A major theme of Lord of the Rings is that power corrupts. It’s impossible to miss. The Ring represents the power to subjugate, conquer, and destroy. Sauron made it for that purpose. It has a magical aura that causes people who stay near it for long to want to possess and use it. It controls people more than they control it. Only Sauron can fully control the Ring.
Hobbits vs. authoritarianism
However, it doesn’t influence everyone equally. Hobbits are, with one major exception, less susceptible. Sam shows little interest in it, taking it only when he has to and returning it to Frodo with relative ease. It’s a huge burden on Frodo, but he doesn’t succumb to it until he reaches Mount Doom and faces the decision to destroy it. Merry and Pippin have no interest in acquiring it.
Gollum (Sméagol) is the major exception. He’s the only character who commits murder to get the Ring within seconds of his first sight of it. We’re told he’s a hobbit or at least belongs to a species very closely related to hobbits. However, we don’t know much about his background or the culture he lived in.
This suggests it’s not a hereditary trait of hobbits, but rather something cultural, that lets them resist it. We should look at the Shire, which is nearly a libertarian utopia. The government is minimal, and its inhabitants aren’t interested in gaining power over each other. It’s built on cooperation, not command. On his return to the Shire, Sam says, “If I hear not allowed much oftener, I’m going to get angry.” Sméagol could have grown up in a completely different culture from the Shire.
Having little interest in power, hobbits don’t have much use for the Ring. Bilbo finds it hard to give up, but it never occurs to him to use it to become Lord of the Shire. Frodo never puts it on to use its power, He puts it on only under some outside pressure, to escape imminent danger, or once perhaps by the Ring’s own action.
How the Ring affects people
Virtue isn’t a sure defense against it. Gandalf is afraid to touch it, and he’s a Maia. Likewise, Galadriel desires it but declines when Frodo offers it. Sam tells her, “I wish you’d take his Ring. You’d put things to rights. You’d stop them digging up the gaffer and turning him adrift. You’d make some folk pay for their dirty work.”
She answers, “I would. That is how it would begin. But it would not stop with that, alas!”
That statement is central. You can’t acquire power over others to do just one thing. Once you have it and exercise it, you acquire more enemies. They object to what you’re doing, they want to grab the power from you, or they’re an obstacle to your grand plan. To keep your power, you have to use it more and more.
Boromir is especially susceptible. He’s heir to the stewardship of Gondor, and he’s a warrior who wants to perform glorious deeds. He literally likes to blow his own horn. To him the Ring is a weapon to use against Sauron. This leads him to Sauron-like behavior, trying to acquire it by force. The Ring’s magical influence is partially responsible; he comes to his senses when he’s no longer near it. However, his character makes it easier for the Ring to work on him.
His brother Faramir is a different kind of person, not interested in power. He resists the opportunity to seize the Ring from Frodo and knows that taking it would lead to a bad outcome. (I’m not going to comment here on why Peter Jackson degraded his character.)
The Ring doesn’t simply use mind-control magic to make people want it; it plays on what people already want. Saruman turns to deception, kidnapping, and brute force to acquire it, though he never comes near it. Fear of Sauron’s power is enough to make him want to be another Sauron, or failing that a vassal of Sauron’s.
Sauron is totally focused on power, and this becomes his blind spot. He can’t imagine that anyone is working to destroy the Ring. Gandalf says, “He is in great fear, not knowing what mighty one may suddenly appear, wielding the Ring, and assailing him with war, seeking to cast him down and take his place. That we should wish to cast him down and have no one in his place is not a thought that occurs to his mind.” This endears Tolkien to libertarians; Frodo’s quest isn’t one to get power into the “right” hands but to destroy power.
Anarcho-monarchy
However, there’s another side of Tolkien politically. Much of the book is about having power in the right hands, specifically Aragorn’s. Aragorn is oddly unaffected by the Ring’s influence. In Bree, he points out that he could take it immediately if he wanted to. While Tolkien showed great distrust of power, Lord of the Rings shows his love of royalty as well.
It’s a strange combination, which some have called “anarcho-monarchist.” In a letter to his son Christopher, he wrote, “My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning the abolition of control and not whiskered men with bombs) — or to ‘unconstitutional’ monarchy.”
Tolkien doesn’t explain how laws are made and armies financed in Rohan and Gondor, so it isn’t clear what he means, at least from LOTR alone. David B. Hart has a very interesting article exploring his political philosophy. He further quotes Tolkien: “Grant me a king whose chief interest in life is stamps, railways, or race-horses; and who has the power to sack his Vizier (or whatever you dare call him) if he does not like the cut of his trousers.” He’s talking with a king with very limited power.
But I’d have to throw Galadriel’s words back at him: “That is how it would begin. But it would not stop with that, alas!” He’s talking about good monarchs, such as Aragorn and Théoden, as opposed to tyrants like Sauron and the Witch-King of Angmar. But even if they stay good, nothing ensures that their successors will. Tolkien’s attitude may have been influenced more by legends such as Arthur and Beowulf than by any hard thinking about political systems. Hart describes Tolkien’s leanings this way: “The ideal king would be rather like the king in chess: the most useless piece on the board, which occupies its square simply to prevent any other piece from doing so, but which is somehow still the whole game. There is something positively sacramental about its strategic impotence.”
Systems of government
That tells us nothing about how to govern. We learn little about how Gondor or Rohan is governed. Theoden and Aragorn are more than chess kings; they command armies. We don’t see much of the normal peacetime affairs of those countries. There must be occasional criminals, as well as contractual disputes. That requires something like police and courts. In the Shire, the shiriffs act as police, but I don’t know of any mention of courts or arbitration. There’s a mayor, but “almost his only duty was to preside at banquets.”
Saruman finds it easy to take over, and perhaps that’s an admission that the system has problems. On the other hand, he works within the system, with Lotho Sackville-Baggins as his stooge, so perhaps nothing would have helped. The hobbits are quick to overthrow their tyrants once they have effective leadership.
Tolkien disliked industrialization. It’s been suggested he was sympathetic to “distributism,” which holds that property should be privately owned but not concentrated in large enterprises. He may have seen such an arrangement, rather than any political system, as the best bulwark against power. Its disadvantage is that it requires more labor while producing less output.
In the end, Tolkien despised coercive power and tyranny, but his ideas about how to build a society that would stay free of it were vague. That’s understandable; he was a linguist and a writer of great fiction, not a political philosopher.