Power Tends To Corrupt: Lord Acton's Study of Liberty

Preface

Preface anyone beginning a large research project can understand my feelings of confusion and even hopelessness when i attempted to write the first page of thisbook.afterafewyearsofresearchthatwerelessratherthanmoreintensive (a full-time teaching position and various administrative duties allowed me to proceed at only a moderate pace), i realized i could no longer postpone writing if i were to avoid the (mis)fortune of my own hero, Lord acton. acton had always put off the writing of the history of liberty for the sake of more complete research, until—tired and dejected—he deserted the idea entirely. although i had read the majority of acton’s work and the literature on him and had reread my notes again and again, i had no clue as to his thought (except that he was a liberal and he loved freedom) or, even more, how to begin to find it. he wrote so many essays, reviews, and letters, all of which fascinated me with their originality, erudition, and extraordinary insights. at the same time, his works confused me with their inconsistencies, esoteric references and themes, incomprehensible allusions, gaps, and contradictions. how would i make it all coherent and intelligible? Would i be able to write on acton’s theory of liberty, the aim of my original project? initially, i shunned the thought of re-creating acton’s history of liberty. First, i did not want to pretend that i could have succeeded in carrying out the project that had proved too challenging for Lord acton. second, i did not believe that his original grand design for the history of liberty was viable, nor did i think myself worthy of attempting it. Third, i did not want to be seen as merely the most recent enthusiast who entertains an idea of reconstructing acton’s original history of liberty as if he had written it.* however, if not through the history of liberty, how would i approach my topic, which was too broad and too complex to understand in its entirety? how would i distinguish the fundamental from the secondary in acton’s thought, placing his ideas in some coherent order? i did not cherish any preconceived thesis as to his thought, nor did i harbor any hidden agenda, except for a sincere desire to comprehend him. * in 1955, G. e. Fasnacht and, a few years later, George Watson attempted to “reconstitute The History of Liberty from acton’s notes”: George Watson, Lord Acton’s History of Liberty: A Study of His Library, with an Edited Text of His History of Liberty Notes (aldershot: scolar Press, 1995), 49. x Preface There i was, at the end of my sabbatical in the summer of 2007, going back and forth to the Lauinger Library at Georgetown University, impatiently awaiting an “illumination” as to the essence of acton’s thoughts. i finally realized that i would not comprehend acton without applying some principle of division. i had to separate his ideas into smaller units, sort them out, and then, step-by-step, analyze each. The best solution seemed to proceed in chronological order, reviewing acton’s output according to what he wrote about freedom in each period of Western civilization, from antiquity until his own time. i hoped that using the Cartesian method of division and analysis then gradual reconnection and synthesis would allow me to understand acton’s theory of liberty from its most basic to its most complex elements. With this plan of how to proceed, i was at last able to write the first page of what now is chapter 2. The remaining pages and chapters would gradually emerge and, before i realized it, i had produced acton’s history of liberty. although not as he designed it, Power Tends to Corrupt is the history of liberty according to acton, with his theory of freedom being pushed to second place. My first encounter with Lord acton was not encouraging. i had to write a short paper on his editorship of the Cambridge Modern History for a graduate course on methodology, which i took at Georgetown University. at that time, i viewed him as a rigid figure, rather passé, who still dreamed about the possibility of scientific history. Because of that belief, i thought of him as a kind of positivist historian who had entertained an idea of ultimate history. i was not aware then of how much acton would have hated to be linked with positivism. i was fortunate, however, to take a course with Father James...