gentleman” and “a citizen” and leave out other essential virtues—in particular the virtues of humility and a radical sympathy for the poor; in other words, he believed that the state would present “a moral ideal in an extremely lop-sided condition.”70

What Chesterton vividly criticized was the constant paternalism of all reformers including Conservatives, Liberals and Socialists. Against this reforming paternalism, he stressed that what the common Englishman desired was not more reforms through greater state control. The common Englishman ‘does not merely want a roof above him and a chair below him; he wants an objective and visible kingdom; a fire at which he can cook what food he likes, a door he can open to what friends he chooses’.71 Because of a deep sensitivity towards the poor, Chesterton opposed state reforms on the ground that this would in the end deprive men of their last freedom: ‘to scrap its machinery and live on the land, if

68 Wilkin, Tory Anarchism, p. 172. 69 The bill failed partly because it was ‘an attempt at a compromise between those

two essentially political concerns—the Conservative desire to forge national unity and Liberal insistence on popular control’. Susan E. Hannssen, ‘“English in spirit”: G.K. Chesterton, Church and State, and the 1906 Education Act Debate,’ The Catholic Social Science Review 13 (2008), pp. 47-76 (here p. 49).

70 Hannssen, ‘English in spirit’, p. 54. 71 G.K. Chesterton, The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, vol. 4 (San Francisco:

Ignatius Press, 1987), p. 73.

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it really likes it better, as any man has to sell his old bicycle and go for a walk, if he likes that better’ or again to drink or not to drink as they saw fit. This was precisely the point of The Flying Inn.72 The remedy against the inequities and injustices of democratic society was not more state control.73

The remedy, if there ever was one, was really democracy, but true democracy. However, as Chesterton and Belloc affirmed: ‘pure democracy is possible only in a small community’.74 This democracy embodied in small communities is perfectly typified in the Shire. In fact, the family-structure of the Shire provides such community-based individual freedom. Of course the smallness of the Shire is itself good example of a small communal anarchic democracy. Nominally the Shirefolk owed their allegiance to the King of Gondor and Arnor but by the time of The Lord of the Rings, this had passed out of common knowledge. However, after the King’s Road was re-opened and the Shire had again recovered its place in the ‘Westmarch kingdom’, Hobbits remained relatively independent vassals of the king, for King Elessar, even as the legitimate suzerain of the Shire, would not cross the border and respected the Hobbits’ political will, leaving them to mind their own business.75

The four Farthings of the Shire, being officially administered by a duly elected Mayor, ‘still bore the names of some of the old leading families’, demonstrating a breaking up of governmental centralisation.76 Head of clans led families in their own business and there was nothing else needed for proper government, especially

72 G.K. Chesterton, The Outline of Sanity, p. 145.73 The papal social encyclical Rerum Novarum already made the same point

earlier in 1891: ‘To remedy these wrongs the socialists, working on the poor man’s envy of the rich, are striving to do away with private property, and contend that individual possessions should become the common property of all, to be administered by the State or by municipal bodies’. Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, paragraph 4, http://www.vatican.va (accessed July 26, 2012).

74 Belloc and Chesterton, The Party System, p. 25. 75 Christopher Tolkien, HoME, IX:117, p. 126.76 Tolkien, LoTR, I:9.

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not a representative body of officials. The Master of Buckland managed the Brandybucks’ affairs in the same manner as ‘The Took’ managed the Tooks’ affairs.

The only real distinction due to the Took family was for them to appoint the office of Thain, the military commander of the Shire. While a Thain was always officially appointed, by the time of the events of The Lord of the Rings took place, ‘the Thainship had ceased to be more than a nominal dignity’.77

This ‘clannic’ organisation could easily be mistaken for a new aristocracy. However, in the Shire, Hobbit common sense and anti-plutocracy made room for the rise of some families, among whom, the Gamgees serve as a good example. Genealogical table S2 presents us with the rise of ‘the family of Gardeners of the Hill’.78 Here, the function of ‘gardener’ serves almost as a family title, that is, it indicates not so much social status as genealogical order. The Gamgees are no longer gardeners. They are the family of ‘Gardeners of the Hill’ as if the title itself provided a good reputation for Hobbit common sense.

