Alberto Mingardi discusses Tolkien v. Power:
Hardcore environmentalists have tried to enlist Mr. Tolkien among them, focusing on Tolkien’s candid love for nature, for example. But if loving nature necessarily implies you are an environmentalist, people like Ludwig von Mises should also have been very sympathetic toward the Green movement. Indeed, as Justin Raimondo points out, his point wasn’t to bash industry or capitalism; it was to illustrate that evil is expansionist and projects itself even on the landscape. Hence bad environmental aesthetics are a reflection of bad rulers, which is to say, the use of power.And here we have the correct understanding of the theme of the novel: it is about the evils of power. More precisely, the book aligns itself against power–not “economic power” or “social power”, but specifically political power. This is also the central theme of the classical liberal political tradition.
This has been explained in various occasions by Tolkien himself:
“You can make the Ring into an allegory of our own time, if you like: and allegory of the inevitable fate that waits for all attempts to defeat evil power by power” (The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, 1995, p. 121.)“Power is an ominous and sinister word in all these tales” (p. 152.)
“The story is cast in terms of a good side, and a bad side, beauty against ruthless ugliness, tyranny against kingship, moderated freedom with consent against compulsion that has long lost any object save mere power, and so on” (pp. 178-179.)
“In my story Sauron represents as near an approach to the wholly evil will as is possible. He had gone the way of all tyrants: beginning well, at least on the level that while desiring to order all things according to his own wisdom he still at first considered the (economic) well-being of other inhabitants of Earth. But he went further than human tyrants in pride and the lust for domination, being in origin an immortal (angelic) spirit” (p. 243.)
“Of course my story is not an allegory of Atomic power, but of Power (exerted for domination)” (p. 246.)
So, we can say The Lord of the Rings fictionalize Edmund Burke’s motto: “In vain you tell me that Artificial Government is good, but that I fall out only with the Abuse. The Thing, the Thing itself is the Abuse!” That’s what Tolkien is trying to convey and dramatize in a novel over 600,000 words long.