Like a growing number of our ancestors (those not forgotten entirely), Lord Acton (1834-1902) has been reduced to a single sentence, often misquoted: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Because we intuitively know this to be the case, though some will deny it, Acton’s apothegm, originally written in a letter to Mandell Creighton, an Anglican bishop, is treated as a readily disregarded cliché. If a cliché retains some kernel of lasting truth, and if it remains applicable to the world as we know it, is it still a cliché and should it be scorned? In her first book, Lord Acton: A Study of Conscience and Politics (1952), Gertrude Himmelfarb (1922-2019) examines Acton’s observation and writes:
“The great
temptation of history to which most men succumbed, it was apparent to many of
Acton’s contemporaries, was power. It had taken the shattering experiences of the French Revolution, the
Napoleonic wars and the nationalist revolutions to explode the illusion of the Enlightenment
that power itself was ethically neutral, that its potential for good was as
great as for bad, that a benevolent despot was the best of all possible rulers.”
If the
historical events cited by Himmelfarb aren’t enough to cure us of our naïveté,
two world wars, the Holocaust and Communism should have completed the job. Here
is the sentence that follows Acton’s best-known observation: “Great men are
almost always bad men . . .” Himmelfarb writes:
“By this
maxim, Acton takes his place squarely in the tradition of political and
philosophical pessimism. His pessimism worked its way into every corner of his
thought, into his politics, religion and history, and it took every emotional
tone from passionate indignation through exasperation, despair, and what seemed
to be a world-weary resignation.”
I’m reminded
that the late Terry Teachout described himself as an “ebullient pessimist.”
People have the mistaken notion that a pessimist must be gloomy and grim, a
real drag to be around. Pessimism lightens the burden of existence. With fewer illusions,
fewer obligations to be bubbly and tediously extroverted, you are liberated to
enjoy the best in life, including writers like Himmelfarb and Teachout. The
former writes:
“What saved
Acton from the unredeemed bleakness of pessimism and gave meaning to his
indignation was his refusal to succumb to philosophical or historical
determinism. Man, he believed, for all his propensity to evil, was a free agent
capable of choosing the good, and though original sin was always there to dog
his steps, it did not always succeed in tripping him up.”
2 comments:
I read Himmelfarb's book many years ago. What struck me most about it was that, for all his vast learning and his first-class mind, Acton was involved in so many ideas and projects that he never wrote even one full-length book, though he wanted to and attempted to start on several occasions. Fingers in too many intellectual pies, I reckon.
In the oft-quoted (so why not quote them again) words of Professor Tolkien, "I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect 'history' to be anything but a 'long defeat' - though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory."
I don't know how any but the most facile, head-in-the-sack optimists can look around and see anything but the long defeat. All the more reason not to set your course by the divigations of the news cycle.
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