Tolkien, in fact, emphasises over and over again that governing bodies should be greatly limited.79 Even the power of King Elessar respects this limitation of government, especially regarding the Shire. Needing reassurance that royal government will respect their relative independence, Gandalf replies to Barliman Butterbur that they will be let alone, to which Butterber answer with a doubtful (or is it hopeful?) ‘And it will be good for business, no doubt. So long as he lets Bree alone’.80

But Tolkien not only demonstrated his suspicion of plutocracy in the Shire as presented in The Lord of the Rings. In his short story Farmer Giles of Ham, Tolkien sets forth the rise of the common

77 Ibid.78 Christopher Tolkien, The Peoples of Middle-Earth, p. 115.79 See also Patrick Harrington, ‘Tolkien and Distributism’, Third Way Special

Edition, ‘Tolkien and Politics’, 2003, p. 13.80 Tolkien, LoTR, III.6.vii, p. 971.

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farmer to the dignity of “lord” while at the same time presenting with irony and humour the outcomes of plutocracy. Tolkien begins this short story with the instructive line: ‘Ham was only a village, but villages were proud and independent still in those days’, reminiscent of Chesterton’s independent city quarters in The Napoleon of Notting Hill.81 In this independent village, a common farmer, farmer Giles, became the unwilling hero of the folk in this part of the country. After several “adventures”, as Hobbits would say, Giles successfully tamed Chrysophylax the dragon and took the dragon’s treasure with him. Here begins the true political nature of Farmer Giles of Ham.

At home, Giles was met by the King and his courtiers who settled in his farmyard to celebrate the dragon’s supposed demise—though the dragon had bargained for his life and been spared. And here, ‘the king explained carefully that the wealth of the miscreant Chrysophylax all belonged to himself as lord of the land’.82 Moreover the King’s court stayed long enough to eat and drink all that Ham had to offer! Of course, the people of Ham had no choice but to submit to the King’s will, although, remarks Tolkien, ‘they knew enough, at any rate, to feel sure that the King’s esteem would not rise …’ to what they would have been able to bargain for with the dragon. Here for sure we can discern a subtle and careful criticism of the plutocracy in royal disguise.

The end of Farmer Giles provides further criticism. After approaching the dragon for the second time, Giles ‘never went near the court of the King nor sent any message’ prompting the King to remark angrily that Giles had no right to ‘go home without

81 J.R.R. Tolkien, ‘Farmer Giles of Ham’ in Tales from the Perilous Realm (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), pp. 100-167 (here p.103). Akers notes that, ‘Chesterton wrote a Distributist novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, in which Adam Wayne, the hero, raises an army of locals to defend his native district of Notting Hill against neighboring London districts, which are attempting to confiscate a portion of Notting Hill in order to run a highway through it.’ Akers, ‘Distributism in the Shire,’ p. 13.

82 J.R.R. Tolkien, Tales from the Perilous Realm, p. 139.

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reporting’.83 And then, when summoned, Giles refused to come to court and give away the treasure, concluding with ‘finding’s keeping, and keeping’s having, we say here …’84 Farmer Giles is here very keen on stressing his own individual freedom over against the centralised royal government and, in fact, underlining that the people’s will is to be left to their own governance, not a representative one. This conclusion also marks the end of farmer Giles as one of the plutocrats, a knight or a member of the court. In doing so, Farmer Giles demonstrates that there is no need, for governance or for a representative body of which he would be part as representative of Ham. All that is needed is a communal, local democracy. Such is the end of farmer Giles: ‘from that day the power of the Middle Kingdom came to an end in that neighbourhood’.85

Conclusion: A Distributist State

All our previous comments come together in the movement known as Distributism. Some could argue that making a connection between Tolkien and a socio-economic movement is indeed far-fetched given the absence of any particular position adopted by Tolkien himself. However, this absence of public comment is not necessarily the result of a disinterest in political and economic issues but more an unwillingness to talk publicly about private opinions. Furthermore, it is clear that Tolkien was interested in economic issues, being a regular subscriber to Candour (preserving its 24 volumes), a journal founded by the controversial cousin of Chesterton, A.K. Chesterton. Through this journal, Tolkien would have had been quite familiar with the social ideals of both Distributist and Social Credit movements. Moreover, one can hardly doubt that Tolkien was familiar with the arguments made

83 Op. cit., p. 154 and p. 155.84 Op. cit., p. 157.85 Op. cit., p. 160.

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by both Chesterton and Belloc as well as the supporting historical arguments set forth by Christopher Dawson.

