Introduction

Lord Acton on the Historian

By Josef L. Altholz

Lord Acton is rightly remembered as the historian of liberty in the context of religion and conscience, and primarily applied to politics and political thought. Acton's political views were formed by his work and experience as an historian, his discovery of the historian's need for intellectual liberty, which led to his larger concern for liberty in all spheres in which conscience might be involved. Acton thought much and wrote a fair amount about the rights and duties of the historian. This monograph will be devoted to his thoughts on the historian. I say "on the historian," not "on history," deliberately: Acton, I will argue, was a moralist, and he thought about his subject in terms of the moral duties of those who study it. His thoughts about his profession are relevant to the study of religion and liberty because, for Acton, liberty of historical thought and writing was founded on religious principles, the moral obligation of truthfulness, and the sanctity of truth.

In the Dictionary of National Biography, where the opening of an entry gives a descriptive term for the subject's occupation or area of importance, Acton is defined as "historian and moralist." This is the only instance of the conjunction of these terms. Yet it is exactly right: Even the aphorisms that give Acton his current significance in political thought are essentially moralistic in a context of history. In rewriting his entry for the New Dictionary of National Biography, I again describe Acton as "historian and moralist." This unique conjunction is nowhere better seen than in his thought about the historian.

Acton was typically Victorian in his devotion to the ideal of Truth (which he often wrote with a capital T). The most important virtue, he was to teach his children, was to tell the truth. Acton was also typically Victorian in his failure to recognize the two distinct things that are conflated in the word Truth. There is factual truth, that which actually is; and there is truthfulness, the moral condition or state of mind that seeks to describe facts honestly. Acton, the moralist, was primarily concerned with the moral quality of truthfulness. He assumed, perhaps naively, that if this were joined to proper methods of research it would lead to historical truth. This was to him the attractiveness of the discipline of history, which as he discovered it in the mid-nineteenth century had learned to discard its prejudices and to work objectively from valid original documentary sources, thereby becoming a true Wissenschaft, a word imperfectly translated as "science." To resist the conclusions of historical science was thus a sin against truth. What historians required was to be allowed to seek truth for its own sake, to operate freely by their own methods, independent of external authorities and without concern for the effects of their work. The truthful pursuit of truth required complete freedom of inquiry. So morality led to liberty, first in history.

Acton's thought on these matters was formed in the early 1850s by his apprenticeship at Munich to Ignaz von Döllinger, the leading Catholic historian in Germany. It was a heady time for students of scientific history, a discipline largely shaped in German universities. Objectivity had been discovered as a virtue both necessary and useful, releasing the historian from the chains of partisanship and freeing him, in the phrase of the leading historian Ranke, to show "what actually happened" (wie es eigentlich gewesen). The critical method of examining sources produced new and sounder interpretations of historical authorities, and Ranke pioneered the study of basic original sources just at a time when many of the archives of Europe were being opened to scholars. Acton found himself Döllinger's fellow student in the new archival history. Döllinger, brought up in the older critical school, taking part in the free competition of Catholic and Protestant scholars, had an apologetic motive behind his objectivity, seeking to prove that Catholics could be as sound and objective as Protestants and thereby to disprove canards against his Church. But scientific history won over the historian, and the historian triumphed over the priest: Döllinger, followed by Acton, discovered and exposed the failings of his Church. In the late 1850s and early 1860s, Acton as a Catholic journalist in England and Döllinger as a Catholic historian in Germany were criticized for excessive freedom and objectivity in their criticisms of their Church. The issue of intellectual freedom thus became personal to both men, in the form of freedom of historical scholarship against the authorities of the Church. It was a papal attack on the freedom of scholarship asserted by Döllinger in 1863 that led Acton to close his journalistic career in 1864. His first struggle for liberty was thus on a religious ground, a struggle for freedom within religion for the scholarly conscience against ecclesiastical authority.

The first liberty for which Acton contended was intellectual liberty. It may seem odd that the historian of political liberty should have first confronted the Church rather than the State, but in the latter nineteenth century Acton did not have to defend intellectual liberty against the State. Wilhelmian Germany might be authoritarian but scrupulously respected academic freedom; the stodgy conservatism of Austria shielded the brilliant universities of Vienna and Prague; other countries, with Britain in the lead, allowed or even encouraged freedom of thought and the press. Only the authorities of the Roman Catholic Church sought to impose control, and it was therefore those authorities that Acton had first to fight. In his general theory of liberty, Acton valued the corporate Church, as he valued other corporate bodies, as a buffer between the State and the individual, but his early experience showed the need of a buffer between the individual and the institutional Church, and he was even willing to call on the less autocratic State to perform that role. In 1870 he urged Gladstone to join in a general protest by the great powers to prevent the definition of papal infallibility. In 1871 he saw Döllinger excommunicated by the Church but protected in his tenure at Munich by the fact that it was a state university. Acton was ready to defend liberty by any means against all threats.

