Middle-earth and the Return of the Common Good: J.R.R. Tolkien and Political Philosophy by Joshua Hren (review)

Much has been written about the religious themes that undergird J.R.R. Tolkien's subcreative vision in Middle-earth, but less attention has been given to the political themes that Joshua Hren argues are just as important to understanding the world that Tolkien discovered. In his work, Middle-earth and the Return of the Common Good: J.R.R. Tolkien and Political Philosophy, Hren places Tolkien in conversation with political theorists such as Plato, Hobbes, Hegel, Sombart, Adorno, Voegelin, Foucault, and others before concluding that the best way to explain Tolkien's political vision is to see "political things as intractably bound to a Thomistic understanding of the common good" (23).

Following this introductory thesis statement, Hren's work consists of five body chapters, each emphasizing the shortcomings of differing political readings of Tolkien before settling on the Thomistic vision as superior. The first chapter compares Tolkien's Frodo to Hegel's world-historical individual. This individual is on earth for one purpose: driving history forward without regard for his own well-being, happiness, or even ultimate satisfaction. Frodo, the humble hobbit who changes the world, serves as a corrective to this vision by, despite being unable to find ultimate contentment in the Shire, finding peace and escaping the Primary World in the Undying Lands. The second chapter finds Tolkien's Númenor compared to Plato's Atlantis and the evil Nazi conception of the Nordic Atlantis as a way of understanding the political relationship between mythology and history. Hren points out that

political projects that overreach in their quest for immortality conclude with a cult of death characterized by human sacrifice disturbingly reminiscent of the Nazi Reich. And yet, if he resists the temptation of permanent Númenorean political splendor, through eucatastrophe, a remnant remains—a remnant that fosters resistance to the regimes that unfold in the sinister, shifting shapes of Becoming, even as they proclaim mythical ties to purity and a permanence of Being.

(63)

In the third chapter, Hren considers the theory that Bilbo Baggins is a "bourgeois burglar" and explores Sombart's various forms of acquisition (force, magic, scheming) in the legendarium, specifically The Hobbit. Various economic relationships are explored as well such as contracts, exchange, and gift-giving, some of which can be good and some of which can be evil.

After this exploration of these more general concepts, the trajectory of Hren's analysis swings towards the problems associated with our Mordorlike, Hobbesian technocracy in the penultimate chapter before coming to the ultimate conclusion that a Thomistic understanding of the common good is the best way to understand Tolkien's political vision. The common good returns through the king, not the modern tyrant. Frodo's pity toward Sméagol and, to a lesser degree, Sam's pity, who was faced with opportunities to kill Sméagol but held back, is ultimately used as an instrument of the unnamed and rarely talked about higher power in Middle-earth to help Frodo destroy the Ring. Hren writes, "In Tolkien's interpretation of his own work, he gives us a hobbit who gains misericordia from God for showing misericordia toward Gollum" (150). Through this personal, specific good, the greater common good emerges allowing the true king Aragorn to reign on the throne, administering distributive justice and allowing for freedom. In conclusion, Hren states, "Middle-earth is saved not merely through the lone quest of Frodo, or by Aragorn descending in some single-handed deus ex machina, but through the commitment of innumerable characters—kings and seemingly insignificant hobbits, among others—to the common good" (151). Tolkien's work finds its completion in a world that is not perfect but is stable, peaceful, and free; it is a picture of the world that truly embraces the common good. An epilogue follows in which Hren urges the...