In fact, the relation between Distributism and Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings has already been made clear and further comment might not be necessary at this point.86 Hence, the following comments will serve as conclusion to this article. It is necessary to begin with a brief definition of the Distributist movement provided by Shapiro, who indicates that it “opposed big business, economic centralization, socialism and government bureaucracy, while favoring a return to the soil and the strengthening of small business.”87

Discerning the distributistic characteristics in the Shire is not difficult. First, the opposition to big business is clear when seen in connection with the rise of mechanized industry.88 One of the

86 See for example Joseph Pearce, ‘The Lord of the Rings and the Catholic Understanding of Community’, in Paul E. Kerry (ed.), The ring and the Cross: Christianity and the Writings of J.R.R. Tolkien (Plymouth: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011),pp. 224-233 ; Third Way Special Edition, ‘Tolkien and Politics’, 2003; Matthew P. Akers, ‘Distributism in the Shire’, St. Austin Review (January-February 2010), pp. 11-14.

87 Edward S. Shapiro, ‘Postscript: A Distributist Society’ in G.K. Chesterton, Collected Works, vol. 5 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), 211. Goodway also provides a helpful summary: ‘Belloc was to develop with G. K. Chesterton the theory of distributism, urging the creation of a nation of small proprietors through the widest possible distribution of property: ‘the re-establishment of a Distributive State in which the mass of citizens should severally own the means of production.’ Syndicalists, industrial unionists and Guild Socialists, supplemented during wartime by the leadership of the Shop Stewards’ Movement, had no sympathy for this political programme, yet were impressed by Belloc’s analysis, sharing his rejection of the ‘servile state.’ Belloc’s political origins in Liberalism help to explain the apparent paradox that in their anti-statism the revolutionary socialists had drawn very near to the concerns of the radical-liberal ‘Old Unionists’ who had been resisting state socialism since the 1890s and continued to represent a major current within the trade unions, and hence also within the early Labour Party (established in 1900-6).’ David Goodway, Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow, pp. 32-33.

88 The role of machinery in a Distributive society was a highly debated among Distributists. ‘Chesterton himself thought that machinery should be limited but not abolished: the English people had lost their land and property before the arrival of industrial machinery.’ Ker, Chesterton, p. 558.

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best examples in The Lord of the Rings is the effectiveness/efficiency sought for in the mechanisation of the Mill. Once one of these automatons is in place, two consequences arise: Ted Sandyman becomes the willing slave of a machine and strangers are brought in to manage the machine. Property is not individual anymore, and wealth will accordingly benefit only a few privileged.89 Tolkien, in one of the great ironic moments in this dramatic chapter ‘The Scouring of the Shire’, shows how the Shire has become a mechanized state in the hand of a brutal plutocracy made up of the ‘Boss’ and his ‘sharers’ who, complains Hob, ‘do more gathering than sharing, and we never see most of the stuff again’.90 The irony is made clearer in Farmer Cotton’s explanation of the Shire’s demise: ‘everything except Rules got shorter and shorter, unless one could hide a bit of one’s own when the ruffians went round gathering stuff up for “fair distribution”: which meant they got it and we didn’t…’91 Fair distribution is impossible outside the democracy of a small self-governing community in which people are left to their own business—and to manage them as they saw fit.92

Here again the connection with conservative anarchy and anti-plutocracy is made clear: under strict centralised governance, people will live by Rules, ever extending Rules, and soon lose the individual liberty of managing one’s own affairs. Individual liberty and property, one of the essentials of the basics of Distributism, ‘for, every man has by nature the right to possess property as his

89 To understand the importance of property, it is essential to remember that, for Distributists, and so for the economic tradition Tolkien was familiar with, property was the means of production, that is, the main means for re-distriution. See Hilaire Belloc, An Essay on the Restoration of Property (Norfolk: IHS Press, 2002), pp. 4 ff.

90 Tolkien, LoTR, III.6.viii, p. 976.91 Tolkien, LoTR, III.6.viii, p. 989.92 This irony did not escape the expertise of Tom Shippey who refers to the

‘curious ‘socialism’, so to speak, of Sharkey and his men’. Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (Boston, New York: Houghton Mfflin, 2002), p. 167.

