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In Part 1 of this series, I mentioned Lord Acton’s interest in two aspects of the history of freedom: the intellectual and the institutional. This essay focuses on the institutional factor, specifically, on a fundamental condition that permitted free institutions to develop in the West. After summarizing Acton’s views on this matter, I quote from numerous sources, ranging from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, to show that Acton’s approach has been a common explanation among classical liberal historians.

“Liberty,” according to Acton, “is established by the conflict of powers.” This principle is the key to Acton’s institutional history of freedom.

For centuries after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the Catholic Church was the only institution with the authority to challenge the power of feudal lords, monarchs, and emperors. Church and state contended for power, and if either had achieved total victory the probable result would have been the kind of absolute despotism that developed in other parts of the world. This is the fundamental theme in Acton’s history of freedom—a prolonged struggle between spiritual and temporal powers in which neither side was able to achieve complete victory until the ultimate triumph of the sovereign territorial state in post-Reformation Europe. (Many historians have warned against speaking of this as a struggle between church and state, since the “state,” as we understand the term today, did not, for the most part, exist in medieval Europe. I hereby acknowledge this qualification, ignore it, and move on.)

According to Acton, neither church nor state favored liberty, but, while competing for allies, each granted various immunities and privileges to towns, parliaments, universities, guilds, and other corporations. Eventually some of these institutions were able to resist the power of both church and state—and so there evolved a decentralized system of power unknown to the ancient world and the East. Institutional barriers to arbitrary and absolute power, long advocated in theory, now existed in fact. Individual liberty was a happy byproduct of this system. As Acton wrote in “The History of Freedom in Christianity.”

To that conflict …we owe the rise of civil liberty. If the Church had continued to buttress the thrones of the kings whom it anointed, or if the struggle had terminated speedily in an undivided victory, all Europe would have sunk down under a Byzantine or Muscovite despotism. For the aim of both contending parties was absolute authority. But although liberty was not the end for which they strove, it was the means by which the temporal and spiritual power called the nations to their aid. The towns of Italy and Germany won their franchises, France got her States-General, and England her Parliament out of the alternate phases of the contest; and as long as it lasted it prevented the rise of divine right.

The contention that freedom emerged in Europe as an unintended consequence of centuries of conflict between various claimants to power, with the result that no single power was able to establish a monopoly, was scarcely original with Acton. I don’t know how far back this theory goes, but it was advanced in the early eighteenth century by Voltaire (who is sometimes credited with originating the idea), and it subsequently became standard fare among classical liberals who wrote about the history of freedom.

This approach to understanding the evolution of free institutions in the West has also been defended by many modern historians. Because of the tremendous importance of this explanation, I will cite examples from various sources. These examples are far from exhaustive, of course, but they may serve as indicators for readers who wish to investigate this matter in more detail.

In his Philosophical Letters (1733; also known as Letters Concerning the
English Nation), Voltaire discussed why personal freedom in England was so much greater than in his native France. English liberty, he argued, emerged from conflicts between English kings and nobles that prevented any single power from becoming dominant.

Fortunately, in the shaking that the strife between kings and nobles gave to empires, the chains of the nations have been more or less loosened. Liberty was born in England of the quarrels between tyrants.

In Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (written during the early 1790s and published posthumously), Condorcet attributed the decentralized power structure in Renaissance Italy to the “rivalry between pope and emperor,” which “prevented Italy from being united under one master, and ensured the continuance of a large number of independent societies.”

In History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe (1861), the secular historian W.E.H. Lecky discussed “the conflicting claims of temporal sovereigns and of popes.” Although severely critical of the Catholic Church, especially for its role in promoting the “Crusades and religious persecution,” Lecky concluded that “there can be no question that it was on the whole favourable to liberty.”

