[Preface to Essays on Freedom and Power (1948) by Lord Acton]
Those who read Acton today will treble Lord Morley’s praise of him and affirm that they would undertake to find on every page of Acton at the very least one pregnant, pithy, luminous, suggestive saying. For Acton’s is the splendid voice of charity and informed wisdom heard from above the merciless and warring extremists of a sorely perplexed time. His reputation as a master historian, elevated as a mountain of constancy above the flat wastelands, attests that the greatness of a soul is measurable by the duration — the undefeatable vitality — of its moral force.
To what is the perennial appeal of Acton due? Above all, to Acton’s moral integrity. Firm, steady, dispassionate, self-controlled, unbelievably erudite, he does not yield his ethical principles one iota. In devotion to the supremacy of the Sermon on the Mount, he said “no surrender” to iniquity. His studies command a persistent, ever-recurring esteem for his own precious, sacrificial devotion to truth. Though men may be errant, they are brought back again to Acton’s vindication of the supreme human truths as they shine forth from the course of history: religion, veracity, justice, the hatred of lies and cruelty.
Acton was no mystic, though like all men his mind reposed upon a faith. He was an intellectual who wrote of men’s gravest concerns, earnestly and scrupulously, with brilliant illumination, following the discoverable evidence. He was a powerful, indefatigable explorer of human nature and human events, rich in ideas, deep in thought, highly practiced in reflection. He believed in the capacity and the right of man’s intellect to investigate and to discriminate between good and evil, not that man’s mind must suffer defeat. For Acton, historical exploration was the true demonstration and sovereign guidance of private and public conscience.
I compute that he read some 20,000 books. What appears here is a representative portion of what he wrote or spoke on the path to what he never succeeded in writing, a History of Liberty. Greater integrity hath no man than this, that he abandoneth his unwritten book when intellect hath declared the materials imperfect.
In time of affliction it becomes compulsive in mankind to rake over the ashes to identify at what point — virtue, character, fate, knowledge or environment — the course might have been differently ordered. Acton is an oracle today because he is a “universal” historian, that is to say, his range is immense in time and terrestrial area. He is sophisticated enough to include the making of history, as he said, by events “on the political backstairs.” Acton’s history is a steady majestic voyage of the mind and soul in a vast and comprehensible path and design, not merely mundane, concrete. It has spiritual meaning: gushes lessons on the nature, capacities, and destiny of man, the relationship of individual conscience to the movement of society and of the rights of man to the power of government. It promises to enable us to make political science and political judgments effective. The standing attraction of this kind of history is its assured offer of something like the full formula of human nature in politics.
If the design were something horrible, Acton’s history might still be left in its little black boxes used by the author as his storehouse of notes. Acton’s history vindicates human freedom, which he sets above any other human interest.
“Liberty,” says Acton, “is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.”
Now everybody is a devotee of freedom — for what particular good is another matter. And whether one can bestow it on all, without denying a proportion of it to each, is also another matter, as we shall see. But the prayer to liberty must find eager admirers in an age chastised by total war, diabolically ingenious torture, thorny economic and social perplexities; in an age in which a developing democratic conscience is at odds with almighty economic entrepreneurs and hereditary vested interests, of conscious extensive state economic planning, and of intransigent, despotic and murderous politicians of extreme Left and Right, who have contemptuously discarded charity and banished truth, virtue and mercy.
Firm, steady, dispassionate, self-controlled, unbelievably erudite, Acton does not yield his ethical principles one iota.Arnold J. Toynbee’s A Study of History is not formally a history of liberty; but, in so far as it is a significant history of civilizations, it is bound to be a valuable history of liberty. It is just possible that Acton did not so succeed because he became prophetic enough to realize that success meant failure. Toynbee’s success (which he did not purpose) consists in almost completely revealing the gaps in a full and final account of man in society; and not only this but the dreadful inevitability of gaps, the fatality of the necessary escape of facts and understanding that the historian tries to domesticate. The pattern the historian discovers is seen to be an approximation, after all. Acton must have looked back on the essays of his earlier days — for example, the two on the “civil war” in the United States — and surely have learned that if man can err on a contemporary event of world magnitude, how hesitant must a man of conscience (which Acton was above all else) be about events of a remoter past?
People seek a broad sweeping historical induction that shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth — wide in its compass, profound in its insight, and utterly convincing in its finish and definition — but such revelation cannot be won once and for all at any one time by a single man, or a sect, school, church or nation, or even by an international band of scholars. Acton deplores the imperfection of historical materials. His efforts furnish a grand practical dual lesson in history: what we must add to historical induction to reach valid social conclusions, and with what a qualifying spirit the historians’ conclusions must be read if their account of human nature is to be helpful to those who are governed and those who govern. How foolish it would be not to listen to so earnest, learned and wise a man, speaking on the grandest of human concerns in grave and noble accents, simply because it is given to no man to be capable of uttering any more than a warning!