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own’,93 will have been dealt with. In such a case, communal life will slowly, but surely, disappear. This right to personal property, this “plain hobbit-sense” is what saved Samwise from the power of the Ring.

One remembers that, when Frodo is captured by the Orcs of Cirith Ungol at the end of book four of The Lord of the Rings, Sam has kept the ring in a doomed attempt to fulfil the Quest before realising with a shock that his Master is alive. Sam then faced the difficult necessity of putting on the ring to step unnoticed into Mordor. As the ring begins to take hold of him, ‘wild fantasies arose in his mind; and he saw Samwise the Strong, Hero of the Age … and at his command the vale of Gorgoroth became a garden of flowers and trees and brought forth fruit…’ Then Sam came back to his Hobbit common sense: all he needed was his small garden, his own, garden. Small, administered of his own will, for truly, ‘the one small garden of a free gardener was all his need and due, not a garden swollen to a realm; his own hands to use, not the hands of others to command’.94 The Hobbit agrarian Distributist ideal kept Sam from the tyranny of Big Business—as Chesterton would have put it. Here, the true virtue of ‘Hobbitness’ comes to life, the virtue which resides in the overwhelming majority ‘Sam-wise’ represents: the simple people.95

The Shire is a Distributist state, neither Socialist nor Capitalist. As Charles Coulombe rightly concluded:

In many ways the Shire expresses perfectly the economic and political ideals of the Church, as expressed by Leo XIII

93 Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, paragraph 6.94 Tolkien, LoTR, III.6.i, p. 880.95 This is by no means pejorative. On the contrary, it is merely another way to

defiine Distributism. As Margaret Canovan put it, ‘Virtue resides in the simple people, who are overwhelming majority and in their collective traditions’. Margaret Canovan, G.K. Chesterton, Radical Populist (New York, London: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovitch, 1977), p. 5.

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in Rerum novarum, and Pius XI in Quadragesimo anno. Traditional authority (the Thain), limited except in times of crisis; popular representation (the Mayor of Michel Delving), likewise limited; subsidiarity; and above all, minimal organisation and conflict. It is the sort of society envisioned by Distributists Belloc and Chesterton in Britain …96

As a decentralized, agrarian, community founded upon ‘small is beautiful,’ Distributism opposed to both Liberal and social-Communist states, the Shire readily serves as an example of Tolkien’s economic and political convictions.97 This ideal of a local communal democracy was characterised by popular, not parliamentary, representation; self-governance and regulation; a Distributive society founded on the private property and just redistribution of wealth.

Of course, Distributism may indeed be a daydream: ‘three acres and a cow may be a joke; cows may be fabulous animals; liberty may be a name; private enterprise may be a wild goose chase on which the world can go no further’.98 Tolkien found the political and economic basis for the Shire’s idyllic society respectively

96 Charles Coulombe, ‘The Lord of the Rings: A Catholic View’, http://www.angelfire.com/in3/theodore/opinion/articles/coulombe/tolkien.html (accessed July 26, 2012).

And Akers to conclude: ‘The Shire embodies the Distributist economic vision. It is a rural community composed of farmers, craftsmen, and small businessmen, and its economy is based upon agrarianism’. Akers, ‘Distributism in the Shire’, p. 11.

97 It will be good to recall that this expression ‘small is beautiful’, is taken from the title of E. Fritz Schumacher’s famous book [Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as If People Mattered, 25 Years Later…with Commentaries (Vancouver: Hartley and Marks , 1999)]. Schumacher, who was to convert to Roman Catholicism in 1971, was himself influenced by Leopold Khor’s theory (even though they were contemporaries), itself a latter-day emanation of Distributism. See Nicolas Walter and David Goodway, Damned Fools in Utopia, pp. 261-262 ; Joseph Pearce, ‘The Education of E.F. Schumacher’ The Distributist Review (July 7, 2010) http://distributistreview.com (accessed July 26, 2012).

98 Chesterton, The Outline of Sanity, p. 77.

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in conservative anarchy and Distributism, mainly through the influence of Chesterton, Belloc and Dawson. The Shire, as a conservative-anarchist and Distributist society embodies Tolkien’s most profound convictions about the nature of society, the value of community, and the identity of human nature itself.

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