Tolkien: Christian Anarchist and Distributist
Patrick’s post at Popehat, and his link to an essay in which old school “Swords and Sorcery” author Michael Moorcock, who appears to both share my political / economic beliefs and be a total douchebag, compared Tolkien to Adolf Hitler, prompted me by way of a little Googling to remind myself that Tolkien also shared my political / economic beliefs.
A “distributist” is basically a leftist. (See this essay arguing that Tolkien included in LOTR distributist solutions to problems associated with modernity.) A leftist is not a “socialist,” at least not as that word was understood by Tolkien (my quibble with Patrick over the meaning of the word “socialist” might have been better directed at his presumed interpretation of Moorcock’s use of the word “left”), who wrote in a letter:
I am not a “socialist” in any sense – being averse to “planning” (as must be plain) most of all because the “planners,” when they acquire power, become so bad…
He also wrote, in a letter to his son Christopher:
My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs)…