POWER
TENDS TO
CORRUPT
Lord Acton’s
BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT
POWER TENDS TO CORRUPT
Lord Acton’s Study of Liberty
CHRISTOPHER LAZARSKI
STUDY of LIBERT Y
CHRISTOPHER LAZARSKI
“Lazarski has given us a very helpful discussion of Acton’s ideas contextualized within
a broader current of religious, political and
philosophical reflection. Especially illuminating
is the exploration of Acton’s ideas vis-à-vis
those of Tocqueville, Burke, and Dollinger.
To this extent, Lazarski advances our understanding of Catholic and liberal political
thought in the 19th century.”—Samuel Gregg,
Director of Research at the Acton Institute
and author, most recently, of Wilhelm Ropke’s
Political Economy
“What is particularly unique about this book
is Lazarski’s very detailed analysis of Acton’s
historical thinking. Although Acton was a
historian, who worked on the Cambridge
historical studies, no other work to my knowledge examines as thoroughly as this one
Acton’s view of the past in terms of the goal
that he saw as operative in human events.”
—Paul Gottfried, Professor of Humanities,
Raffensperger Chair of the Political Science
Department at Elizabethtown College, and
author, most recently, of Leo Strauss and the
Conservative Movement in America
Lord Acton (1834–1902) is often called a historian of liberty. A great political thinker, he endeavored to understand the components of a successful free
political community in which members have control over their own lives and
the affairs of their polity while successfully avoiding arbitrary power exercised from above or below. He had a rare talent to reach beneath the surface
and reveal the hidden springs that move events. Observing various polities
and states, as well as certain trends in history, he attempted to see how those
principles worked in practice, from antiquity to his own times. But though
he penned hundreds of papers, essays, reviews, letters, and ephemera, the
ultimate book of his findings and views on the history of liberty remained
unwritten. Reading a book a day for years he still could not keep pace with
the output of his time, and finally, dejected, he gave up. Today, Acton is
mainly known for a single maxim: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute
power corrupts absolutely.”
In Power Tends to Corrupt, Christopher Lazarski presents the first in-depth
consideration of Acton’s thought in more than fifty years. Acton left behind
hundreds of articles and tens of thousands of index cards with his notes.
From a mass of material Lazarski brings the work to light in accessible language, focusing on Acton’s understanding of liberty and its development in
Western history, and providing a secondary look at his political theory. What
results is a work akin to an overall account of the history of liberty such as
Acton had planned to write. Lazarski’s book is an outstanding exegesis of the
theories and findings of one of the nineteenth century’s keenest minds.
Despite being very active and influential in his own time, Acton’s intellectual legacy has been largely lost to the modern readership. Now, when the
understanding of liberty is as critical as ever, Lazarski goes far in bringing
Lord Acton’s work the attention it deserves.
CHRISTOPHER LAZARSKI is associate dean in the School of International
Relations at Lazarski University, Warsaw, and author of The Lost Opportunity:
Attempts at Unification of the Anti-Bolsheviks.
ISBN 978-0-87580-465-1, $45.00, November 2012, Cloth 6x9, 340 pages