There is a wonderfully simple political idea at the centre of The Lord of the Rings, so simple that it can disappear beneath the orcs, elves, wizards and walking trees. The great struggle is not ultimately about which side should possess supreme power. It is about whether anybody should possess it at all.
The One Ring is the most dangerous object in Middle-earth not because it shoots lightning bolts or destroys armies by itself. Its essential power is domination. It gives its sufficiently powerful possessor the capacity to impose his will upon others. Sauron naturally wants it because Sauron is evil, but Tolkien's much more interesting proposition is that the good characters cannot safely use it either. Gandalf will not take it, Galadriel refuses it, Aragorn does not claim it and Faramir rejects the temptation, while Boromir's tragedy begins when he convinces himself that the Ring could be turned against its creator.
Boromir's reasoning is politically impeccable. Sauron is evil, Gondor is good and the Ring provides extraordinary power, so why not let the good use that power to defeat evil? According to Tolkien, almost everything is wrong with this reasoning. The problem is that the Ring does not become morally neutral when transferred from an evil hand to a good one. Its essential nature is domination, and domination gradually transforms the person who exercises it. The righteous ruler begins by forcing people to do what is good for them, then forces them to do what he believes is good for them, until eventually the distinction between what is good and what he wills becomes increasingly difficult to detect.
This is Lord Acton's famous observation that power tends to corrupt transformed into mythology. Tolkien goes further, however, because the Ring presents an even more disturbing possibility: power may corrupt most effectively through virtue itself. The wicked man who wants power because he enjoys cruelty is easy to recognise, while the much more dangerous figure may be the virtuous man who wants power because he intends to save everybody.
That is why Gandalf fears the Ring. His intentions would initially be excellent. He would use its power to defeat Sauron, protect the weak and establish justice, but the very magnitude of his desire to do good would provide the mechanism of corruption. The more convinced he became of the righteousness of his purposes, the easier it would become to justify compelling everyone else to serve them. Galadriel faces essentially the same temptation. The Ring offers not merely personal enrichment but the possibility of becoming a great and apparently benevolent ruler. The temptation works because it takes something admirable and enlarges it until the virtue becomes monstrous.
This is a far subtler understanding of political corruption than the proposition that politicians are greedy. Greed is comparatively easy to regulate. Require disclosure, audit expenses, prohibit bribery and send politicians who steal public money to prison. The more profound corruption occurs when rulers remain convinced of their own virtue while acquiring progressively greater authority over everybody else.
History provides plenty of examples. Revolutions begin by liberating humanity and end with committees deciding who must be shot for humanity's benefit. Governments acquire emergency powers to solve an emergency and discover that the powers remain extremely useful after the emergency. Bureaucracies are established to solve particular problems and gradually discover new problems requiring an expanded bureaucracy. Surveillance is introduced to catch terrorists and then becomes useful for catching other criminals, monitoring protesters or regulating ordinary citizens. At every stage the justification can be perfectly sincere, which is precisely what makes power dangerous.
The Spectator's discussion of Tolkien's politics correctly emphasises his distrust of statism, managerialism and technological domination. Tolkien was no modern libertarian writing a political manifesto in hobbit costumes, and attempts to squeeze Middle-earth into contemporary party politics usually tell us more about the person doing the squeezing than about Tolkien. His politics were eccentric, conservative, Catholic, monarchist in some respects and almost anarchistic in others. He once said his political opinions inclined increasingly towards "Anarchy," by which he meant the abolition of control rather than bomb-throwing revolution. There is nevertheless a remarkably consistent thread running through his thought: suspicion of the attempt to organise human beings from above.
Tolkien himself explained that his mythology was concerned with Fall, Mortality and what he called "the Machine." By Machine he did not merely mean steam engines, bulldozers and factories. He meant the use of external devices and systems to make one's will immediately effective, particularly where that involved dominating the real world or coercing other wills. That definition makes the One Ring the ultimate Machine. Put it on your finger and your will acquires power over other wills. The normal difficulties of persuasion, compromise, tradition, resistance and individual freedom disappear because you no longer need to convince people; you can make them obey.
