Lord Acton

English historian and moralist

• Born: January 10, 1834
• Birthplace: Naples (now in Italy)
• Died: June 19, 1902
• Place of death: Tegernsee, Bavaria, Germany

Although he never finished his planned monumental “History of Liberty,” Acton was one of the most learned scholars and probing intellects of his time. Although a devout Roman Catholic, he was for much of his life at odds with the church hierarchy because of its authoritarian tendencies. He was first and foremost a moralist, and his most passionate commitment was to the defense of individual freedom.

Early Life

John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, or Lord Acton as he was known after his elevation to the peerage in 1869, was born in southern Italy. He was the only child of Sir Ferdinand Richard Edward Acton, seventh baronet, and the former Marie Louise Pelline de Dalberg. The Actons were an old Shropshire family, the first baronet having received his title (conferred in 1643) in reward for his loyalty to Charles I. Acton’s paternal grandfather had been prime minister of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies; his mother belonged to one of Germany’s oldest noble families. His family heritage—on both sides—was staunchly Roman Catholic. Acton attended the Roman Catholic St. Mary’s School at Oscott, near Oxford, and then studied under a private tutor.

The turning point in Acton’s intellectual development was his study, from 1850 to 1858, with Johann Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger of the University of Munich, the leading Roman Catholic theologian and church historian of the time. The close ties that were forged between the two men had a decisive influence in shaping Acton’s most salient values. Döllinger was a champion of the Rankean scientific approach to the study of history, based upon exacting research into the primary sources. He simultaneously aspired to make Roman Catholicism intellectually and theologically respectable by opening the Church to modern philosophical and scientific thought. Most important, Döllinger taught that Christian dogma was not fixed but underwent change and development. The test of any doctrine thus lay in historical evidence. The revolutionary implications of this position first became apparent when Döllinger protested the 1854 proclamation of the Immaculate Conception of Mary because of its lack of historical status.

Life’s Work

Acton’s social position gave him the opportunity to travel widely and provided him with access to the leading political and intellectual figures in England and on the Continent. An avid book collector, he built up a personal library of approximately fifty-nine thousand volumes that would, after his death, become part of the University of Cambridge collection. He was a prodigious reader, reputed to read, annotate, and memorize an average of two volumes per day. Fluent in English, German, French, and Italian, he was a brilliant conversationalist. “If the gods granted me the privilege of recalling to life for half an hour’s conversation some of the great men of the past I have had the good fortune to know,” politician and historian John Morley remarked, “I should say Acton.”

Acton’s father died when the younger Acton was three, and Acton succeeded to the title as the eighth baronet. His mother in 1840 married Granville George Leveson-Gower (who would become the second earl of Granville), a power in the British Liberal Party. His stepfather arranged for Acton’s election to the House of Commons in 1859, but he was not temperamentally cut out for the rough-and-tumble of politics and remained during his six years in the Commons an unimportant backbencher. His personal inclinations and talents lay in journalism and scholarship. In 1858, he became part-owner and an editor of the “liberal” Roman Catholic monthly, the Rambler, which in 1862 was converted into a quarterly under the name Home and Foreign Review. After worsening conflict with the church hierarchy led to its termination in 1864, Acton became associated with two other short-lived journals of liberal Catholic opinion—the weekly Chronicle (1867-1868) and the quarterly North British Review (1869-1872).

Acton’s difficulties with the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy grew out of his hostility to its ultramontanism. In its narrower meaning, ultramontanism stood for the centralization of power within the Church in the papacy. More broadly, the ultramontanist position—most explicitly summarized by Pope Pius IX in the Syllabus Errorum appended to his 1864 encyclical Quanta Cura —repudiated “progress, Liberalism, and modern civilization.” Among the heresies condemned in the Syllabus Errorum were separation of church and state, freedom of worship, and free intellectual inquiry in science, philosophy, and history. On the opposite side, Acton affirmed that faith could be reconciled with reason and science.

Second, Acton called for a free church in a free state. Relying upon the force of the state would inevitably subordinate the Church to mere political expediency; alternately, an absolutist state could not tolerate an independent Church. Most important, Acton regarded individual liberty not as the antithesis of Christianity but as its product. In contrast with the theocracy of the Jews and the ancient Greek states, the Christian distinction between what was due to God and what was due to Caesar introduced the new conception of the individual conscience immune from political interference. When ultramontanists glorified the Inquisition, Acton replied that murder was no less murder because it was sanctioned by the pope. He even published in 1869 a painstakingly researched article, “The Massacre of St. Bartholomew,” showing papal complicity in the bloody 1572 attack upon the Huguenots.

The high point of Acton’s conflict with the church hierarchy came over the doctrine of papal infallibility that Pius IX pushed through a tightly managed general council in 1870. Acton was in Rome during the meeting of the council, working behind the scenes as an adviser to the minority of prelates opposed to the promulgation of the doctrine. He even made an unsuccessful attempt to organize a protest from all the major European powers. In the aftermath of the council, he publicly marshaled the historical evidence in support of the anti-infallibilist position. His old mentor Döllinger was excommunicated because of his refusal to accept the new doctrine.

