Lord Acton [Hardcover]

Mr. Roland Hill (Author), Roland Hill (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 2000

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Lord Acton, 1887 Lord Acton (1834-1902), numbered among the most esteemed Victorian historical thinkers, was much respected for his vast learning, his ideas on politics and religion, and his lifelong preoccupation with human freedom. Yet Acton was in many ways an outsider. He stood apart from his contemporaries, doubting the notion of unlimited progress and the blessings of nationalism and democracy. He differed from fellow members of the English upper class, holding to his Catholic faith; and he angered other Catholic believers by fiercely opposing the doctrine of papal infallibility. In this remarkable biography, Roland Hill is the first to make full use of the vast collection of books, documents and private papers in the Acton archives to tell the story of the enigmatic Lord. The book describes Acton's extended family of European aristocrats, his cosmopolitan upbringing, and his disrupted education. Drawing a lively picture of politics and religion at the time, Hill discusses Acton's brief career as a Liberal member of Parliament, his work as editor and owner of learned Catholic journals, his battles for freedom for and in the Catholic Church, his friendship with William E. Gladstone, and his seven years as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University. Though unable to complete The Cambridge Modern History series he envisaged, Acton transformed historical study and left a legacy of ideas that continues to influence historians today.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Lord Acton's statement that "power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely" is probably better known than he is. In this well-researched and coherently written biography, Hill, a retired journalist who has long studied Acton's work, draws on known publications as well as Acton's private notes. A highly respected historian and teacher, Acton (1834-1902) studied and maintained friendships in Italy and Germany besides England. His "compulsive note-taking" was in three languages, and the notes were dispersed in libraries throughout Europe. They were very fragmented, and Acton's granddaughter helped with their contextual reconstruction. Acton wrote almost 20 monographs in English, Italian, and German and was criticized for not further sharing his breadth of learning through writing. A devout Catholic, he edited the Catholic journal Rambler, earning it a reputation for independent intellectual thought; Acton himself disagreed with some Catholic tenets, including papal infallibility. Hill's book should be added to academic collections, though public libraries may wish to defer to the local college collections.
-Robert C. Moore, Raytheon, Sudbury, MA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"Readers will be convinced of Acton's importance and fascination, if somewhat mystified why that should be so." -- Choice

"[A] splendid biography, the most complete yet made of this complex Victorian." -- John T. Noonan, New York Times Book Review

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 576 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press; First Edition edition (May 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300079567
• ISBN-13: 978-0300079562
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.6 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #694,897 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars on the nature of history, January 4, 2006

By 

Patrick McNamara (Boston MA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Lord Acton (Hardcover)

For the great British historian, Lord Acton (1834-1902), study of the great books of the ages was essential in bringing a person to full intellectual and spiritual maturity. Such study was good for a man because it functioned..."to open windows in every direction, to raise him to the level of his age, so that he may know the twenty or thirty forces that have made our world what it is, and still reign over it; to guard him against surprises, and against the constant sources of error within; to supply him both with the strongest stimulants and the surest guides; to give force and fullness and clearness and sincerity and independence and elevation and generosity and serenity to his mind, that he may know the method and law of the process by which error is conquered and truth is won: discerning knowledge from probability and prejudice from belief; that he may learn to master what he rejects as fully as what he adopts; that he may understand the origin as well as the strength and vitality of systems and the better motives of men who are wrong; to steel him against the charm of literary ability and talent, so that each book, thoroughly taken in shall be the beginning of a new life and shall make a new man of him". Lord Acton; quoted in Hill, p 285-286.

This man, John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton -- Lord Acton of Aldenham - amassed a library at his Aldenham estate of well over 60,000 books and manuscripts! He also had many tens of thousands of other books at his other homes scattered across England and the continent. And he had read and studied many and perhaps most of them! This was a man who read, and read, as they say, voraciously! He was interested primarily in one big question: What was the relation of political order to religiousness and religion? He is worth reading (though he wrote few books himself) because he grappled so honestly with this huge question and because he came to solid insights that might yet help us today.
Acton was born in Naples, Italy on January 10, 1834. His grandfather, served as Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Naples while his father Sir Richard Acton, died when Acton was only three years old. His mother, Countess Marie Louise de Dalberg (from an ancient and distinguished Catholic family of Bavaria), remarried later to Lord Granville, William Gladstone's Foreign Secretary, and then moved the family to Britain. Thus Acton received his early schooling in Britain and grew up fluent in English, German, French, and Italian.