Anyone who has ever become frustrated with democratic politics has felt a tiny flicker of the Ring's temptation. Why can't the government just do something? Why must there be consultations, courts, elections, opposition parties, constitutional limitations, property rights and awkward people refusing to cooperate? If only somebody sensible were in charge, we could finally get things done. That last thought contains the entire problem, because who gets to decide who is sensible?
Plato's answer was the philosopher-king. Find the wisest and most virtuous person and give him authority to rule. Political thought has been haunted by variations of that solution ever since. If only the right king, party, experts, scientists, administrators or technocrats possessed sufficient authority, irrational political conflict could finally be replaced by intelligent government. Tolkien's answer is more pessimistic: there is no safe Ringbearer.
The wisest characters in The Lord of the Rings demonstrate their wisdom partly by refusing the ultimate instrument of power. Gandalf does not effectively say, "Give me the Ring because I am wiser than Sauron." His wisdom consists in understanding why being wiser than Sauron does not make possession safe. That distinction has enormous contemporary relevance.
The modern state possesses powers Sauron would have regarded with professional admiration. Governments can track the movement of millions of citizens, collect extraordinary quantities of financial information, monitor electronic communications, freeze bank accounts, regulate employment, determine access to services and increasingly combine enormous databases using artificial intelligence. Much of this power has legitimate purposes, and that is precisely the point.
Nobody proposes a national digital identity system by announcing that it will make future tyranny more efficient. It will prevent fraud, simplify services and protect citizens. Surveillance cameras catch criminals, financial monitoring catches money launderers, internet regulation protects children, emergency powers save lives and centralised databases make government efficient. Every Ring comes with a reason for putting it on.
Technology magnifies the problem because Tolkien's concept of the Machine was not primarily an objection to gadgets. It was an objection to technological power being used to overcome the resistance of reality and other human beings. The bulldozer is morally significant because it allows somebody to remake a landscape rapidly according to his will. Modern information technology permits something similar to be done to society.
The bureaucrat of 1900 could theoretically dream of monitoring every citizen, but the physical limitations were enormous. He needed clerks, filing cabinets, informants and mountains of paper. The bureaucrat of the near future may ask an artificial-intelligence system to search billions of transactions and communications in seconds. The ambition may not have changed, but the Ring has become considerably more powerful.
Tolkien's treatment of Saruman is especially revealing here. Saruman begins as one of the Wise. He does not initially set out to become a cartoon villain. He studies the enemy, becomes fascinated by the mechanisms of power and eventually concludes that the wise should seize control of events. If unpleasant methods are temporarily necessary, they can be justified by the better world that intelligent rulers will eventually create. Saruman's fall is consequently intellectual before it becomes political because he convinces himself that, since he understands power, he can safely use it.
That conceit has survived remarkably well outside Middle-earth. Every generation produces intellectuals convinced that previous attempts at concentrated government power failed because the wrong people possessed it. Their own generation finally has the correct theory, data, technology and moral understanding. Give the experts enough authority and this time the Ring will behave itself. It rarely seems to occur to them that believing oneself uniquely qualified to exercise enormous power might itself be evidence of being uniquely dangerous.
Tolkien offers another model through the hobbits. They are politically insignificant, militarily unimpressive and largely uninterested in ruling anybody. The Shire has remarkably little government because its inhabitants mostly want to grow vegetables, drink beer, celebrate birthdays and complain about their relatives. This is not accidental. The people least interested in exercising power are the ones Tolkien entrusts with carrying it towards destruction.
Even they are not immune. Frodo eventually cannot voluntarily destroy the Ring, while Gollum completes the task accidentally through the culmination of events involving pity, mercy and providence. Tolkien therefore refuses even the comforting conclusion that humble people can safely possess absolute power. They can resist it longer, perhaps, but the Ring remains the Ring.
Sam provides one of Tolkien's most beautiful treatments of temptation because the Ring cannot easily discover grandiose ambitions within him. It offers him visions appropriate to his character: Samwise the Strong, heroic commander, turning Mordor into a garden. Yet somewhere beneath the fantasy remains the absurdity of the proposition. Sam does not really want an empire; he wants his own garden. That may be Tolkien's most radical political insight, because freedom survives not because everyone learns how to exercise enormous power responsibly but because ordinary people retain things they value more than power.
