The Acton Legacy

James V. Schall
SelectedWritings of Lord Acton, edited by J. Rufus Fears, tndianapolis: Liberty Classics. Volume I: Essays in the History of Liberty, 1985, 557 pp. Volume II: Essays in the Study and Writing of History, 1985. 580 pp. Volume 111: Essays in Religion, Politics, and Morality. 1988, 716 pp. Each $15.00 (paper $7.50).
ings of Providence, he was promptly sent to Munich to study under lgnaz Dollinger, only to discover there the world of German historiography and theology that he could never have known half so well in England. We have here an account of what he learned and subsequently thought. It would be difficult to find a finer collection of any author than this series that Professor Fears has brought together. What strikes one again and again about Acton is what a good writer he was. No doubt he assumed that, like himself, his reader would be able to read French, German, Italian, Spanish, Latin, or Greek with equal facility and delight. Consequently, he cited such long passages where appropriate, yet his English was excellent, graphic, witty, memorable, flawless. Acton, for instance, once did a charming review (these three volumes contain numerous reviews of famous and not-sofamous works, even as the reviews themselves are classics of criticism and learning) of a book of George Eliots works, collected by her husband. She, too, had had a German phase and knew many of the famous German scholars, especially David Friedrich Strauss, whom she visited in 1854. She also translated his curious Life of Jesus into English. On this point, Acton vividly describes Strauss in this way: Theology made him sick, and fame did not console him, for he was tired of being called the author of his book. . . (Volume ttt, p. 466).Acton knew irony. George Eliot even translated Feuerbachs The Essence of Christianity, in the translation still readily available. Eliot had by this time lost her early Christian upbringing and had become quite hostile to Christianity. But Acton knew the importance of Feuerbach in Eliots intellectual saga. He thus describes The Essence o f

LORD ACTON (1834-1902) was without doubt one of the most interesting personalities of the nineteenth century. His
grandfather had been the Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Naples, his stepfather the Prime Minister of England. He was legitimately English and legitimately German on his mothers side, with an enormous erudition in French, Italian, and general European culture. Everyone knows what Acton said about power corrupting. He was especially known for his loyalty to the Catholic Church, yet famous for his opposition to the Declaration of Infallibility of Vatican I, and perplexing to many as a correspondent of Robert E. Lee, whose cause Acton thought was the more just. Professor J. Rufus Fears and Liberty Classics have produced a most handsome, inexpensive, thorough collection of Actons writings. Acton is also sometimes known for never having written a complete book, but he certainly made up for this .in numerous essays and reviews, which revealed a profound learning and constant attention to scholarship that eventually made him Regius Professor at Cambridge and the founder of the famous ancient histories. Would that the vast majority of writers of actual books could show his extraordinary genius. Acton, because he was a Catholic, was not allowed, evidently, to attend Cambridge as a youth. But, such are the work-

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Chrisfianify,that book Marx himself read with so much enthusiasm:

More than any other work it had contributed to the downfall of metaphysics, and it contained an ingenious theory of the rise and growth of religion, and of the relation of the soul to God, while denying the existence o f either [III, p. 4731.

the prodigious range of his intellect, Acton took up the question of poverty. Since devotion to the poor has become almost the essence of religion at the end of the twentieth century, Actons observation on this delicate topic is worth recalling:
The remedy for poverty is not in the material resources of the rich, but in the moral resources of the poor. These, which are lulled and deadened by money-gifts, can be raised and strengthened only by personal influence, sympathy, charity. Money gifts save the poor man who gets them, but give longer life to pauperism in the country [Ill, p. 5741.

From the subtle wit of such a passage we can be sure that, for Acton, metaphysics, religion, soul, and God remained in place, however much Feuerbach and George Eliot contributed to their presumed downfall. Acton clearly had the advantage of knowing the Germans and of knowing theology, so that he could put this most famous English lady in context when she, too, took up the German intellectual world to justify her agnostic views. After she had encountered at Coventry a family of busy and strenuous freethinkers, Marian Evans seems to have quickly given up the faith that Acton understood so well. But from that momentous November [1841] until her death it would appear that no misgiving favourable to Christianity ever penetrated her mind or shook for an instant its settled unbelief (111, p. 463). True to his own principle of judicious fairness and equitable treatment, Acton concludes:
If ever science or religion reigns alone over an undivided empire, the books of George Eliot might lose their central and unique importance, but as the emblem of a generation distracted between the intense need of believing and the difficulty of belief, they will live to the last syllable of recorded time [HI, p. 4851.

