Word: acton
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Last week, with the publication of two biographical studies-Acton's Political Philosophy, by sometime Oxford Lecturer G. E. Fasnacht (Hollis & Carter; 215.), and Lord Acton: A Study in Conscience and Politics, by U.S. Historian Gertrude Himmelfarb (University of Chicago; $3.75)-modern readers on both sides of the Atlantic could review Acton's position. Some would find him no longer out of step. "He is of this age, more than of his," says Biographer Himmelfarb. "He is, indeed, one of our great contemporaries...
...Books a Day. Even without his vast knowledge, Acton might have become a famous man. One of his grandfathers was a Roman Catholic baronet who won the favor of the Queen of Naples and became her Prime Minister. His maternal grandfather was a duke of the Holy Roman Empire who won the favor of Talleyrand and became a peer of France. To all this, Acton's stepfather added another note: he was Lord Granville, one of the most influential of Britain's Whigs...
With such a background, young Acton was destined to have a curious education. He studied with Catholic scholars in France, England and Germany, and by the time he finished, he had delved deep into every aspect of history. He could read and all but memorize two books a day. He was said to have known everyone worth knowing and to have read everything worth reading. He was a familiar figure in the great Whig houses, at Windsor Castle and the papal court. He spoke English to his children, German to his wife, French to his sister-in-law, and Italian...
...What We Ought." To Acton, there was one constant in history: the idea of liberty. But this liberty involved far more than the rights of man or the pursuit of happiness. Indeed, said Acton, "if happiness is the end of Society, then liberty is superfluous . . . Liberty is not the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought...
Every age, said Acton, had witnessed man's struggle for freedom, but man would never find it within social or political frameworks alone. Athenian liberty failed, for instance, because it belonged "to an age which possessed no fixed standard of right and wrong," and modern democracies would also fail if they insisted that "the will of man, not the will of God, was the rule of life." True political freedom, Acton insisted, depended on quite another principle-"the principle that all political authorities must be tested and reformed according to a code which was not made...