The simple fact that nations acknowledged two different masters was itself a barrier to despotism, and the Church had always to appeal to the subjects of a sovereign to enforce its decisions against him. There was therefore a certain bias among ecclesiastics in favour of the people, and it must be added that the medieval popes almost always belonged to a far higher grade of civilization than their opponents. Whatever may have been their faults, they represented the cause of moral restraint, of intelligence, and of humanity, in an age of physical force, ignorance, and barbarity.

In The History of European Liberalism (1927 English translation), Guido de Ruggiero wrote:

Ever since the feudal period, and with renewed vigour in the age of absolute monarchy, the Catholic Church fought against State supremacy; and the very fact of this conflict between two great powers has been an effectual safeguard for individuals against the perils of utter enslavement to either. If the Western peoples have succeeded in saving themselves from the stagnant theocracy of the East, it has been because of the age-long rivalry of Church and State, rooted ultimately in the fact that both Church and State were self-contained and self-sufficient institutions forming in fact two separate and independent states.

Regarding the “reciprocal influence of church and state” in medieval Europe, Alexander Rüstow (Freedom and Domination: A Historical Critique of Civilization, 1980 English translation) wrote:

To both sides this separation of power was undesirable; church and state each tried to establish total and unrestricted domination, yet neither succeeded. The church remained the conscience of the state, the state the critic of the church—both unquestionably to the benefit of Western Mankind. For as Voltaire knew, this dualism was the strongest guarantee of freedom, the only protection against being overtaken by one of the two powers.

This thesis was nicely summarized in 1964 by the distinguished medieval historian Brian Tierney (The Crisis of Church and State, 1050-1300), who also called attention to the philosophical consequences of the conflict between religious and secular authorities:

The very existence of two power structures competing for men’s allegiance instead of only one compelling obedience greatly enhanced the possibilities for human freedom. In practical life over and over again in the Middle Ages men found themselves having to make genuine choices according to conscience or self-interest between conflicting appeals to their loyalty. On the theoretical level, intellectuals were led to formulate detailed arguments about the deposition of tyrannical kings or popes and to define with more and more precision the due limits of their respective powers.

In his magisterial book, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (1983), Harold J. Berman explored in considerable detail the highly decentralized legal system of medieval Europe. According to Berman, “Perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of the Western legal tradition is the coexistence and competition within the same community of diverse jurisdictions and diverse legal systems.” Berman continued:

The pluralism of Western law, which has both reflected and reinforced the pluralism of Western political and economic life, has been, or once was, a source of development, or growth—legal growth as well as political and economic growth. It also has been, or once was, a source of freedom. A serf might run to the town court for protection against his master. A vassal might run to the king’s court for protection against his lord. A cleric might run to the ecclesiastical court for protection against the king.

At the risk of taxing the patience of readers with a laundry list of quotations, I will conclude this essay with some general observations and additional passages about the role of unintended consequences in histories of freedom written by classical liberals.

In Part 2 of this series, I criticized Herbert Butterfield’s discussion of “the whig interpretation of history” as unfair and inaccurate. The leading whig (i.e., classical liberal) historians, I argued, did not trace the progress of freedom in the linear, simplistic manner that Butterfield attributed to them. The passages I have quoted thus far illustrate my point, but additional examples may be given of the stress that whig historians placed on unintended consequences. This is especially true of eighteenth-century Scottish historians, such as Adam Smith, David Hume, Adam Ferguson, John Millar, and William Robertson.

Consider The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles the Fifth (1769), by William Robertson. In the celebrated first chapter, “A View of the Progress of Society in Europe,” Robertson discussed how Europe emerged from the “darkness” that prevailed in the centuries after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The factors that contributed to this progress, Robertson maintained, were sometimes unintended. The Crusades, for example, were condemned by Robertson as “a singular monument of human folly”; nevertheless, “from these expeditions, extravagant as they were, beneficial consequences followed which had neither been foreseen nor expected.”

Or consider John Millar’s An Historical View of the English Government (1787). Millar was a student of Adam Smith, so it should come as no surprise that he was sensitive to the role of unintended consequences in historical causation. A good example appears in Millar’s discussion of the Magna Carta and other “charters” that contributed to the progress of English freedom.