Family, home, friendship, faith, land, craft, tradition and community all create centres of meaning outside politics. The person whose entire conception of human improvement runs through political power is therefore especially vulnerable to the Ring because politics has become the instrument through which everything worthwhile must be achieved. Tolkien's heroes repeatedly choose limitation instead.
Aragorn possesses legitimate authority but does not attempt to turn Middle-earth into a centrally administered empire. Gandalf guides rather than rules, Faramir does not grasp the weapon that might advance his political fortunes and Galadriel accepts that her own realm will diminish rather than seize the power that might preserve it indefinitely. Even victory involves relinquishment, an idea profoundly alien to modern political thinking, where success normally means acquiring enough power to implement one's programme.
The Left wants power to create equality, the Right wants power to restore order, environmentalists want power to save the planet, technocrats want power to implement rational policy and revolutionaries want power to remake society. Each can provide reasons why its objectives are exceptionally important. Tolkien whispers the same question to all of them: what will possessing that power make of you?
This does not mean all authority is evil. Middle-earth contains kings, captains, laws and hierarchies, and Aragorn's restoration is presented as good rather than tyrannical. Tolkien's distinction is therefore not the childish proposition that authority equals oppression. The distinction is between authority and domination. Legitimate authority recognises limits and leaves room for persons, communities, customs and loyalties that it does not manufacture and cannot completely control, whereas domination seeks to subordinate everything to a single directing will.
Sauron's great evil is consequently not that he wants chaos but that he wants order: an order so complete that nothing remains outside his will. That is why Mordor is such a powerful political image. Totalitarianism does not necessarily aspire to disorder but to the elimination of uncontrolled life. Everything is numbered, organised, commanded and directed towards the purposes of the centre. The Shire represents almost the exact opposite. It is untidy, parochial, inefficient and alive.
When Saruman finally reaches the Shire, his petty tyranny is expressed through rules, committees, confiscations, destruction and bureaucratic interference. The scale is almost comic compared with Mordor, but the principle is identical: other people's lives must be rearranged according to somebody else's plan. This is where Tolkien's distrust of power meets his distrust of the Machine. Political power and technological power can reinforce each other because technology allows rulers to translate intentions into effects with progressively less resistance.
We should therefore be particularly suspicious when someone promises that a new concentration of power will be harmless because good people will control it. Good people eventually die, governments change, institutions deteriorate and emergency measures become precedents. Databases built by one administration are inherited by the next. Censorship mechanisms designed against universally despised material can be redirected towards politically disputed material, while surveillance systems created to watch terrorists remain available to watch everyone else.
The crucial political question is consequently not merely whether we trust the present ruler, but whether we would willingly give the same power to our worst political enemy. If the answer is no, we have discovered why constitutional limits matter.
Tolkien understood this at the level of myth. The Fellowship does not march into Mordor to capture the Ring and install a better Dark Lord. Its mission is to destroy the instrument of domination itself, even though doing so means surrendering a weapon that might conceivably defeat the enemy. That is a remarkable conclusion for a heroic epic because victory comes through refusing supreme power.
Perhaps that is why The Lord of the Rings continues to speak so powerfully to political questions Tolkien never lived to see. Governments have vastly greater technological capacities than anything available in his lifetime. Artificial intelligence, biometric identification, digital currencies, ubiquitous cameras and immense databases promise efficiencies that earlier administrators could scarcely imagine. Every one of those technologies may have legitimate uses, but every one also increases somebody's capacity to make his will effective over somebody else.
The question Tolkien leaves us is therefore not whether power should ever be exercised, because civilisation could not exist without authority. The question is whether we remain sufficiently suspicious of concentrated power to build limits around it before discovering what it does to those who possess it. The Ring's inscription promises rule, discovery, coercion and binding. It is the fantasy of perfect political administration reduced to a piece of jewellery.
The wisest people in Middle-earth do not fight over who deserves to wear it; they agree that nobody should. That may be Tolkien's most important political lesson. The danger is not merely that evil people seek power, because we already know that. The greater danger is that good people seek enormous power for good reasons, acquire it, and only afterwards discover that the Ring has been wearing them.