Barred from attending Cambridge University because of his Catholicism, his devout (Catholic) mother sent him to study at the University of Munich under the famous church historian, Ignaz von Döllinger. The close mentoring he received from Dollinger was a decisive experience for the young Acton. Through Döllinger's mentorship Acton discovered his own vocation to become a historian of church and state and to study the more fundamental link between liberty and religiousness.

As he neared the end of his university studies, his stepfather Lord Granville cajoled and sponsored him to stand for Parliament. He did so and won election in 1859 to the House of Commons representing the Irish constituency of Carlow. He did much like politics and did not distinguish himself in any particular way while in Parliament. On the other hand he met and became a lifelong friend of William Ewart Gladstone: the Liberal politician (thrice Prime Minister of England) who dominated Victorian politics for almost a half century. Thus Acton via his 40+ years of close friendship with Gladstone was never far from questions of practical politics. In 1869, Gladstone rewarded Acton for his efforts on behalf of Liberal political causes by offering him a peerage and a seat in the House of Lords. As we will see below Gladstone did this favor for Acton for other reasons as well...in particular to strengthen Acton's hand in his struggles at the First Vatican Council.

As a young man however Acton was more interested in editing a journal of ideas than in distinguishing himself as a parliamentarian. He left parliament and subsequently launched a series of journals (such as the "The Rambler", and the Historical Review...) giving them each a distinctly Catholic character and dedicating each to an analysis of social, political, and theological issues from a Catholic point of view. He became acquainted with the great convert John Henry Newman who supported Acton's journalistic efforts and contributed to some of these journalistic efforts. Around this time he made a trip to America and met among others the great Catholic convert and philosopher Orestes Brownson. On his return to Britain he soon evidenced a profound admiration for the American revolution; seeing in it a great advance for liberty; praising in particular the Federalist papers, the balanced Constitution and the overall federal arrangement of power. Although he opposed slavery his sympathies ran more powerfully with the South as the South's cause was bound up with the preservation of states rights in opposition to a centralizing Federal government. He apparently believed that slavery could be ended (as it had in Brazil) by the North offering to Southern slaves a sanctuary of freedom. The slaves would then simply desert to the North and all would be well! In this Acton was naïve as conditions in America were fundamentally different than in Brazil...(as Acton the historian and the Catholic should have realized). In Brazil there was a Catholic (missionary) legacy of defense of native's and slaves rights while in the British-American colonies there was no strong missionizing tradition-no particular interest in the souls of slaves or Indians (they were not considered rational human beings by most protestant divines) except as labor to be exploited in the case of Black slaves or or as enemies to be displaced from their lands in the case of the Indians. The Quakers (and Eliot in Massachusetts) were the exception that proved the rule and except in Pennsylvannia were not in any case a strong national political force. Abolitionism in America achieved no political prominence until the 1840s. Thus the Slave power in the South was politically strong and able to get Congress to pass the Fugitive Slave act which required Northern states to return fugitive slaves to the South and their `owners' thereby precluding a `Barzilian solution' to the slavery problem. Acton also underestimated the almost limitless stupidity of the Southern slaveowners-they intransigently refused to limit the growth of slavery in any wise and in any of the new terroritories thus pushing the Northerners into increasingly extreme positions themselves. All this despite the original Constitutional compromise among the Northern and Southern Founding fathers which put a limit to slavery's growth in the new Republic. On the other hand Acton was right to point out that the North's aggressiveness centered around its attempts to build up the federal power in order to eliminate southern economic competition and to dominate international trade. Acton also rightly saw the genius, the nobility and the tragedy of the figure of Robert E. Lee. He wrote to him a letter of sympathy and praise (after the surrender at Appomotax) that Lee apparently treasured till the end of his days.