This generalization of what had begun as a defense of intellectual liberty within the Church took shape when Acton made his grand tour of European archives in the late 1860s. What these original sources showed was the "conventional mendacity" of Catholic historians, their practice of falsehood and suppression of truth to further the interests or reputation of the Church. For one whose commitment to truth was integral to his religion, this perversion by religion of the moral obligation of the historian was fundamentally evil. What especially appalled Acton was that the particular facts suppressed by mendacious historians concerned the crimes committed by leading churchmen, including popes and saints, notably the sanctioning of killing in the interest of the Church and the practice of persecution unto death. Acton's morality on this subject was as simple, perhaps simplistic, as his morality of truthfulness: Killing is simply murder, the worst of crimes. Yet Church authorities had practiced persecution; popes and saints had authorized the killing of heretics; theologians had justified such things as doctrine; and historians had either suppressed or excused these facts. Persecution was to become the touchstone of Acton's historical morality, raising his critique of his Church from the ecclesiastical to the ethical plane. But it was not only a critique of the church. The State, especially the absolute monarchies, had engaged in persecution and political murder with no less vigor. So Acton's growing hatred of persecution merged into his long-standing hatred of absolutism, initially formed under the influence of Burke but now taking shape in the context of a particular concern as an historian.

This was a concern that differentiated Acton from Döllinger in their historical mentalities. It was a difference that Isaiah Berlin was to illustrate by the analogy of the hedgehog and the fox: The fox knows many little things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. Döllinger, the veteran historian, knew all sorts of historians' lies and ecclesiastics' crimes, but he knew them singly. Coming to this knowledge relatively young and suddenly, Acton was able to generalize it into a system pervading history in general. In 1867 Pius IX canonized a notorious inquisitor, Pedro Arbuès. To Döllinger this signified that the Church had sanctified the principle of persecution, and he now found himself in ethical opposition to Rome. To Acton, already in ethical opposition, Arbuès was just another part of the pattern, a mere illustration of the system of lies and murder.

Acton's judgment of the Church throughout history was so severe as to make his opposition to one event, the definition of papal infallibility at Vatican I in 1870, less fundamental than it was to Döllinger. Acton agreed with Döllinger that the infallibilist position was dangerous as absolutism and was based on bad history. Döllinger opposed the dogma as essentially false and accepted excommunication rather than submit. Acton felt that the pre-1870 Church had so many crimes on its record that the addition of one dogma could not tip the scales any further. If Rome was the true communion before 1870, it was the true communion still, despite its faults. In his reply in 1874 to Gladstone's attack on papal infallibility in its bearing on the civil allegiance of Catholics, Acton pointed out numerous cases in which Church authorities had been guilty of political crimes without invoking papal infallibility; English Catholics had ignored papal commands in the past, and a newly defined dogma would not change their civil allegiance. He thus justified present-day Catholics by revealing the faults of the historical Church. Acton used the occasion to make one last plea for the freedom of church history: "It would be well if men had never fallen into the error of suppressing truth and encouraging error for the better security of religion I should dishonor and betray the Church if I entertained a suspicion that the evidences of religion could be weakened or the authority of Councils sapped by a knowledge of the facts with which I have been dealing." Acton's faith transcended history. The Church taught a divine truth that could not be compromised by the actions of men, even popes and saints. The more Acton exposed the crimes of churchmen, the more he asserted his faith. So he did not spare the Church he loved.

After the Vatican crisis was over, in the late 1870s, Acton formed his plans for what would have been his magnum opus, the History of Liberty, which has been called the greatest book never written. It is not quite true that it was never written. His lectures on the History of Freedom, delivered in 1877 and recently republished by the Acton Institute, provide a seventy-page prospectus for the larger work, a brilliant overview of the grand theme. His Cambridge Lectures on Modern History are animated throughout by his mature theory of the history of liberty, almost as if he had taken up the theme anew and brought it to completion under another guise. But the project as Acton had formulated it in the late 1870s was effectively aborted in the early 1880s, as I will explain shortly. That project, however, was a rather narrow one, covering only about 150 years, from the 1680s to 1830, with an English Whig theme, not the near-universal span of the History of Freedom lectures nor even the modern history of the Cambridge lectures. The notes for it, published in 1994 by George Watson, contain brilliant aphorisms but suggest that the connected narrative might have been disappointing. The greatest book never written may owe its greatness to the fact that it was never written.