One could state without too much exaggeration that failure to understand Actons point has been the main problem with liberal and religious thought on poverty, especially in the Third World, throughout the twentieth century. Acton could be most witty, even biting. In an essay on The Hanoverian Settlement, Acton wrote of the new king that he
was neither a tyrant, nor a coward, nor a fool; he was only unintellectual and brutally selfish. There were ladies in his company who received English titles, and offended one part of the public by their morals and the remainder by their ugliness [I, p. 1211.

Somehow, on coming across such a passage, one is not prepared to find Lord Acton so consistently amusing. Actons account of the execution of Maximillian, the Mexican Emperor in 1867, rivals Burkes account of the deaths of Marie Antoinette and the King during the French Revolution.
He fell, and carried with him in his fall the f the people he had come to independence o save. Nothing henceforth remains that can permanently arrest the United States in the annexation of Spanish America. If they have prudence to avoid European war, and wisdom to compose their own dissentions, they may grasp the most glorious inheritance the earth affords. . . . The memory of the fair-haired stranger, who devoted his life to the good of Mexico,

If Acton himself had a single vocation as an intellectual writer, surely it was this effort to resolve the need for belief with the difficulty of believing in an age in which science and religion seemed at loggerheads. His famous History of Liberty was designed to show that they were not, at least not necessarily. In his correspondence with Richard Simpson in 1861, to recall something of

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and died for guilt which was not his own, will live in sorrow rather than in anger among the people for whom he strove in vain. Already we may pronounce the verdict of history upon his sad career-his worst crime was in accepting the treacherous gift of Empire, but his misfortune was greater than his fault. 1 think he was wellneigh the noblest of his race, and fulfilled f my the promise of his words, The fame o ancestors will not degenerate in me [I, p. 1971.

are at the root of modernity in precisely that way in which Acton sensed that the continuity with the past would be broken to the extent that it did not serve as a sober corrective to how men could deal with one another. Acton thought that valid modern liberty followed a line that went from Aristotle through Aquinas. As he put it in his review of Sir Erskine Mays Democracy in Europe:
But the Politics, which, to the world of living men, is the most valuable of his [Aristotles] works, acquired no influence on antiquity, and is never quoted before the time of Cicero. Again it disappeared for many centuries; it was unknown to the Arabian commentators, and in Western Europe it was first brought to light by St. Thomas Aquinas, at the very time when an infusion of popular elements was modifying feudalism, and it helped to emancipate political philosophy from despotic theories and to confirm it in the ways of freedom [I, p. 631.

Acton wrote these words in 1868. He seems to have been wrong about the annexation of the Spanish possession. One does wonder, however, what he had in mind by the most glorious inheritance the earth affords. In these volumes we find the famous essays of Acton-The Study of History, The History of Freedom in Antiquity, The History of Freedom in Christianity, The Political Causes of the American Revolution, Human Sacrifice, Ranke, The Vatican Council, Nationality, and The German Schools of History. In giving us these essays, Professor Fears has rightfully preserved all the academic apparatus that Acton himself displayed. No doubt in part because of Professor Herbert Butterfields analysis of it in his Whig View of H i s t o r y ,Actons inaugural lecture as Regius Professor in 1895 is perhaps his most famous work. Much reflection remains to be done, especially for those Voegelinians and Straussians among us, on Actons view of the nature of modernity. In his Regius lecture, Acton observed:
The modern age did not proceed from medieval by normal succession, with outward tokens of legitimate descent. Unheralded, it found a new order o f things, under a law of innovation, sapping the f continuity. In those days ancient reign o Columbus subverted the notions of the world, and reversed the conditions of production, wealth, and power; in those days Machiavelli released governments from the restraint of law [II, p. 5071.

It seems clear that Acton was aware of both the need for continuity with antiquity and the nature of the break with antiquity signaled by an attempt to emancipate the world into a new order by liberating the state from any theoretic restraints. Acton. thus was not happy with what was occurring in the United States. He felt that Jefferson was at the heart of the problem. In The Political Causes of the American Revolution he wrote:
Jefferson, who, even at the time of the Declaration of Independence, which was his work, entertained views resembling those of Rousseau and Paine, and sought the source of freedom in the abstract rights of man, returned from France with his mind full of the doctrines of equality and popular sovf Adams in the conereignty. By the defeat o test for the presidency, he carried these principles to power, and altered the nature of the American government [I, p. 2291.