Contrary to some modern historians, who look with academic disdain upon the supposedly naïve treatments of English liberty by whig historians, Millar did not embrace the simplistic notion that the Magna Carta and similar charters were intended to establish freedom for the common people of England. On the contrary, “the parties concerned in them were not actuated by the most liberal principles.” Such charters were not meant “to secure the liberties of the people at large, as to establish the privileges of a few individuals.” They resulted from the conflicts between “a set of petty tyrants” (the nobility) and “a great tyrant” (the king). Millar continued:

But though the freedom of the common people was not intended in those charters, it was eventually secured to them; for when the peasantry, and other persons of low rank, were afterwards enabled, by their industry, and by the progress of arts, to emerge from their inferior and servile condition, and to acquire opulence, they were gradually admitted to the exercise of the same privileges which had been claimed by men of independent fortunes; and found themselves entitled, of course, to the benefit of that free government which was already established. The limitations of arbitrary power, which had been calculated chiefly to promote the interest of the nobles, were thus, by a change of circumstances, rendered equally advantageous to the whole community as if they had originally proceeded from the most exalted spirit of patriotism.

Aside from the historical significance of the preceding quotations, I confess to a personal motive in presenting them. Over decades of writing about and teaching the history of libertarian thought, I have often been asked for a list of recommended reading. What books should a student of freedom read if he or she wishes to understand the origin and development of libertarian ideas and how they were implemented? Implicit in this question, more often than not, is the assumption that only fairly recent books are worth reading, that historical accounts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are outdated and are therefore a waste of time.

Now, I don’t wish to deny that considerable advances have been made in our historical knowledge in modern times, but I do wish to deny that such advances render earlier works of no value. I have benefitted tremendously from my reading of historical works on freedom written during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially for their presentation of general themes that were regarded as fundamental to the classical liberal tradition. I therefore recommend that serious students of liberty study those early accounts as well.

It is often said that early historical works should be read with caution. I agree, but I would add that all historical accounts, whenever written, should be read with caution. I also contend that an understanding of how classical liberals viewed history is indispensable if we wish to understand classical liberalism itself.

Lord Acton once said that we cannot truly appreciate an idea unless we know something about its history. In this as in many other matters, Acton was exactly right.

Modern historians have been a reflective tribe; some have written articles and books in which they analyze various problems that attend the art of writing history, such as the nature and possibility of objectivity and the role of value judgments. Among their writings on methodology, few if any have influenced professional historians as much as The Whig Interpretation of History (1931), a slender book by the British historian Herbert Butterfield (1900-1979).

Many professional historians have followed Butterfield’s lead in condemning “the whig interpretation of history,” or what Butterfield sometimes called the “whig fallacy.” These labels are meant to signify a deeply flawed method of writing history, one that Butterfield associated with various whig historians. Other than a few names mentioned in passing, the only historian that Butterfield discussed was Lord Acton, so it is appropriate to discuss Butterfield’s charges in my series on Acton.

Were Butterfield’s criticisms based on an accurate understanding of Acton’s ideas? I contend they were not.

When historians criticize the whig interpretation of history, they are thinking primarily of those nineteenth-century classical liberal historians—such as Lord Acton, T.B. Macaulay, H.T. Buckle, and W.E.H. Lecky—who focused on the progress of freedom in various spheres, especially in post-Reformation Europe. In particular, Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859), who was one of the most widely read historians of the nineteenth century, has been singled out as the quintessential practitioner of the whig interpretation of history. And to hurl this charge against a historian is, in effect, to dismiss his work with a sneer.

What, precisely, is the whig interpretation of history? What is the fallacy that whig historians supposedly committed? Some historians identify what they call presentism as the fundamental fallacy. This is the (supposed) fallacy of interpreting the past from the perspective of the present, of assessing people from bygone eras in terms of our own moral and political values, with the result that those who agreed with us, or who came closest to our way of thinking, receive a more sympathetic hearing than those who did not.