What brought the History of Liberty project to a stop was the moral crisis brought on by Acton's break with Döllinger. This grew out of Acton's ideas of the moral function of the historian. The issue here was persecution, which Acton had long regarded as simply murder, by common consent the most heinous of crimes. Religious persecution, killing for the sake of the Church, was worst of all. Precisely because the crime of persecution had its source in that which ought to be the source of morality, it was most to be condemned. Further, it was no private crime: It was pursued by public authority for a public end, thus corrupting the entire society. Worse still, persecution was justified by theorists, thereby being perpetuated as a doctrine for the future. The evil had been brought into the heart of the Church; it was in Acton's words "the fiend skulking behind the Crucifix." Here Acton merged his morality and his history. He thought that morality and history shared a common "scientific" ground: Murder could serve as an objective standard of evil in both. On this basic point, morality must be upheld by the historian. As an historian of ideas, Acton was most concerned with the idea of persecution. Worse than the actual murderer was the theorist who justifies murder, and the historian who defends or even fails to condemn either is no better. The historian must not be morally indifferent ("objective" in our current usage): He must be a judge, applying the moral standard as a canon of judgment, admitting no exceptions. He must indeed judge most harshly the best of men, those who ought to know better. So Acton criticized Catholics more than Protestants, clerics more than laymen, popes and saints most of all.

This ethical rigorism applied to history brought about a break with Döllinger. The incident that caused it seems slight compared with the absolute difference of principle that it revealed to Acton. In 1879 Döllinger prefaced a short letter to an uncritical obituary article on the French bishop Dupanloup. Acton regarded Dupanloup as a man who was ready to justify the worst abuses of the papacy and thus was no better than those who committed crimes in the name of the Church. He was shocked to find that Döllinger did not agree with him. Döllinger refused to condemn men for their mere weaknesses, choosing to explain rather than to judge; Acton judged men readily, making no allowance for the morality of past times. What ensued from this affair was the revelation to Acton that even his friend and mentor did not share his ethical rigorism, that he was absolutely isolated in his fundamental position. The shock of this revelation paralyzed Acton's creative faculties for several years.

In the mid-1880s Acton returned to historical work, as part of a movement to create a historical profession in England, becoming one of the founders of the English Historical Review. When the editor, Mandell Creighton, an Anglican clergyman, invited Acton to review his own History of the Papacy, Acton produced a harsh review criticizing Creighton's failure to condemn the popes of the Reformation era. In the ensuing correspondence, in which incidentally Creighton had the better of the argument, Acton uttered his famous phrase about power tending to corrupt and absolute power corrupting absolutely. This is most commonly cited in a political context, as a condemnation of State absolutism, which Acton indeed abhorred. But in this instance his dictum was meant as a canon of historical criticism, a caution against the mitigation of judgment. "I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favorable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holder of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. The inflexible integrity of the moral code is, to me, the secret of the authority, the dignity, the utility of history. If we may debase the currency for the sake of genius, or success, or rank, or reputation, we may debase it for the sake of a man's influence, of his religion, of his party, of the good cause which prospers by his credit and suffers by his disgrace. Then history ceases to be a science, an arbiter of controversy, a guide of the wanderer, the upholder of that moral standard which the powers of earth, and religion itself, tend constantly to depress."

This was the most noble mission ever assigned to the historian, but it may have been the most impossible. For one thing, there was no consensus as to how the moral standard was to be applied. More important, professional history is the study not of text but of context. Historians are trained to place actions and events in the context of time and place, considerations that are fatal to an absolute morality that is timeless and universal. As Owen Chadwick put it, there is a tension between "historical understanding and moral conviction": "Moral judgment," which is "the essence of the man," "corrupts the historian." The professionalization of the discipline of history meant that historians could not accept the moral role that Acton proposed for them. They were reduced from universal histories to monographs and from moral arbiters to a necessarily valueless objectivity. Yet Acton, isolated but admired, remained engaged with history and historians. He reaped his reward when in 1895 he was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University, potentially the most influential position a historian can hold.

It is customary for Cambridge professors to begin their tenure with an inaugural lecture, and Acton seized the occasion to profess his historical creed. He concisely restated his theme of the history of liberty by defining "the Unity of Modern History" (the period since the Renaissance) as a constant "progress in the direction of organized and assured freedom," which he regarded as the work of Providence through history and discerned by historians. Then Acton turned to the development of scientific history in the nineteenth century, under the influence of Ranke, whom he described as his "master," archivally researchful, critical of sources, and above all, impartial. He suggested the necessity and also the limitations of scientific history, "a discipline which every one of us does well to undergo, and perhaps also well to relinquish." This led to his concluding section, asking himself if he had "any cardinal proposition, that might serve as his selected epigraph, as a last signal, perhaps even as a target." His answer was to reassert his doctrine of the historian as moral judge: "I exhort you never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong," for "if we lower our standard in History, we cannot uphold it in Church or State."

