Introduction by Ralph Raico

As we near the centenary of the death of Lord Acton, it is clear that he continues to attract readers eager to obtain the wisdom that historical knowledge is often thought to impart. In this, Acton resembles Tocqueville and Burckhardt among great historians of the last century, rather than Macaulay and Michelet. His dictum, "power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely"-quite possibly the most famous statement ever penned by a historian-is emblematic of what many seek in his works.

Yet there is another source of Acton's perennial fascination more peculiar to him. In the essay that follows, the distinguished Acton scholar, Josef L. Altholz, of the University of Minnesota, identifies it when he characterizes his subject as an "historian and moralist," and as a moralist of a distinctively austere and demanding sort. What has surely helped create the figure of Acton as culture-hero is the fact that his moral fervor was often turned against the Catholic Church, which, despite all the difficulties of his relationship with it, he never left. With remarkable conciseness, Dr. Altholz tells the story of Acton's development as the kind of historian he ultimately became. He recounts how, first under the guidance of his mentor Ignaz von Döllinger in Munich, Acton applied the new methods of mainly German historiography to uncover and expose the misdeeds of his own Church. It should be noted that Dr. Altholz's scholarship on Lord Acton spans thirty-five years and commenced with his definitive study of Acton's career in English Catholic journalism.

Dr. Altholz stresses the growing dismay and horror Acton felt as he probed the Church's involvement over centuries in heinous crimes, including the murder of heretics, and, worse still, in Acton's view, its elaboration of a theory justifying such murder. Here indeed was "the fiend skulking behind the Crucifix." Acton's loathing went all the deeper because of his lifelong love of and commitment to the Catholic Church. It was not only that he held the Church to be the possessor of the magisterium and keeper of the sacraments. Historically, he maintained, it had played the key role in the epic struggle through which liberty had come into the modern world.

In his great essays "The History of Freedom in Antiquity" and "The History of Freedom in Christianity" Acton traced the origin of modern liberty to Jesus' admonition: "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's." Acton added that "our Lord not only delivered the precept, but created the force to execute it"-the Roman Catholic Church, "the most energetic institution and the most universal association in the world." The Church emerged as a highly effective countervailing force to the expansion of state power, most clearly and significantly beginning with the investiture controversy:

To that conflict of four hundred years [between the Church and the temporal rulers] we owe the rise of civil liberty... The towns of Italy and Germany won their franchises, France got her States-General, and England her Parliament out of the alternate phases of the contest; and as long as it lasted it prevented the rise of divine right.

In Acton's analysis, the adversarial role of a powerful, international Catholic Church in the Middle Ages was crucial in preventing the rise of a pan-European empire; thus, the Church aided mightily in producing the radically decentralized Europe within which free institutions, ideas, and values could evolve. This is an interpretation that has received strong support from the work of recent scholars, among them Harold J. Berman and Brian Tierney. For Acton, the Church's entanglement in the practice and theory of murder was a betrayal not only of its divine origin and its spiritual mission, but of its historical-political role as well.

Dr. Altholz traces with great care Acton's celebrated-or notorious-views on the duty of the historian to act as judge on the crimes of history's great men. He states that "this was the most noble mission ever assigned to the historian," adding that "it may have been the most impossible." It is certainly not obvious that the increasingly professionalized scholars who devoted themselves to history in the generations that followed had any particular calling to deal out moral judgments at every turn. Still, it may be that there is a place for Actonian moralism, though not in the terms in which it was originally phrased.

Dr. Altholz notes Acton's full awareness that the state "had engaged in persecution and political murder with no less vigor" than the Church. In our own century, of course, mass-murders committed by powerful states have thrown into the shade anything ever done by the Catholic or any other church. In some cases, historians have been admirably eager to explore and lay bare these crimes. In other cases, however, the same power that corrupts its possessor seems to have had a tendency to seduce the scholars who have written about it. Thus, an alternative conceptualization of the moral mission of the historian appears as a possibility: to avoid the temptation to apologize for the crimes of great statesmen and attenuate their culpability, and instead actively to ferret out and exhibit those criminal acts.

Such a neo-Actonian task has been taken up, for example, by Robert Conquest, in The Great Terror and other of his works on Soviet communism. It may be suggested that Professor Conquest's identity as an Actonian historian does not lie in the explicit and implied moral judgments he passes on the Soviet criminals who are the subject of his excellent books. Rather it is the very commitment to examine, with meticulous scholarship over years of devoted effort, the offenses of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and the others -the stern resolve not to let them get away with it-that marks Professor Conquest as a scholar in the spirit of Acton. To the degree that historians resist the Machiavellian temptation to plead raison d'état on behalf of the masters of men, and dauntlessly pursue the misdeeds of statesmen through the maze of the historical evidence, they will be fulfilling, as much as is possible to them, an Actonian calling.

Ralph Raico is professor of European history at the State University of New York College at Buffalo, and adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.