Acton, John

Biographical Sketch

Lord John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton (January 10, 1834 – June 19, 1902) was a prominent English historian. He was born an in Naples with an aristocratic Roman Catholic family pedigree and roots in Victorian England. Acton was a learned scholar and educated at the University of Munich. Also, he was an honorary professor of history at Cambridge and he was later knighted as a member of The Royal Victorian Order that was established by Queen Victoria.

Too some modern observers, Acton is paradoxical as he was an aristocrat, somewhat of a classical liberal, and a Whig. However, Acton was a man that consistently desired for the betterment of humanity through the improvement of civil society and the sustenance of ordered liberty. He was possessed of a deep reflective political philosophy and sobriety resembling that of Edmund Burke. Acton was not beholden to the realm of speculative tinkering of abstract theorists, nor did he filter his observations through the lens of egalitarian ideology. Instead, he looked to history for reflection and examples or the “lamp of experience” as Patrick Henry characterizes it. For Acton, individual liberty was preserved because it was simultaneously restrained. More importantly, in his historiography, the instrument that served to protect liberty—the State—was itself to be restrained under the rule of law. Acton first opined the now famous maxim, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Acton's approach to historiography carried a deep moral dimension. Not suprisingly, he felt the burden upon historians to render a verdict and a moral judgment on history. Historians cannot be amoral, value-neutral or non-aligned in their historical judgments. Some critics cast Acton as a reductionist for making liberty the focal point of his historiography, as the so called Whig interpretation of history does. However, many historians have a propensity for making the triumph of national power and the march of the state as a prevailing theme in their historical works. So, which focal point is really preferable in the study of history?

Acton took a profound interest in the American experiment in ordered liberty. Incidental to this interest, the constitutional history of America was of profound interest to him. John was very well studied in the letters and writings of Jefferson, Mason, Washington and Hamilton. He reviewed at length the American Commonwealth by James Bryce, which was a critical examination of the institutions of the American republic by a British observer in the 1870s. In his essay on the Political Causes of the American Revolution, Acton offers his insights and perspective on American constitutional history from the first war for independence to the bloody American civil war that unfolded in his time. Acton saw seeds of discord planted in the American republic very early on. He observed an unresolved tension between the heirs of Hamiltonian nationalists and Jeffersonian republicans. Despite, his misgivings about the American experiment that had proven barren to Acton as the United States was engulfed in fratricidal civil war, he expressed deep appreciation for the constitutional federal polity that America inspired. Though, Acton expressed sympathy for the ailing South Atlantic republicanism over the crass commercial republicanism of New England. Acton admirably explored the statesmanship of John C. Calhoun, and he particularly looked with warmth upon Calhoun's principle of the concurrent majority. Acton cited Calhoun with affection and characterized Calhoun's constitutional theory as “profound.” For Acton, the victory of the North in the American Civil War in 1865 represented the triumph of centralization, absolutism, and majoritarian nationalism over concurrent majority, federalism, states’ rights, republican self-government and the rule of law. Acton even engaged in a few exchanges with Confederate General Robert E. Lee of Virginia. The Acton-Lee correspondence is among the more fascinating historical curiosities. John Acton wrote to Robert E. Lee:

I saw in State Rights the only availing check upon the absolutism of the sovereign will, and secession filled me with hope, not as the destruction but as the redemption of Democracy. The institutions of your Republic have not exercised on the old world the salutary and liberating influence which ought to have belonged to them, by reason of those defects and abuses of principle which the Confederate Constitution was expressly and wisely calculated to remedy. I believed that the example of that great Reform would have blessed all the races of mankind by establishing true freedom purged of the native dangers and disorders of Republics. Therefore I deemed that you were fighting the battles of our liberty, our progress, and our civilization; and I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo.

In his essay succinctly entitled Nationality, Acton wrestles against homogenizing, centralizing, and tyrannical conceptions of nationalism. He sketches a history of the European view of the nation from the collapse of the Roman empire throughout the middle ages into the nineteenth-century. He examined the legacy of Roman imperialists and its vitriolic reincarnation in the êtatism of the French Revolution. Like Edmund Burke, Acton profoundly deplored the tumultuous passions of the multitudes, the sectarian violence, and the demagoguery that animated the French Revolution. Not surprisingly, Acton squarely challenged the tyrannical abstraction of a “general will” that Jean-Jacques Rousseau coughed up. Acton poignantly surmised, “Nationality is founded on the perpetual supremacy of the collective will, of which the unity of the nation is the necessary condition, to which every other influence must defer, and against which no obligation enjoys authority, and all resistance is tyrannical” (p. 424). To Acton, the collectivist ideology of Jean-Jacques Rousseau was indeed the very embodiment of tyranny. Acton, on the other hand, championed ordered liberty, a diffusion of power and authority, subsidiarity and federalism.

Bibliography

Chadwick, Chad. Acton and History, (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

Himmelfarb, Gertrude, Lord Acton: A Study in Conscience and Politics, (Oakland, CA: ICS Press, 1993).

Works Cited