The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with Jeff Rigenbach.
The third day of January was the 118th birthday of the English writer J.R.R. Tolkien, whose most celebrated work, the nearly 1500-page novel The Lord of the Rings,
was one of the most influential literary creations of the 20th century.
How influential?
Listen to Hillsdale College historian Bradley Berzer
from a lecture on The Lord of the Rings given in Seattle in 2003.
It was interesting to see at the end of the 20th century
how many people thought The Lord of the Rings was the best book of the 20th century.
Poll after poll in both the United Kingdom and here in the United States
Nor, according to Berzer, is Tolkien's popularity restricted to English-speaking countries.
But, Tolkien, you may reply, why? What does J.R.R. Tolkien and his long tale of orcs and wars and magic rings have to do with libertarianism?
isn't this podcast supposed to be on the libertarian tradition surely you're not
calling Tolkien a libertarian on the basis of some interpretation of the
symbolic meaning of the Lord of the Rings didn't Tolkien himself say that it
had no meaning well in a word yes he did in 1965 in his forward to the second
As for any inner meaning or message the Lord of the Rings has in the intention of the author, none. It is neither allegorical nor topical.
He added a page later that he cordially disliked allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.
Ten years earlier, in 1955, he said much the same thing in a letter to his American publisher.
The Lord of the Rings, he said in 1955, is not about anything but itself.
Certainly it has no allegorical intentions, general, particular or topical, moral, religious or political.
Yet, nearly ten years before, in 1947, when his British publisher, Stanley Unwin, was
reading the first two-thirds of the manuscript of The Lord of the Rings, and Tolkien was
busily writing the final third, he had voiced a far different opinion.
"'You can make the ring into an allegory of our own time if you like,' Tolkien wrote
wrote to Unwin, an allegory of the inevitable fate that waits for all attempts to defeat
evil power by power.
And in April of 1956, only about a year after publicly declaring that his tale of Middle
Earth had no allegorical intentions, general, particular or topical, moral, religious or
Literary critics used to warn against what they called the intentional fallacy, the fallacy
of supposing that even in those cases where you can know for sure what the author's intention
was, you can regard information about the author's intention as the key to understanding
a work of literature.
Similarly, Lysander Spooner used to argue that what the framers of the Constitution
intended was irrelevant.
What matters, he said, is what they wrote.
What does what they wrote mean?
That is the question before anyone, judge, juror or layman, who is trying to figure out
what the Constitution does or does not provide.
I submit, and I am far from the first to do so, that if we adopt this principle in reading
J.R.R.
Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, we will inescapably see that his novel is about something other
The Theory of Money and Credit
Lord Acton, as it happens, was born in January 2, a week later than Tolkien, but nearly sixty
years earlier.
The man who eventually came to be called Lord Acton was born on January 10, 1834, three
years before Queen Victoria ascended the British throne.
His name at birth was John Emerick Edward Dalberg Acton.
He was born into an old, wealthy, but not noble family, a family which in fact faced
a good deal of prejudice and bigotry in the England of the early 19th century because
of their commitment to Roman Catholicism.
Young John, though a brilliant student, was denied admission to Cambridge because of his
membership in the Catholic Church, so he left England for eight years of higher education
in Germany.
On his return, at the age of 24, he began dabbling in intellectual journalism, writing
about ideas and about historical topics for intellectual magazines, mostly monthlies and
quarterlies.
Shortly, he took a job as editor of The Rambler, a liberal Catholic monthly.
A year later, at 25, he was elected to the House of Commons, winning the election by
only 14 votes.
During his six years in parliament, he continued to practice journalism on the side, transforming
the monthly rambler into the quarterly home and foreign review.
During these same years, he became a protege, friend and trusted advisor of one of the nineteenth
century's greatest and most famous liberal politicians, William Ewert Gladstone.
After young Acton left public office in 1865 at the age of 31, he stayed on in London,
writing for liberal Catholic weeklies like the Chronicle and the North British Review,
and as an advisor to Gladstone, who interceded for him with the Queen four years later and
got him his new name, the one we know him by today, Lord Acton.
Men devoted his late 30s, his 40s and his 50s, the 1870s and 1880s, plus the first
few years of the 1890s, to his intellectual journalism, to advising Gladstone, who served
four tumultuous terms as Prime Minister during those years, and to writing and delivering
the occasional lecture.
When he was 61 years old in 1895, he was offered a professorship in modern history
at Cambridge.
Noting the irony that Cambridge had rejected him as a student applicant some 45 years earlier,
he accepted the offer.