However scrupulous Acton was to assimilate and write all his facts, as Ranke desired — letting them speak for themselves without personal interference — his conception of the role of history is provocative. His rule was
The inflexible integrity 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 disgrace. Then History ceases to be a science, an arbiter of controversy, a guide of the wanderer, the upholder of that moral standard which the powers of the earth, and religion itself, tend constantly to depress.
Whoever holds the view that he is a moral censor must begin with a principle of censure; and we, who read to learn, can be sure rather of his iterated principle than confident that we have been told all. When Acton declares that “all history is the true demonstration of religion,” or postulates that “the full exposition of truth is the great object for which the existence of mankind is prolonged on earth,” or that “liberty is the highest political end,” we are so dazzled that we suspect that many phenomena may still lurk unexamined in the shadow. He has judged well for us, and yet has not brought into our own court the alternatives, the facts presented to him. Our judgment is usurped, and our right of moral choice annexed. When history is a tool of morality, it can enlighten us as much as the moralist can, but no more; for we are likely to end the study of history exactly where we began, except that immorality (with Acton) has illustrations to adorn the tale, and morality shines in picturesque raiment.
Acton believed in the capacity and the right of man’s intellect to investigate and to discriminate between good and evil.Acton had a very resolute standard of judgment, and a standard kills some of life. Acton’s standard was less clear-cut and monistic than he himself thought proper. In the actual blended plurality of his own values against his own will and logic, there is a lesson he never consciously used about the understanding of human nature in politics and society. It is that no single solitary unmixed idea has ever ruled or satisfied man, nor can it do so; all social science, like all motivation, is an affair of degree; and universal histories are not capable of revealing exact degree to us. The air of certitude imported into judgment is ill-adapted to inquiry. Acton quotes with approval from the theologian Mozeley:
A Christian is bound by his very creed to suspect evil, and cannot release himself…. He owns the doctrine of original sin; that doctrine necessarily puts him on his guard against appearances, sustains his apprehension under perplexity, and prepares him for recognizing anywhere what he knows to be everywhere.
This kind of certitude can have a very bad influence on bad men. More valuable by far are Acton’s dicta regarding the stern obligation of the historian to make out the other side’s case even better than the other side could make it out for itself. This method has to be balanced against the threat of the overfervent moral criterion.
Acton’s value to the student of history, and still more to the student of politics and society, is his perennial concern with the grand themes of power, democracy, equality, liberty, nationality, and religion. People are less interested in mere narration than in social judgment. It will be seen that all of Acton’s teaching is conditioned by, if it does not issue from, his disavowal of power.
This is most acutely encountered in two of his own sayings: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence not authority.”
And the second is “The greatest crime is Homicide. The accomplice is no better than the assassin; the theorist is worse.”
It is this that puts a limiting perimeter on his admiration for democracy, liberty, and equality, and even, it must be said, for religion, for he certainly and abundantly recorded it of his own church. He appreciates the values in the various liberties. He gladly acknowledges that they constituted human progress. He joyously applauds the movements in history that overthrew the many varieties of despotism. He welcomes the men and the doctrines that established the principles and the institutions of the triumphant liberal and representative states. But he sees also that if any single, untempered idea, should attain the exclusive dominion over the mind of man, however good it were, the power needed to establish its victory and cement its reign — thus equality, or democracy, or nationality — must limit and debase liberty. Though he did not quote Montesquieu, their minds move together: “Virtue itself hath need of limits,” for freedom and tranquillity lie in self-restraint. To demand all is to lose all by very excess.
“Acton’s history vindicates human freedom, which he sets above any other human interest.”Yet, though these are indispensable truths, they ought not to obscure the equally indispensable truth that power is beneficent. Pascal spoke concerning this, once and for all: “Without Power, Justice is unavailing.” For the kingdom of politics is of this world. And power, as the biographies of so many statesmen reveal (for example, that of Sir Thomas More), heightens sensitiveness, stimulates the imagination of purposes and expedients, generates invention, develops compassion when it places men where they confront the sorrows that government exists to assuage and the trials that must be visited on some in order that others may have a more abundant life; and power develops humility and fortitude. These are precious qualities in the service of mankind, and inseverable from power. Together they will one day enable humanity to progress, as Acton recommended, from nationalism to an embracing state that shall include the whole world.
The study of Acton in this volume, in a sympathetic and alert spirit, cannot fail to multiply the number of truly democratic citizens, or to enhance their abilities and their acknowledgment of obligation to their fellow men.
This article was originally published as the 1948 preface to Essays on Freedom and Power (1948) by Lord Acton.