By the time of the American Civil War, Acton began to arrive at positions increasingly at odds with the Church hierarchy-in particular on the question of the temporal power of the papacy (which was in process of losing the territories called the papal states to Italian nationalism) and then with respect to the question of papal infallibility. Seeing the inevitability of being silenced by the hierarchy he chose to fold his journalistic operations. When the First Vatican Council was called (1869-1870) to discuss the issues of the Immaculate Conception of Mary and of Papal Infallability Acton moved himself and his new family (he had married and started to have children) to Rome where he became one of the leaders (along with Cardinals/Bishops Strossmayer, Darboy and Dupanloup) of the opposition (to infallibility). Interestingly, as mentioned above Gladstone made him at this time a Peer of the Realm (conferring on Acton a semi-official diplomatic status) in order to strengthen his hand in dealing with the Cardinals and Bishops. He regularly sent long letters on debates of the Council to Dollinger who then forwarded them to the World Press. These letters later became priceless documents for historians of the Council.

Through his principled, diplomatic and passionate opposition to Papal infallability Acton became known in Britain as one of the most articulate defenders of religious and political freedom. He saw no inherent contradiction between religion and political liberty. He also argued forcefully in essays and lectures that freedom of conscience was the bedrock of political liberty and that conscience had to be understood in the Catholic sense as not truly free until it was informed by revelation as embodied in holy writ, religious tradition and in the sacraments.

In the 1880s and 90s he began to develop what can only be described as a philosophy of history. Religion and liberty were at the core of the historical process with the gradual realization of individual and political liberty constituting the meaning and purpose of history. Given that political liberty depended on the vigilance and participation of free individuals who could and did consult their conscience on matters political, liberty itself depended on religiosity. Acton was fiercely critical of any historian who tended to whitewash the crimes of the church. There could be no excuses for St Bartolomew's massacre or for the persecution or the Jews or Muslims or for the tortures perpetrated by the Inquistion. He believed that there had been a plot sanctioned by the Pope... Read more ›

22 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Master who never produced a masterpiece, September 6, 2000

By 

The Sanity Inspector (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lord Acton (Hardcover)

This is the first major biography of Lord Acton since mid-century. This remarkable historian, Catholic dissident, and philosopher of freedom was in many ways the very epitome of the erudite Victorian scholar. That is, he was _so_ learned, that the present-day reader should distrust any reviewer, including the present one, who presumes to encapsulate and classify him in a few easy paragraphs.

There's little danger of that from me. This book tells the story of Acton's life and career, and I must admit that, so far as judging the work of author and subject, my hat's simply off to them. It is interesting reading about things like Acton's near-excommunication from the Catholic Church, because of his opposition in 1870 to the new doctrine of papal infallibility, and then his continued devotion to the Church. His private correspondence with contemporaries, debating the great issues of the day, particulary freedom, make for bracing reading.

His ideas in private circulation, rather than his parliamentary career or written output, carry his fame today. His magnum opus, _History of Liberty_, was never written. The only bits of it that made it to completion were two lectures, "The History of Freedom in Antiquity", and "The History of Freedom in Christianity." Disappointingly, these and a couple of other short writings are only excerpted here--they are brief enough to have been put in an appendix of this big book. Fortunately, they can be read at the Acton Institute's website.

By the way, it was Acton who coined the phrase, "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

4.0 out of 5 stars Not a man of our time!, June 30, 2010

By 

Eric (California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lord Acton (Hardcover)

Most of us are somewhat familiar with Acton - by reputation if not through his writings. This biography, though a tad on the "academic" side, reveals many facets of the man. I was particularly engrossed by his involvement in the doctrinal politics of the Roman Catholic Church, in Victorian politics, and also by his associations within the European aristocracy. Acton was obviously not a man cut from the common cloth, either socially or intellectually. One thing this biography clearly demonstrates is that an important figure in 19th century liberalism (classical) was strongly religious, and not under the sway of the strict secularism of the old liberal school of the Enlightenment. Even though his loyalty to the Church was sometimes questioned, Acton followed where his conscience led and opposed unwarranted authority wherever he thought it existed. Roland Hill has given us an informative, if somewhat bloodless, picture of a figure who deserves to be better known today.