Lord Acton: life, ideas and books

Life

John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton was born in Naples in 1834 into a Catholic family of English and German descent. He sat in the House of Commons for Carlow from 1859 to 1865 and for Bridgnorth from 1865 to 1866, edited the Catholic journal The Rambler from 1859 and was created Baron Acton in 1869. He was made a lord-in-waiting in 1892 and, in 1895, Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, a chair he held until his death in 1902.

He opposed the proclamation of papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council in 1870, and he was knighted in 1897. He planned the Cambridge Modern History but did not live to complete it, and his library of about 60,000 volumes went to Cambridge after his death.

Ideas

Acton regarded liberty as the highest political good and the central theme of history, and he held that freedom is secured by limiting power. His best-known sentence comes from an 1887 letter: power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. He applied it with an even hand, refusing to excuse the abuses of popes, kings or democratic majorities, and he insisted that historians judge the great by the same moral standard as the obscure.

He admired federal systems, such as the American one, that divide authority, and he supported Irish Home Rule. He saw the American Civil War and the development of the United States as a test of whether liberty could be preserved in a large republic.

Major works

• The Civil War in America (lecture, 1866).
• The History of Freedom in Antiquity and The History of Freedom in Christianity (addresses, 1877).
• A Lecture on the Study of History (1895).
• Lectures on Modern History (1906, published after his death).
• The History of Freedom and Other Essays (1907, published after his death).

Why conservatives read him

Acton's most famous line is the shortest argument for the separation of powers, and it is the usual epigraph for conservative and libertarian books on limited government. His thought links Montesquieu and the American framers, James Madison among them, to later writers on the dangers of concentrated authority. His distrust of the centralising state was shared by Alexis de Tocqueville.

Acton was a liberal in his own day and sat with Gladstone's party, and much of his politics would be classified as liberal now, but his respect for religion, for historical continuity and for the moral limits on power make him a favourite of conservatives. The Acton Institute, a Michigan think tank, takes his name. Readers should note that he published little in his lifetime, and that most of his reputation rests on lectures, letters and essays collected after he died.