There’s a very interesting interview in Catholic World Report with Jay W. Richards, co-author of a new book examining Tolkien’s political philosophy.

The interview and the book are for the most part very good and incisive. The only blot on the otherwise edifying intellectual landscape is the suggestion that Tolkien would not have agreed with Belloc’s belief that some form of political “force”, i.e. legal intervention, would be necessary to restore equity in the economy through the positive assistance of small businesses to gain and retain a place in the marketplace. Bizarrely, Richards cites the chapter from The Lord of the Rings entitled “The Scouring of the Shire” to buttress his claim that Tolkien would have opposed Belloc’s Essay on the Restoration of Property. Richards makes the all too common and naive mistake of equating Belloc’s political philosophy with socialism and then, having done so, states, quite correctly, that Tolkien was not a socialist. The fact is that Belloc opposed the way in which both socialism and globalist capitalism concentrate property into the hands of a privileged few, i.e. politicians and plutocrats. The answer to this injustice was to promote small businesses and to use the power of politics to do so. Such political intervention is not liked by free market libertarians who believe that it’s better to have the world run by global corporations who have free rein (and reign) to use and abuse their economies of scale to exclude the vast majority of people from the market. 

And as for the suggestion that Belloc supported political intervention whereas Tolkien didn’t, one wonders what Dr. Richards would call the force used by the hobbits upon their return to the Shire to restore agrarian sanity by exorcising both the dark satanic mills (capitalist industrialism) and political corruption (socialism). Is taking up arms against the usurpation of political power by an unrepresentative minority not the employment of force and political intervention?

Apart from this lapse into anarcho-libertarian nonsense, the interview is worth reading:

http://www.catholicworldreport.com/Item/3485/the_political_vision_of_jrr_tolkien.aspx