In contrast, critics of this “whig fallacy” insist that the first duty of the historian is to understand historical figures in their own terms, within the intellectual, social, cultural, and political contexts of their own times, rather than judging them by our standards. The job of the historian is to understand historical figures as they understood themselves, not to evaluate them through the distorting medium of our own values. Thus has “context” become a key word in modern historical writing.

Butterfield was all over the map when it came to what he meant by “the whig interpretation of history.” Although he did not use the word “presentism,” he did join more recent historians in condemning what the word denotes. But Butterfield also associated other errors with this approach, including the imposition of inappropriate value judgments by the historian. Indeed, if Butterfield is to be believed, whig historians committed virtually every major methodological blunder that it is possible for historians to commit.

Although Butterfield was something of a classical liberal himself, he criticized earlier liberal historians who viewed history through the prism of libertarian values by focusing on the progress of freedom in recent centuries, and who attempted to explain the causes and conditions of that progress. This perspective distorted the historical record, according to Butterfield. In searching for the origins of values we hold dear today, such as religious freedom, whig historians interpreted people and events in terms of good and evil. Those individuals who contributed to the progress of freedom were praised, whereas those who resisted or impeded that progress were condemned.

In discussing this subject, Butterfield made several points that bear mentioning.

First, whig historians, in their search for heroes and villains, typically vilified Catholics, so the whig interpretation may also be dubbed the Protestant interpretation of history. Whig historians supposedly traced a direct line from Martin Luther to the eventual triumph of religious freedom in many western countries, and in the process they condemned Catholics as enemies of freedom.

Second, Butterfield warned that general overviews of history are prone to adopt a whig perspective, because they omit details that would enable readers to understand the motives and reasons of people they disagree with. When these details are missing, as they are in highly abridged accounts, readers will read their own values into the past and thereby misunderstand why certain people acted as they did.

Third, Butterfield cautioned against finding lessons in history. After the whig historian imposes his own preconceptions on history, he concludes that history teaches us such-and-such. Yet this such-and-such turns out to be nothing more than a logical implication of the whig theory itself, not something that history per se has taught us. If the whig historian claims to have discovered grand moral principles from his study of history, this is only because he superimposed those selfsame principles on his investigations from the outset. The source of moral lessons is the whig historian, not history per se.

According to Butterfield, the aim of the historian “is to achieve the understanding of the men and parties of the past.” The basic problem of whig historiography is that “it studies the past with reference to the present.” Whig historians typically believed in progress; and in tracing the history of progress (say, in the realm of religious freedom) they divided “the world into the friends and enemies of progress.” This perspective inevitably distorted the historical record, because people in the past did not hold the same values or view the social and political worlds as we do today. The good historian will eschew the effort to divide humankind into good and evil; instead he will attempt to empathize with the people he investigates and to understand their ideas, decisions, and actions as they understood them.

There is no doubt that Butterfield gave some sound advice. The problem is that most whig (or liberal) historians did not commit the crude fallacies that he attributed to them. For example, I know of no leading whig historian who attempted to trace a direct line from Martin Luther to the emergence of religious freedom. Rather, those historians typically regarded religious freedom as an unintended consequence of the Reformation—an interpretation with which Butterfield himself agreed. Moreover, the perspective of some leading whig historians of the nineteenth century, such as Lecky and Buckle, was more secular than Protestant, and they frequently gave Catholics their due, as when the Catholic Church served as a protective buffer between secular rulers and individuals.