Seven years later, in 1902, at the age of 68, just a few months after a very young J.R.R.
Tolkien celebrated his tenth birthday, Acton was dead.
Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote of Acton fifty years after his death that those who met him were
unfailingly impressed with his fabulous erudition, and it was commonly said of him that he not
only knew everyone worth knowing, but had also read everything worth reading.
His friends estimated that he read, annotated and practically committed to memory an average
of two books a day.
Inevitably his friend suggested that he himself should write a book.
And Acton meant to.
He really did.
He decided when he was 21 years old to write a book.
And he decided at that same time what the subject of his book would be.
A hundred years after Acton's death, the contemporary libertarian historian Ralph
Professor Ralph Reiko chose the same subject for a series of lectures and credited Acton in his opening remarks.
History as a struggle for liberty.
This conception of history, of what history is, goes back to Lord Acton,
a famous 19th century historian who spent all his life accumulating notes and materials
or what would be, he thought, his great history of liberty, the greatest book never written, people say.
Nonetheless, Acton wrote many essays on the subject, and he's a historian well worth consulting.
Those essays Professor Reiko refers to are, of course, drawn from among Acton's contributions to the magazines of his day.
The time he spent writing them took away from the time he had available to him to write
his book.
So did the time he devoted to preparing lectures, the time he spent writing letters, the time
he spent writing in his journal.
He never got his book written because of all this other writing.
And yet we can scarcely begrudge Acton the time he chose to devote to these lesser kinds
of Writing, for it is on such writing, and especially on his journals and letters, that
his formidable reputation chiefly rests.
The most famous passage he ever wrote appears, not in any of his magazine work, nor in any
of his lectures, but in a letter he wrote in 1887 to Mandel Creighton, author of a multi-volume
History of the Papacy in the Period of Reformation
Acton had reviewed the first two volumes of this work when they were published in 1882.
Creighton had written to him in reply to his review, and the two men had struck up a correspondence.
Power tends to corrupt, Acton wrote to Creighton in April of 1887, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
As I said a few minutes ago, I can think of no better short statement of the symbolic meaning
The magic ring that Frodo Baggins inherits from Bilbo Baggins at the beginning of The
Lord of the Rings is one of twenty rings of power manufactured centuries before.
It is the one ring, the ring that gives its possessor power over not only the possessors
The One Ring is a daunting one, however, for the One Ring corrupts its possessor, no matter
A mortal who keeps one of the great rings, the wizard Gandalf tells Frodo, does not die,
but he does not grow or obtain more life, he merely continues, until at last every minute
is a weariness.
And sooner or later, later if he is strong or well-meaning to begin with, but neither
Neither strength nor good purpose will last.
Sooner or later the dark power that rules the rings will devour him.
And when Frodo asks Gandalf why he, a powerful wizard, cannot take the ring and destroy it,
Gandalf cries out, No!
With that power I should have power too great and terrible.
And over me the ring would gain a power still greater and more deadly.
Do not tempt me, for I do not wish to become like the Dark Lord himself, yet the way of
the ring to my heart is by pity, pity for weakness and desire of strength to do good.
Do not tempt me, I dare not take it, not even to keep it safe, unused.
The wish to wield it would be too great for my strength.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Even Lord Acton couldn't have said it better.
Tolkien distrusted power with every fiber of his being.
He wrote to his then 19-year-old son Christopher in 1943 while he was writing The Lord of the
Rings, that my political opinions lean more and more to anarchy, philosophically understood,
meaning abolition of control, not whiskered men with bombs.
The 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.
Does this make Tolkien a libertarian? I'd say it does.
In the prologue to The Lord of the Rings, in a section called Of the Ordering of the
Shire, Tolkien describes the political organization of the hobbits. He wrote,
The Shire at this time had hardly any government. Families, for the most part, managed their
own affairs.
One is reminded of the American transcendentalist Bronson Alcott, friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson
and Henry David Thoreau and father to Louisa May Alcott, who asked, Why would I employ
a state to govern me? Why not govern myself? In The Lord of the Rings, in the character
first known as Strider and later known as Aragorn, Tolkien portrays a man who does
Does Not Want to Be King, The Type of Man Tolkien Believes Would Make a Good Ruler,
The Man Who Does Not Want Power.
Does this make The Lord of the Rings, perhaps the most culturally influential novel written
in English in the 20th century, a libertarian work?
I'd say so.
How about you?
This is Jeff Rigenmaier.