The novus ordo saeculorum and governments no longer restrained by law

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Acton often displays the same caution about abstract rights that Burke had already embodied. Actons two essays on the history of l i b erty are, no doubt, the contribution to
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intellectual life and political ethics that he was most proud of. He was no Mill, and his reasons for political liberty were not based in a kind o f skepticism about truth. Acton knew that ideas formed institutions:
It would be easy to point out a paragraph in St. Augustine or a sentence of Crotius that outweighs in influence the Acts of fifty Parliaments, and our cause owes more to Cicero and Seneca, to Vinet and Tocqueville, than to the laws of Lycurgus or the Five Codes of France. By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes his duty against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion [I, p. 71.

will consider that, among the moderns, men of genius equal to these have held political doctrines not less criminal or absurd-it will be apparent to you how stubborn a phalanx o f error blocks the paths of truth; that pure reason is as powerless as custom to solve the problem of free government.. . [I, p. 191.

Acton fought for liberty not because he was against religion but because he was for it. He was not afraid to record calmly any sordid act of a cleric or a politician, because he held, in a way, that the very purpose of his historiography was to redeem the evil acts of men in the very effort to write accurately about them. Moreover, Acton was willing to face the question of why men do not proceed to the full truth. The vice of the classic state, he thought, was that it was both Church and State in one (I, p. 17). As great as his respect for Plato and Aristotle was, Acton held that human reason by itself could not persist in coming to the truth, or would not if it could.
If you will bear in mind that Socrates, the f the pagans, knew of no higher cribest o terion for men, of no better guide of conduct, than the laws of each country; that Plato, whose sublime doctrine was so near an anticipation of Christianity that celebrated theologians wished his works to be forbidden, lest men should be content with them, and indifferent to any higher dogma -to whom was granted that prophetic vision o f the Just Man, accused, condemned and scourged, and dying on a Cross-nevertheless employed the most splendid intellect ever bestowed on man to advocate the abolition of the family and the exposure of infants; that Aristotle, the ablest moralist of antiquity, saw no harm in making raids upon a neighboring people, for the sake of reducing them to slavery-still more, if you

Acton was willing to grant that the limitations of human ethical and political capacities were real and that this was a fact of observation. He knew the limits of pure reason. The stubborn phalanx of error that, as Acton put it, blocks the path to truth was found in the greatest intellects of our kind. The legacy of Acton no doubt lies here in the question we are no longer culturally allowed to ask when we face the problems and defeats of a free government, the fact that reason alone, however great it is, even to the sublime Plato and the able Aristotle, and those who nobly follow them in this, is not enough. Acton, one suspects, would suggest that we have two alternatives: the first is to ask ourselves whether anything more than reason is given to us; the second is to repeat the history of antiquity. These three volumes represent an intellectual occasion of the first order. Professor Fears and Liberty Classics could not have chosen a body of philosophical, political, and theological reflection from the last century more directly pertinent and challenging to the cultural issues of the coming century. Thus, writing paradoxically of Goldwin Smiths Irish History, Acton recalled the lesson of the French Revolution, now itself 200 years old
The significance of that sanguinary drama lies in the fact, that a political abstraction was powerful enough to make men think f themselves right in destroying masses o their countrymen in the attempt to impose it on their country. . . . The Reign of Terror was nothing else than the reign of those who conceive that liberty and equality can co-exist [I, p. 951.

The century from Acton to ourselves, more earnestly than his own century, certainly did attempt, again and again, to im-

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pose this political abstraction, an imposition that always resulted in another sanguinary drama. What is important to understand is that the lesson we have learned in the meantime is not Actons concerning the limits of reason. Rather it is the lesson that, to philosophize and to legislate, liberty and equality must co-exist. What is wrong, we are told, is not our theories, but the

structure of the world. Therefore, we seek to change the world as if it is ours to remake in our own image, itself limited to nothing but ourselves. This is the concluding sentence of The History of Freedom in Christianity: The story of the future is written in the past, and that which hath been is the same thing that shall be (I, p.

53).

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