In the 1920s and 1930s, Lord John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton’s reputation had become obscured. But the succeeding age of totalitarianism and socialism brought a new appreciation for Acton and his never-failing love of liberty by the few who still read and studied him. A wider and more appreciative audience for the message of Acton came after the publication of Friedrich A.Hayek’s Road to Serfdom (1944), in which Acton shares with Tocqueville the roles of prophetic critic of socialism and tyranny and apostle of liberty. The rediscovery and growing appreciation of Acton was further stimulated by the subsequent publication of Gertrude Himmelfarb’s Lord Acton: A Study of Conscience and Politics (1952) and a number of articles by other scholars in journals of political science and history.
Lord Acton was born on January 10, 1834, in Naples, the descendant of a long line of Shropshire baronets and the Dalbergs, one of the most honored families in the imperial aristocracy of the Holy Roman Empire. He was more continental than English, as aristocratic and traditional in politics as he was Roman Catholic in religion. His Whiggery was the Whiggery of Edmund Burke. Because he was Catholic he was unable to study at either Oxford or Cambridge and was educated on the Continent: in Paris at the school run by Feliz Dupanloup, later bishop of Orleans, and in Munich where he spent six years in the home of Ignaz von Döllinger while he studied at the university. Döllinger was German Catholicism’s leading historian and historical theologian.
The essential pivot in Acton’s life was religious and moral. He believed that only the conscience acting in liberty could perform a moral action. He believed that “Christ was risen on the world” and that the consequences of the Incarnation were liberty and the amelioration of the human condition. He believed that God so loved liberty that he permitted even sin. He believed, moreover, that free inquiry would result in the establishment of God’s truth. When the young Acton returned to England from Germany in 1857, he cooperated with John Henry Newman in the publication of liberal Catholic journals that he hoped would demonstrate the dedication to free inquiry within the Catholic Church and the compatibility of political liberty and the indispensable need for liberty of conscience in the moral Catholic life. These journals met with Ultramontane opposition and condemnation by the Church.
Acton believed that political liberty had grown up in the no-man’s-land of conflicts between church and state. Modern liberty in England and America, Acton asserted, resulted from the claims of persecuted religious sectarians to liberty of conscience and their insistence upon an obedience to a higher law.
Acton’s philosophy of history and love of liberty involved him in a bitter conflict with Ultramontane theology. He resisted to the fullest the definition of papal infallibility by the first Vatican Council, though after the definition he remained a pious, loyal, and conforming Catholic.
Acton projected but never finished a great “History of Liberty.” The rudimentary outlines may be traced in his essays, lectures, and massive manuscript notes. The best and fullest presentation of his work is presented in J. Rufus Fears’s edited compilation Selected Writings of Lord Acton (1985–88). The exchange of letters between Acton and his mentor Döllinger is essential to a full understanding of his motives. The definitive biography, Roland Hill’s Lord Acton (2000), is also indispensable.
Acton was increasingly fearful as the nineteenth century wore on. He believed that the French Revolution threatened to destroy liberty. Democracy and nationalism were the great threats to freedom and civilization. He equated socialism with slavery. When he was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University by the Queen, it was generally agreed that he was the most erudite and astute student of history in England. As a consequence, he became the first editor of The Cambridge Modern History (1902–10).
Acton’s high appeal to conscience, dedication to liberty, defense of Catholicism, and transforming influence on the study of history in England make him one of the most important figures in European thought in the nineteenth century and one of the most influential in the twentieth century.
Further Reading
John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton and Reginald Vere Laurence, Lectures on the French Revolution
John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, Essays on Church and State
John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, Essays in the Liberal Interpretation of History: Selected Papers
Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History
This entry was originally published in American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia, p. 6.
