The scouring of the Shire and unconstitutionalism

Last week YouTuber Feral Historian posted an excellent short reflection on the often-overlooked final conflict in The Lord of the Rings: the Scouring of the Shire. After a brief summary of the ways Frodo and company find the Shire changed upon their return and what they do about it—bold activity rather than passivity being one of the marks left upon them by their journeys—Feral Historian unpacks just what is so devilish about Saruman’s achievements there.

It’s an excellent video with lots of good asides—about bureaucracy, the depersonalization of authority, a bit about historiography, and even the fundamental error of reading racialist meanings into Tolkien’s work—so by all means watch it. It’s well worth your eleven minutes. I want to focus on one important detail.

Feral Historian quotes a famous letter from Tolkien to his son Christopher (Letter 52 in the original edition of The Letters of JRR Tolkien, also quoted in full here), written in November 1943 as Christopher trained at an RAF based:

My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs)—or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy.

In light of Feral Historian’s analysis, Tolkien’s phrase “‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy” brought to mind Joseph de Maistre’s 1809 Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions.

This is a short but dense work of political philosophy, but one of the chief arguments of the Essay is that the only authentic constitutional orders arise organically from a people’s way of life, and that the act of writing the laws down destroys it. Written constitutions lose their authenticity immediately, not, as Rousseau would argue, by being left behind by the march of generations, but by replacing organic and proven institutions with artificial constructions that can be manipulated by the unscrupulous,* and naturally generate more and more “law,” eventually smothering the people. On this point, the Essay is an elaboration of Tacitus’s observation, in a sweeping account of the history of law and its perversion, “Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges”—the more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. Indisputable.

Let the reader understand.

The Essay was a great challenge to me when I first read it but I think de Maistre is basically correct.** The question is what to do about it—if it is even possible to do anything about it.

As Feral Historian notes near the end of his video, Tolkien’s monarchism is already foreign to American thinking. Devolution and decentralization to the point of actual local self-governance—the kind Saruman sought to vandalize—are already something neither side in bipartisan politics would support since it would mean relinquishing even the possibility of “bossing other men,” as Tolkien puts it elsewhere in his letter. Going as far as de Maistre by stripping written constitutions of the sacred mythology built up around them in favor of “unconstitutionalism”—tradition, courtesy, and custom—would take us from fiction to fantasy.

But one can hope, perhaps.

Watch Feral Historian’s video, and take some time to explore his back catalog. Here’s a bit more about de Maistre and his context. You can read de Maistre’s Essay in its entirety in an 1847 translation here and here. It’s short and to the point and worth reading, even if only to argue about it.

* Hamilton makes a similar argument in Federalist 84, in which he asserts that a clearly elucidated bill of rights would be grist to the mill of legal shenanigans. Naturally I suspect Hamilton of mendacity, but the basic point is sound.

** I have a parable illustrating the basic argument in my head that, ironically, I need to get written down one of these days.