In addition, more than a few whig historians preceded Butterfield in insisting that historians should understand their subjects within their historical context. Indeed, this was commonplace. Consider a celebrated book, The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles the Fifth (1769), by the celebrated Scottish historian William Robertson (an important figure in the Scottish Enlightenment). Robertson, a Protestant, had a good deal to say about the progress of freedom in Europe since the Reformation. He did not hesitate to identify the friends and enemies of progress, so by Butterfield’s standard he was about as whiggish as they come. Yet, in a typical remark, Robertson criticized histories “written by modern authors, who are apt to substitute the ideas and maxims of their own age in the place of those which influenced the persons whose actions they attempt to relate.” Such historians “convey a very imperfect notion of the spirit” of the time they were investigating.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, whig historians often insisted that historians should attempt to understand the “spirit” of an age, i.e., the beliefs, assumptions, and perspectives, whether explicit or implicit, that permeated a particular society or culture. It is therefore difficult to know which historians Butterfield thought he was criticizing.

The problem becomes even more acute when we consider that the only whig historian discussed by Butterfield was Lord Acton, and that Acton was a Catholic, not a Protestant. Of course, since Acton was also a classical liberal, it could be said that he was guilty of committing some vaguely defined whig fallacy, despite his religious affiliation. But this won’t wash, as anyone who has read Acton carefully can attest. On the contrary, Acton maintained that no one group or movement, religious or secular, deserves exclusive credit for the theory and evolution of free institutions. He wrote that historians should avoid the error of “making history into the proof of their theories.” Instead, the historian should try “to do the best he can for the other side, and to avoid pertinacity or emphasis on his own.”

It would be an absurd caricature to attribute to Acton most of the fallacies that Butterfield linked to whig historiography. So why did Butterfield single him out? Primarily because of Acton’s comments about the role of value judgments in history. Butterfield exploited Acton’s penchant for penning memorable aphorisms. Even those people who have never heard of Acton are probably familiar with his maxim, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” According to Butterfield, this aphorism instills a prejudice against historical figures who wielded great power, and this prejudice, in turn, hinders our ability to understand them accurately.

Butterfield and other critics of Acton objected to some of his comments in “The Study of History,” a lecture delivered in 1895, after Acton’s appointment as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. It was here that Acton expressed his belief that “liberty is the one ethical result that rests on the converging and combined conditions of advancing civilization”; it was here that he advised students of history to “suspect power more than vice”; it was here that he likened history to “a hanging judge”; and it was here that he uttered the oft-quoted line: “But the weight of history is against me when 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.”

Critics of Acton who quote these remarks rarely mention Acton’s admonitions in the same lecture about the need for impartiality and accuracy in historical writing, and the danger of making history into a proof of one’s own theories. Similar remarks are scattered throughout Acton’s writings, e.g.: “The absence of a definite didactic purpose is the only security for the good faith of a historian.” So what is going on here?

Acton’s views on the role of value judgments in history were complex and subtle, so it is difficult to summarize them in a few paragraphs. Essentially, Acton was objecting to those historians who whitewashed the unjust actions of “great men,” especially secular and religious leaders, by attributing to them grand purposes and designs. Atrocities that would naturally strike most people as repellent if committed by ordinary people were treated as means to noble ends when committed by people with power; and some historians lightly passed over the details of such atrocities, especially when dealing with a religious or political figure they admired.

Acton astutely recognized that all historical treatments involve value judgments, if only implicitly, because the historian must use value judgments when selecting which facts to include as part of his narrative. Acton was especially critical of fellow Catholic historians who downplayed the significance of various inquisitions, or who excused the role of the papacy by placing most of the responsibility on secular rulers.

Historians need not expressly render judgments of good and evil in order to smuggle value judgments into their writing. Such judgments are integral to the discipline of history itself, so historians must decide whether to reveal their value premises openly so that readers can decide for themselves if they have unduly affected a given historical account. In addition, historians must decide whether to present both sides, good and bad, of an important historical figure so that readers can make their own assessments of his or her character and actions.

It is perhaps ironic that Lord Acton, the supposed dean of whig historians, offered his ideas about value judgments as an antidote to the bias that he found in other historians, both Protestant and Catholic. He did not call for historians to praise heroes and condemn villains; rather, he advised historians to be impartial in their accounts, to present all relevant aspects of significant figures and then let readers determine for themselves, using the ordinary rules of morality, how to assess them.

