Friedrich August von Hayek, The Actonian Revival (1953)

Hayek’s magazine book review treats Gertrude Himmelfarb’s Lord Acton: A Study in Conscience and Politics and G. E. Fasnacht’s Acton’s Political Philosophy: An Analysis as complementary contributions to the recovery of a liberal tradition. Its movement is from a polemical account of liberalism’s divergent inheritances to an assessment of the two books’ methods and achievements. The renewed interest in Acton matters, Hayek argues, because his writings preserve an understanding of liberty obscured by the intellectualist and radical currents also associated with nineteenth-century liberalism.

Hayek begins with Harold Laski’s acknowledgment of Tocqueville and Acton as essential nineteenth-century liberals. He then distinguishes their British Whig inheritance from the French tradition of “intellectualist democracy,” whose totalitarian tendencies he regards as increasingly apparent. References to J. L. Talmon and Francis Lieber place this distinction within a wider reconsideration of democracy and freedom. Acton’s contemporary importance rests on the historical lineage he represents:

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 thus a development of the tradition Hayek values, not an instance of the revolutionary radicalism he opposes. Acton’s maxims belong to an older inheritance concerned with the corruption of power. Although Acton never produced a systematic exposition, Hayek regards his historical essays and lectures as an exceptionally complete expression of this liberalism. His claim is openly evaluative: these are, for him, among Western civilization’s finest values. He also advances a counterfactual judgment that Europe might have avoided immense suffering had this tradition prevailed over an intolerantly antireligious liberalism that divided the continent. This is the review’s political frame, rather than a conclusion derived from detailed analysis of the two books.

Against that background, Hayek welcomes recent studies, essay collections, and announced editions of Acton’s writings. The two books under review stand out because they offer the first satisfactory accounts of his ideas as a whole:

Moreover, they are complementary rather than competing with each other.

Their complementarity is methodological. Himmelfarb reconstructs the evolution of Acton’s ideas; Fasnacht organizes them systematically by topic. Both draw extensively on manuscripts preserved at Cambridge, illuminating positions previously known chiefly through aphorisms and occasional publications. Hayek emphasizes that Himmelfarb’s account resolved apparent contradictions even for him, a longstanding admirer and student of Acton. Her reconstruction also clarifies his response to the Vatican Council’s declaration of papal infallibility in 1870, an episode obscured by the suppression of relevant letters.

Hayek calls Himmelfarb’s book the best introduction to Acton’s thought, but qualifies that praise. He thinks she exaggerates Acton’s later departure from the Whig position of the early Burke. This objection bears directly on her difficulty in reconciling his admiration for the American Revolution with his criticism of the French Revolution. For Hayek, those judgments are intelligible within the distinction between liberal traditions established at the review’s outset.

Fasnacht offers the next stage of study: a less readable but equally careful exposition of Acton’s mature thought, largely through Acton’s own words.

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.

The review ends by turning incompleteness into an intellectual opportunity. Notes accumulated for Acton’s unwritten History of Liberty provide material for further scholarship and invite readers to engage difficult problems of political philosophy. Hayek’s central move is therefore both historical and constructive: recovering Acton’s development makes his apparent contradictions more intelligible, while assembling his scattered statements makes a coherent philosophy available for renewed inquiry. The revival promises more than biographical clarification; it restores a liberal inheritance Hayek considers urgently relevant.