This was a grand and noble ideal; it was expressed with an eloquence unusual for Acton; but it was also hopeless. Acton founded a school of history at Cambridge, but it was not a school of Actonian history, of which he was the first and only practitioner. Working historians then and since have settled for mere objectivity as the best they can achieve. Acton must have known that he was uttering a hopeless protest against the inexorable tendency of the historical profession he was helping to found. He had suggested that it was "a last signal, perhaps even a target"; and his great sentence of exhortation began with an acknowledgment that "the weight of opinion is against me." Having uttered his protest, Acton spent the rest of his Cambridge career working with historians on their terms, accepting their limitations. His own lectures advanced his own themes, but the last great project of his life, the Cambridge Modern History, forced him to admit that objectivity (he preferred to say "impartiality") was the most that he could ask of his colleagues.

Acton's 1896 prospectus for the Cambridge Modern History envisioned the opportunity of "recording the fullness of the knowledge which the nineteenth century is about to bequeath," based upon critical research in archives, to be produced by a "division of labour" in which each chapter would be written by the English-speaking scholar most competent on the subject. But how could such a number of men achieve consistency of approach, or how could eminent writers be bound to one common theme? The only answer was to insist on absolute impartiality, the avoidance of any point of view. "We shall avoid the needless utterance of opinion, and the service of a cause. Contributors will understand that we are established, not under the meridian of Greenwich, but in longitude 30 West"-that is, not in one country but in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Acton no doubt expected that the completed work (which he planned but did not live to publish) would manifest his theme of the unity of modern history as progress toward liberty, but this was to be accomplished by the organization of volumes and chapters, not by statements of position.

This emphasis on neutrality was the main theme of Acton's letter to the contributors, sent out in 1898. "Our scheme requires that nothing shall reveal the country, the religion, or the party to which the writers belong. It is essential not only on the ground that impartiality is the character of legitimate history, but because the work is carried out by men acting together for no other object than the increase of accurate knowledge. The disclosure of personal views would lead to such confusion that all unity of design would disappear." In effect, Acton acknowledged that he was leading a team that could be held together by nothing other than impartiality; even he could arrange no design other than what would naturally emerge from the structure as a whole. For one who had so ample a vision of history and so high a conception of the moral function of the historian, mere objectivity must have seemed like a lowering of the standard, but it was eminently practical, representing the only standard that could be achieved by actual historians.

Acton's ideal of the historian as judge, as the upholder of the moral standard, is the most noble ideal ever proposed for the historian; and it is an ideal that has been rejected, perhaps with grudging respect, by all historians, including myself. We workaday historians can seek no more than to attain a high level of mediocrity, and we can have no higher ideal than Acton's second choice, impartiality or objectivity. In this sense, as also in his relative lack of publications, Acton was somewhat of a failure as an historian. Yet he remains relevant to historians, not as a model but as a challenge. If Acton stands on the far right of historians, demanding something more than objectivity, there is a significant far left that would do away with objectivity altogether, and many others who would sharply modify that already moderate standard. Their critique is based upon the valid observation that it is difficult or even impossible for the historian to meet the standard of objectivity, that he will always be affected by his time, his place, his creed, perhaps even his gender. This can be constructively applied as a call to historians to acknowledge their limitations and make the best of them. But it has also been applied as a justification for abandoning any standard, for elevating the historian above the historical record, denying that there is any objective factuality, and allowing an individual historian in effect to create his own past-the historical equivalent of deconstructionism and other postmodern tendencies in literary studies. To this, Acton in his isolation serves at least as a counterpoise, a countervailing force allowing the center to hold. For the historian of today, Acton serves not as an example but as counterexample, providing a standard that we do not follow but that enables us at least to reject its direct opposite.

There is much of failure in Acton's career, whether as liberal Catholic, as politician or as historian. In the 1970s there was some criticism of the continuing study of such a failure, and the late Sir Geoffrey Elton even proposed a moratorium on Acton studies. Yet in these centennial years Acton studies is a prospering small industry, which suggests that there are some failures that are more interesting and even valuable than mere success could be. Had Acton been a success either by his standards or by ours, he would have been a less instructive subject for our study. The spectacle of such a man doomed to failure not by the limitations of his thought but by his own too exacting standards is at once a source of humility and of inspiration. Failure is especially worthy of study when it reveals the fierce integrity of Acton's devotion to conscience, to truth, and to liberty.

Josef L. Altholz is professor of history at the University of Minnestora. He is the author or editor of over half a dozen books on Victorian and religious topics.