This is what Acton meant in calling history a “hanging judge.” The historian should not hesitate to recount the worst deeds of “great men,” nor should he sugarcoat their atrocities. This kind of rounded history will result in the “hanging” of many revered figures—not because the historian does the hanging himself but because his presentation of unvarnished and unpleasant facts will cause readers themselves to condemn those supposedly great men. As Acton put it in a letter to the Anglican historian Mandell Creighton: “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.”

The Cambridge historian Lord Acton (1834-1902) – who is best remembered for his maxim “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” – spent much of his professional life working on a single book, a comprehensive history of liberty. As one of the most knowledgeable historians of the nineteenth century, Acton was uniquely qualified for this ambitious project. Unfortunately, however, his rigorous standards of scholarship eventually got the better of him.

Distrustful of secondary accounts, Acton insisted on doing original research in every phase of his history. And since his history spanned over 2500 years, covered many different countries, and dealt with everything from the history of religion and philosophy to the history of political movements, it became virtually impossible for any one person, however brilliant and industrious, to complete the task that Acton had set for himself. Consequently, Acton’s masterpiece was never finished, and his history of liberty, the work of a lifetime, became known as “the greatest book never written.”

Although Acton never published a book, he did write many articles that reflected his passionate interest in the history of freedom, religious toleration, and constitutional government. According to Acton, we cannot understand the history of Western civilization if we fail to appreciate the perennial conflict between liberty and power. The idea of liberty, he said, “is the unity, the only unity of the history of the world, and the one principle of a philosophy of history.”

Acton detected something unique in Western civilization, a distinctive worldview that set it apart from other cultures. In this worldview, which took centuries to develop, the individual was afforded a status greater than any collective entity, such as the state or society; and the individual conscience, especially in religious matters, came to be treated as a supreme value that should remain forever immune to the incursions of power.

Throughout his articles, we see many indications of Acton’s primary interest, namely to explain the various factors that contributed to the rise of freedom in Western civilization. What were the ideological conditions that led so many Western intellectuals to focus their attention on the idea of freedom? And what were the social and political conditions that made it possible to transform the idea of freedom into specific institutions? According to Acton, if we wish to understand the causes of freedom we must look beneath the surface of recent events to its roots in the intellectual, social, and political history of the Western world.

When Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and others in their tradition referred to history as “the lamp of experience,” they were expressing an insight with which Acton agreed. There is an important sense in which we can understand past ages better than our own. For example, when Edward Gibbon wrote The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire he was dealing with events that had happened some 1500 years earlier. Yet this distance of time, though disadvantageous in some respects, enabled Gibbon to view the arc of Roman history from a perspective that would have been impossible for a historian living, say, in the year 300, in the heart of Rome itself.

Similarly, a historian living a century from now could probably write a better history of modern libertarianism than we can at present, even though we are able to experience events as they happen, in a way the future historian cannot. What the future historian will have, and what we presently lack, is an overall perspective of how things will eventually turn out – which libertarian ideas and policies will be able to gain popular support, which libertarian institutions will prove most effective, and so forth. We are simply too close to these things at present to be able to render a final judgment; and, unlike the future historian, we cannot know where our current efforts will take us.

This is why modern libertarians, like our eighteenth-century predecessors, must rely on a knowledge of freedom’s history for our own “lamp of experience.” And here we are especially fortunate to have a historian of Acton’s caliber to guide us.

Two of Acton’s essays are especially relevant in this context. The first, “The History of Freedom in Antiquity,” stresses the intellectual history of freedom, whereas the second, “The History of Freedom in Christianity,” focuses on the institutional history of freedom. Before exploring the significance of this distinction, we would do well to ponder a few of Acton’s incisive observations. In “The History of Freedom in Antiquity,” Acton wrote:

At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities, that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects often differed from their own; and this association, which is always dangerous, has been sometimes disastrous, by giving to opponents just grounds of opposition, and by kindling dispute over the spoils in the hour of success.

