Friedrich Engel-Janosi, Reflections of Lord Acton on Historical Principles (1941)

Friedrich Engel-Janosi’s journal article, developed from a conference paper, reconstructs Acton’s historical principles through unpublished Cambridge notes, published essays, and correspondence. Its movement from intellectual formation through ecclesiastical controversy to the Cambridge professorship culminates in an appraisal of Acton’s enduring significance. Three documentary appendices extend the discussion of Italian liberal Catholicism, papal temporal sovereignty, and opposition at the Vatican Council. Engel-Janosi acknowledges that the fragmentary notes impose a patchwork character on his reconstruction. Nevertheless, they reveal a coherent aspiration: to unite Catholic faith, liberal freedom, historical scholarship, and uncompromising moral judgment.

Acton himself locates the difficulty in the apparent incompatibility of his allegiances:

I find that people disagree with me either because they hold that Liberalism is not true or that Catholicism is not true or that both cannot be together.

Engel-Janosi explains this conjunction through Acton’s education under Ignaz Doellinger and the intellectual culture of Munich. Against Ranke’s concentration on political formations, Doellinger made religion the organizing principle of universal history. Munich Catholicism also supplied a conception of development within the Church. Engel-Janosi situates this outlook within a wider liberal Catholic movement, encompassing French, German, and Italian thinkers rather than originating with a single founder. Its expectation of religious renewal retained an Enlightenment inheritance: confidence that human institutions and moral understanding could improve.

Acton transformed this inheritance into a philosophy of progress toward freedom. Freedom meant protection for conscientious duty against governments, majorities, custom, and opinion; the situation of minorities supplied its decisive test. Liberty was therefore an end, not merely an instrument of national prosperity or political greatness. Its historical growth also disclosed providential education. Engel-Janosi’s central conceptual move is to connect this religious liberalism with Acton’s insistence that ethics, rather than metaphysics or political success, supplies history’s ultimate standard.

The inflexible integrity of the moral code is to me the secret of the authority, the dignity and utility of history.

This principle explains Acton’s hostility to concentrated power. Neither ecclesiastical office nor political achievement could sanctify wrongdoing. Engel-Janosi places him alongside Guizot and Burckhardt in distrusting power, while distinguishing the optimistic view of human possibilities underlying much liberal Catholic thought from Burckhardt’s pessimism. Historical criticism must remove the immunity conventionally granted to rulers and religious leaders. The historian’s moral independence thus serves the same purpose as political liberty: protecting conscience against authority.

Yet Acton’s commitment to historical development created difficulties for his commitment to absolute judgment. Engel-Janosi describes his methodological outlook as a form of European historicism: institutions become intelligible through their development and historical effects. The Vatican Council exposed its collision with authoritative dogmatic definition. Against a decision establishing papal infallibility independently of historical inquiry, Acton demanded that scholarship precede ecclesiastical pronouncement:

Ecclesiastical decisions not to precede, but to follow scientific decisions.

Here “scientific” means disciplined historical research. Engel-Janosi presents the Council as both an intellectual defeat and a source of isolation, while observing that Acton failed to understand Pius IX’s mysticism. The appendices complicate any simple opposition between liberal scholarship and papal authority. Acton had defended temporal sovereignty as a contingent safeguard against state domination, despite recognizing defective papal administration. His notes on Rosmini interpret 1848 as a lost opportunity for constitutional renewal. His assessments of the Council minority distinguish resistance grounded in truth from resistance motivated by expediency, without assuming that opponents of infallibility were morally superior to its supporters.

The controversy with Bishop Creighton brings Acton’s universal moral standard into sharper focus. Individuals, not collective abstractions, possess freedom and bear responsibility. Historical circumstance cannot cancel their accountability. Yet Engel-Janosi carefully distinguishes the rigor of public judgment from the application of an identical code to every sphere:

The principles of public morality are as definite as those of the morality of private life, but they are not identical.

Acton’s public code gives human life overriding importance, making bloodshed decisive against reputations otherwise sustained by achievement or sanctity. Engel-Janosi nevertheless criticizes his treatment of Catholic saints as failing to grasp the nature of their saintliness. The article thus admires Acton’s moral seriousness without simply endorsing his verdicts.

At Cambridge, Acton restated his confidence in progress, archival discovery, critical method, and impartiality:

If men were truly sincere and delivered judgments by no canons but those of evident morality, then Julian would be described in the same terms by Christian and pagan; Luther by Catholic and Protestant, Washington by Whig and Tory.

Engel-Janosi identifies this aspiration as another Enlightenment legacy. He also marks its limitations: documentary abundance can overwhelm understanding, technical criticism can lose the spiritual connections among events, and progress can obscure the distinctive value of particular epochs. Nevertheless, Acton’s ethical conception enabled him to envisage universal history as connected development. The concluding appraisal locates his lasting importance less in professional optimism or accumulated learning than in the personality formed through historical inquiry. His achievement was an example of historical thinking as moral illumination, inseparable from—but not reducible to—his scholarship.