For a time, it appeared that Acton would suffer the same fate. Such action was not taken, however, partly because Acton was a layman rather than a priest as was Döllinger, partly because of the political difficulties that his excommunication would have raised for the Church in England, and partly because of Acton’s tactfulness in keeping his distance from Rome while still avoiding open defiance. Shrinking from a break with the Church, Acton adopted the face-saving formula “I have yielded obedience.” He squared this acquiescence with his conscience by personally adopting a minimalist interpretation of the doctrine’s meaning. Regarding the Church as a holy body transcending the shortcomings of its official leaders, he took refuge in his faith that time—or what he termed “God’s providence in His government of the Church”—would undo the damage. While upholding the right of others to disbelieve, he never doubted that membership in the Church was the necessary means for his own personal salvation.

Acton appears to have begun working upon what he envisaged as his masterwork, the “History of Liberty,” during the 1870’s. Although rather sarcastically described as “the greatest book that never was written,” its broad outlines can be reconstructed from his essays and manuscript notes. Acton’s starting point was his definition of liberty as the freedom of the individual to follow the dictates of his conscience. Liberty, in turn, depended upon the existence of the rule of law; its antithesis was the exercise of arbitrary power untrammeled by any limitation. Although Acton found glimmerings of that conception in antiquity, despotism was the norm: “In religion, morality, and politics there was only one legislator and one authority.”

The Middle Ages represented a major advance in the growth of liberty. One reason was its corporatist social organization, whereby each class and interest had defined rights and privileges. Even more important was the belief in the existence of a higher law to which temporal rulers were subject and which the Church in theory, if not always in practice, was charged with upholding. The Renaissance, however, saw the emergence of the absolute state that accepted no law outside itself and followed the Machiavellian principle that the end justified the means. After first paying lip service to liberty, the Protestant reformers ended up in a marriage of convenience with royal absolutism. Meanwhile, the Roman Catholic Church copied the Protestant enemy by joining in an alliance with monarchical power that ended in the monarchies’ subjection to church power.

The liberating promise of the English revolution of the seventeenth century was successfully blunted. The result of the 1688 settlement was simply to replace the divine right of kings with the divine right of property. The American Revolution was for Acton the epochal turning point in modern history. He eulogized the revolutionaries’ philosophy of natural rights and their denial of the legitimacy of all authority not derived from the people, but what he most admired was how the framers of the U.S. Constitution had built into their plan of government a set of checks and balances to prevent unrestrained majority rule. By contrast, the disastrous flaw in the French Revolution was its acceptance of a doctrine of unlimited popular sovereignty that substituted for monarchical absolutism the despotism of the majority. The result was the most dangerous threat to liberty yet:

The true democratic principle, that none shall have power over the people, is taken to mean that none shall be able to restrain or to elude its power. The true democratic principle, that the people shall not be made to do what it does not like, is taken to mean that it shall never be required to tolerate what it does not like. The true democratic principle, that every person’s free will shall be as unfettered as possible, is taken to mean the free will of the collective people shall be fettered in nothing.

Aggravating the situation was the accompanying rise of nationalism. Domestically, nationalism fostered a centralization of authority that swept away all intermediate institutions between the isolated individual and the omnipotent state; internationally, nationalism meant rule by force of the strong over the weak. Acton summed up his indictment in an epigram: “The nations aim at power, and the world at freedom.”

Acton’s hero among contemporary political leaders was British Liberal Party leader William Ewart Gladstone . He was attracted partly by Gladstone’s own tendency to define issues in moral terms, even more by what he saw as Gladstone’s commitment to striking a balance between democracy and liberty. Although the propertied minority had rights that must be respected, the majority simultaneously had a right to social legislation that would improve the lot of the masses. Gladstone’s “Little Englandism,” his opposition to the imperialism of the national state run amok, was even more attractive. Deep ties of affection and mutual respect joined the two men.

Gladstone submitted for Acton’s criticism nearly everything he wrote. Acton, in turn, influenced Gladstone in his politics—most important, his espousal of disestablishment of the Irish (Anglican) church and Irish home rule. Gladstone was responsible for Acton’s elevation to the peerage in 1869 as Baron Acton of Aldenham, his election as honorary Fellow of All Souls, Oxford, in 1891, and his appointment as lord-in-waiting to Queen Victoria in 1892. Acton had been one of the founders of the English Historical Review in 1886, himself contributing to the first issue an impressively learned survey of nineteenth century German historians and philosophers of history. As early as 1872, the University of Munich awarded him an honorary doctorate of philosophy. Cambridge followed with an honorary LL.D. in 1888; Oxford, with an honorary D.C.L. the year after. In 1895, Acton was named Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. Along with the professorship came election as an honorary Fellow of Trinity College.

