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Title: Lord Acton by Roland Hill, Owen Chadwick ISBN: 0-300-07956-7 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: May, 2000 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $39.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3 (2 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Good study;questionable subject
Comment: Lord Acton (1834-1902), usually regarded as one of the most eminent Victorians, has largely eluded thorough analysis because of the formidable problems facing the biographer. Any definitive study must involve examination of the vast pile of Acton miscellany gathered at the Cambridge University Library, travel to several European archives (and concomitant facility in French, German and Italian) and an understanding of some fairly arcane problems of 19th century Catholic dogma. Roland Hill contends successfully with all these factors in this excellent study.
Still, students of Church history, or of 19th century Britain may well wonder if Hill's efforts were justified. Acton was born into the English Catholic aristocracy; he had all the advantages of social standing, money (for most of his life), connections and education. Yet, he failed to capitalize on any of these factors to leave a lasting mark on his age.
As a Catholic polemicist, Acton mounted campaigns against the temporal power of the Pope and the doctrine of Papal Infallibility, topics of little interest during the last 150 years. A man of undeniable erudition and learning, Acton assembled an immense private library and conducted research in dozens of Continental archives, but never published a book. A member of Parliament, Acton spoke only three times in the House in more than six years. Although appointed Regius Professor of History at Cambridge (1895), he neither started nor influenced any school of historians and his participation in the "Cambridge Modern History" was too short-lived to have had any effect. As a fairly close friend of Gladstone, Acton might have had some influence on the policies of the great Prime Minister, but if he did, even Hill's assiduous research has failed to disclose any direct link between Acton's ideas and Gladstone's actions.
Even after a careful and charitable reading, it is difficult to agree with Hill's assessment that "it is not paradoxical to admire [Acton] for books he never wrote or for what he tried to do rather than for what he succeeded in achieving." (p. 410). One can, though, admire Hill's thorough, careful and thoughtful study, and still conclude that his talents as a biographer would have been better expended on a more suitable subject.
Rating: 3
Summary: A Master who never produced a masterpiece
Comment: This is the first major biography of Lord Acton since mid-century. This remarkable historian, Catholic dissident, and philosopher of freedom was in many ways the very epitome of the erudite Victorian scholar. That is, he was _so_ learned, that the present-day reader should distrust any reviewer, including the present one, who presumes to encapsulate and classify him in a few easy paragraphs.
There's little danger of that from me. This book tells the story of Acton's life and career, and I must admit that, so far as judging the work of author and subject, my hat's simply off to them. It is interesting reading about things like Acton's near-excommunication from the Catholic Church, because of his opposition in 1870 to the new doctrine of papal infallibility, and then his continued devotion to the Church. His private correspondence with contemporaries, debating the great issues of the day, particulary freedom, make for bracing reading.
His ideas in private circulation, rather than his parliamentary career or written output, carry his fame today. His magnum opus, _History of Liberty_, was never written. The only bits of it that made it to completion were two lectures, "The History of Freedom in Antiquity", and "The History of Freedom in Christianity." Disappointingly, these and a couple of other short writings are only excerpted here--they are brief enough to have been put in an appendix of this big book. Fortunately, they can be read at the Acton Institute's website.
By the way, it was Acton who coined the phrase, "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
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