Friedrich August von Hayek, The Actonian Revival: On Lord Acton (1834–1902)

Hayek’s 1953 book review, reprinted in 2013 with editorial notes, examines Gertrude Himmelfarb’s Lord Acton: A Study in Conscience and Politics and G. E. Fasnacht’s Acton’s Political Philosophy: An Analysis. Its governing argument is that the renewed study of Acton offers more than historical clarification: it recovers a liberal tradition whose distinction from revolutionary rationalism has become politically urgent. The review moves from this claim about liberalism’s inheritance to the contemporary revival of Acton scholarship, then assesses the two books as complementary approaches to a thinker whose writings remained dispersed and frequently aphoristic.

Hayek begins with Harold Laski’s recognition of Tocqueville and Acton as essential nineteenth-century liberals. This acknowledgment from an intellectual opponent introduces the review’s central distinction between the British Whig inheritance and what Hayek calls French intellectualist democracy. European liberalism had combined these traditions, but their association obscured differences that the experience of totalitarianism now made imperative to recover. Invoking Francis Lieber’s contrast between Anglican and Gallican liberty, Hayek places Acton within a historically developed tradition of restraints on power rather than a politics grounded in an intellectually prescribed democratic order.

It is as the last great representative of the English Whig tradition and its most important development in the American Revolution that Lord Acton is of such importance today.

The American Revolution is therefore not incidental to Hayek’s account of Acton. It represents a development of the Whig inheritance, whereas the French Revolution belongs to the competing tradition against which that inheritance must be distinguished. Hayek’s appeal to Acton’s intellectual ancestry, including Milton’s warning about the corrupting effects of prolonged power, locates his characteristic judgments within an older constitutional and moral vocabulary. Their importance does not depend on Acton having invented them: he preserved and elaborated a tradition whose continuity Hayek regards as a source of strength.

Although Acton himself never achieved a systematic exposition of his views, the corpus of his historical essays and lectures is probably still the most complete summation of that true liberalism which sharply differed from the radicalism that led to socialism, and which to me still appears as the finest set of values which Western civilisation has produced.

This is the review’s strongest statement of allegiance. Hayek treats Acton’s unfinished intellectual project as a repository of liberal values, while explicitly separating those values from radicalism’s movement toward socialism. His historical claim is equally forceful: Europe might have escaped considerable misery had this tradition prevailed over a liberalism whose intolerance of religion divided the continent. The distinction is thus both political and religious. Hayek’s praise is openly evaluative, and his account of the scholarly revival proceeds from the conviction that recovering Acton can help recover liberalism itself.

The review then situates the two books among recent studies, essay collections, and editorial projects. Their particular achievement is to provide satisfactory accounts of Acton’s ideas as a whole. Both draw extensively on manuscripts preserved at Cambridge, illuminating positions previously available chiefly through occasional publications and compressed maxims. Himmelfarb traces the evolution of Acton’s ideas; Fasnacht organizes them systematically by topic. Hayek values these different procedures because the surviving writings require both historical explanation and conceptual reconstruction.

Although I have myself for a long time been a student and admirer of Acton, I have gratefully to admit that many of the apparent contradictions in his writings have resolved themselves for me only as a result of Miss Himmelfarb's sympathetic description of the slow growth and gradual change of his views.

Himmelfarb’s accomplishment is not simply to supply biographical context, but to show how development can explain apparent inconsistency. Hayek particularly praises her reconstruction of Acton’s response to the Vatican Council’s declaration of papal infallibility in 1870, an episode obscured by the suppression of relevant correspondence. Yet his endorsement includes a substantive reservation. He thinks she exaggerates Acton’s later departure from the Whig position of the early Burke. This, he suggests, also makes her too puzzled by Acton’s praise for the American Revolution alongside his criticism of the French Revolution. Within Hayek’s interpretive framework, those judgments express a coherent distinction between traditions of liberty rather than an anomaly requiring reconciliation.

Fasnacht’s book is less readable, Hayek concedes, but equally careful and scholarly. Its exposition, largely in Acton’s own words, supplies a different route into the material:

Though Mr. Fasnacht is fully aware of the development of Acton's ideas, his aim is mainly to show that they form a coherent system and to provide as much material as possible from which the gaps in the fragmentary statements left by Acton himself can be filled.

Hayek does not claim that Acton completed such a system. Rather, Fasnacht makes its reconstruction possible through surviving statements and preparatory notes, including material accumulated for the unwritten History of Liberty. The review closes by emphasizing this archive’s unfinished possibilities: it contains resources for future scholarship and challenges for readers confronting difficult questions of political philosophy. The Actonian revival matters, on Hayek’s account, because it joins the recovery of historical evidence to the renewal of a liberal inheritance centered on resistance to power, religious tolerance, and the discrimination between rival meanings of liberty.