Acton’s six years at Cambridge were probably the happiest of his life. Although he lectured on the French Revolution for the historical tripos, the greater part of his energy was devoted to the editorship of the Cambridge Modern History (1899-1912). Although only the first volume and half of the second were in type at his death, he was largely responsible for the planning of the full twelve volumes and the selection of most of the individual contributors.

The burden of handling the manifold details of so large an undertaking badly strained Acton’s already poor health. In 1901, he suffered a stroke that forced him to leave Cambridge. He died on June 19, 1902, at a villa owned by his wife’s family at Tegernsee in Bavaria. He was survived by his wife, Countess Maria von Arco-Valley (whom he had married in 1865), and four children—one son and three daughters.

Acton’s publication during his lifetime consisted mostly of periodical contributions and reprinted lectures. After his death, however, his more important writings were collected in four volumes edited by John N. Figgis and Reginald V. Laurence: Lectures on Modern History (1906), The History of Freedom and Other Essays (1907), Historical Essays and Studies (1908), and Lectures on the French Revolution (1910). The years since World War II have witnessed a resurgence of interest in Acton’s work, resulting in the appearance of such new anthologies as Essays on Freedom and Power (1948; edited by Gertrude Himmelfarb), Essays on Church and State (1952; edited by Douglas Woodruff), Essays in the Liberal Interpretation of History (1967; edited by William H. McNeill), and Lord Acton on Papal Power (1973; edited by H. A. MacDougall).

Significance

Lord Acton’s strength as a historian lay in his painstaking research in and analysis of the primary sources. However, his high scholarly standards were simultaneously a weakness. He could not bring himself to stop until he had explored everything remotely pertaining to the subject. His papers in the Cambridge University Library are filled with pages of notes for projects that were never finished. Even his planned opening chapter for the first volume of the Cambridge Modern History, “The Legacy of the Middle Ages,” was left in too fragmentary shape for inclusion. This weakness was aggravated by the breadth of his interests, which kept him from focusing his energies upon any single period or topic. Moreover, he was not an outstanding literary stylist.

Acton’s importance as a historian lies in his broader philosophy of history. For Acton, ideas were the forces that moved the world. Therein lay the source of his conception of the historian’s role. The historian’s task was not the Rankean ideal of the impartial chronicler of what had actually happened. Even worse was the moral relativism that explained away—even excused—wrongdoing in terms of the values of the time. The historian’s duty to the present and to the future was to judge the past by the canons of eternal justice. His judgment that murder is still murder no matter what its ostensible noble justification has a special resonance for the late twentieth century. “If we lower our standard in History,” he admonished in his inaugural lecture as Regius Professor, “we cannot uphold it in Church or State.”

Part of the reason for the renewed interest in Acton is his championship of what is now called “political pluralism”—his argument that the preservation of individual liberty depends upon the widest possible dispersion of power. Underlying his commitment to pluralism was his awareness of the corruptibility of human nature. “Most assuredly, now as heretofore,” he explained to a friend, “the Men of the Time are, in most cases, unprincipled, and act from motives of interest, of passion, of prejudice, cherished and unchecked, of selfish hope or unworthy fear.” The most dangerous temptation to which humans succumbed was ambition for power. In that recognition, Acton belonged more to the present age than to his own. Only those generations that have witnessed the horrors of the twentieth century can fully appreciate his prophetic warning:

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.… The inflexible authority of the moral code is, to me, the secret of the authority, the dignity, the utility of history. If we may debase the currency for the sake of genius, or success or rank, or reputation, we may debase it for the sake of a man’s influence, of his religion, of his party, of the good cause which prospers by his credit and suffers by his disgrace. Then history ceases to be a science, an arbiter of controversy, a guide of the wanderer.… It serves where it ought to reign; and it serves the worst cause better than the purest.

Bibliography

Altholz, Josef L. The Liberal Catholic Movement in England: “The Rambler” and Its Contributors, 1848-1864. London: Burns and Oates, 1962. An excellent account of the controversy over ultramontanism in England.

Butterfield, Herbert. Lord Acton. London: G. Philip, 1948. A brief, though astute, sketch of Acton’s intellectual development.

Chadwick, Owen. Acton and History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. An edited collection of essays by a noted Acton scholar. Examines Acton’s ideas and his contributions to the study of history.

Fasnacht, George E. Acton’s Political Philosophy. London: Hollis and Carter, 1952. A detailed examination of Acton as a political theorist.

Hill, Roland. Lord Acton. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000. Comprehensive biography, placing Acton within the context of Catholic politics in Great Britain. Includes a foreword by Owen Chadwick, a leading authority on Acton.

Himmelfarb, Gertrude. Lord Acton: A Study in Conscience and Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952. An insightful and perceptive intellectual biography that did much to stimulate renewed interest in Acton.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Victorian Minds. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968. Although the chapter on Acton basically summarizes Himmelfarb’s 1952 study, the volume’s broader scope clarifies Acton’s place within the spectrum of Victorian thought.

Schuettinger, Robert L. Lord Acton: Historian of Liberty. LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1976. Includes more personal details, but thinner analysis, than Himmelfarb’s works.