This passage raises a number of interesting issues that I cannot explore here. I quoted it to illustrate the principle that even a little knowledge of freedom’s history can shed light on its future prospects. Modern libertarians, for example, regard themselves as among those “sincere friends of freedom” who, according to Acton, have always been in the minority. Thus, rather than viewing our minority status as cause for pessimism, we should understand that this has been the norm throughout history. A minority status, according to Acton, has not presented an insuperable barrier to the progress of freedom. Of course, history, as they say, is not destiny, so Acton’s observation doesn’t prove anything one way or the other. But it may suggest new ways of looking at old problems.

Immediately after the passage I just quoted, Acton wrote:

No obstacle has been so constant, or so difficult to overcome, as uncertainty and confusion touching the nature of true liberty. If hostile interests have wrought much injury, false ideas have wrought still more; and its advance is recorded in the increase of knowledge, as much as in the improvement of laws. The history of institutions is often a history of deception and illusions; for their virtue depends on the ideas that produce and on the spirit that preserves them, and the form may remain unaltered when the substance has passed away.

As is so typical of Acton’s writing, this passage bears the mark of extensive research and reflection, condensing a number of important ideas into a few lines. Perhaps most important for our purpose is Acton’s point about the significance of ideas and their relationship to institutions.

Essentially, Acton was saying that political institutions alone cannot be relied upon to preserve freedom, because such institutions have no real substance apart from the ideas that people have about them. A political institution, such as the American presidency, may retain the same external characteristics through time; officially, for example, the office of president had the same powers during the latter half of the nineteenth century, when Acton was writing, that it had during the Washington administration. But, as Acton pointed out, the reality of power is often far different from what it appears to be on paper:

Legally and to outward seeming the American President is the successor of Washington, and still enjoys power devised and limited by the Convention of Philadelphia. In reality the new President differs from the Magistrate imagined by the fathers of the Republic as widely as Monarchy from Democracy, for he is expected to make 70,000 changes in the public service; fifty years ago John Quincy Adams dismissed only two men.

It is interesting to note that a similar point had been made many years earlier by James Madison about the separation of powers in the federal government. The system of checks and balances was supposed to pit each branch of the government against the other two, which in turn was supposed to inhibit the pursuit of power by the members of each branch and thereby restrain the growth of centralized government. But some years after the Constitution had become the law of the land, Madison, who is often hailed as the father of that document, had serious second thoughts about the effectiveness of this system. Indeed, Madison later characterized the separation of powers, as specified in the Constitution, as nothing more than a “parchment barrier” to the growth of the federal government. The idea of checks and balances looked good on paper, but that was about all. It would not serve to restrain the growth of government in fact, because each branch – whether executive, legislative, or judicial – would ultimately seek to expand its power not by encroaching on the jurisdiction of the other branches but by taking freedom away from the people at large.

Acton was calling attention to a kind of optical illusion that can be generated by political institutions. As long as these institutions appear to be in good working order, then it is frequently assumed that our freedom is secure and that we needn’t worry about the onset of despotism. Yet even a political institution that originally served the interests of liberty can insensibly degenerate over time into an instrument of power – and this can happen with no external changes in the formal characteristics of that institution. This is what Acton meant when he said that “the history of institutions is often a history of deception and illusions,” and that the form of an institution “may remain unaltered when the substance has passed away.”

Acton’s other claim—that the “virtue [of institutions] depends on the ideas that produce and on the spirit that preserves them”—illustrates his belief in the crucial role of ideas in achieving and maintaining a free society. However much political institutions that were originally designed to preserve freedom may have been corrupted and turned to other uses, it may still be possible to restore their original spirit with fresh ideas about freedom. If institutions can be corrupted with bad ideas, they can also be reinvigorated with good ideas.