阿克顿勋爵

打开戴维·鲍尔达奇的最出名的小说《绝对权力》（Absolute Power），扉页上是一句阿克顿勋爵的名言：

Absolute Power corrupts absolutely.  ----Lord Acton

约翰•爱默里克•爱德华•达尔伯格-阿克顿，第一代阿克顿男爵，KCVO（英语：John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton，1st Baron Acton，1834年1月10日－1902年6月19日），英国剑桥大学历史系教授，历史学家，理论政治家。19世纪英国知识界和政治生活中最有影响的人物之一。著名的自由主义大师。英文常简称Lord Acton。自由主义名言“权力使人腐败，绝对的权力绝对使人腐败。”出自他写的书《自由与权力》，侯建译，北京：商务印书馆，2001。

 他是自由主义运动的重要人物。他担任过下院议员，在曾四次当选的著名首相威廉•尤尔特•格莱斯顿任内，他产生过重要的政治影响。1885-1902年任剑桥大学近代史教授，主编《剑桥近代史》。作为历史学家，他把历史探索的客观性与历史性研究中的道德判断结合起来；作为政治哲学家，他对个人自由以及促进与威胁个人自由的力量的有力分析，深刻影响了20世纪思想史。他的一些极具洞察力的名言深入人心。

Famous sayings of Lord Acton:

1. “Power tends to corruption; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

2. “Great men are almost always bad men.”

3. “The strong man with the dagger is followed by the weak man with the sponge.”

4. “There is no worse heresy than the fact that the office sanctifies the holder of it.”

5. “There is not a soul who does not have to beg alms of another, either a smile, a handshake, or a fond eye.”

6. “The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.”

7. “Be not content with the best book; seek sidelights from the others; have no favourites.”

8. “The science of politics is the one science that is deposited by the streams of history, like the grains of gold in the sand of a river; and the knowledge of the past, the record of truths revealed by experience, is eminently practical, as an instrument of action and a power that goes to making the future.”

9. “[History is] not a burden on the memory but an illumination of the soul.”

10. “And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control. History has proven that. All power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

11. “The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks.”

12. “The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern: every class is unfit to govern.”

13. “Liberty is not the power of doing what we like, but the right to do what we ought.”

14. “There is no error so monstrous that it fails to find defenders among the ablest men.”

15. “Save for the wild force of Nature, nothing moves in this world that is not Greek in its origin.”

16. “Socialism means slavery.”

17. “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 differed from their own; and this association, which is always dangerous, has been sometimes disastrous, by giving to opponents just grounds of opposition.”

Biography of Lord Acton

 John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton—First Baron Acton of Aldenham—was born in Naples, Italy on January 10, 1834. His father, Sir Richard Acton, was descended from an established English line, and his mother, Countess Marie Louise de Dalberg, came from a Rhenish family which was considered to be second in status only to the imperial family of Germany. Three years after his father's death in 1837, his mother remarried Lord George Leveson (later known as Earl Granville, William Gladstone's Foreign Secretary), and moved the family to Britain. With his cosmopolitan background and upbringing, Acton was equally at home in England or on the Continent, and grew up speaking English, German, French, and Italian.

Barred from attending Cambridge University because of his Catholicism, John Acton studied at the University of Munich under the famous church historian, Ignaz von Döllinger. Through Döllinger's teaching, Acton learned to consider himself first and foremost a historian. Early in life, he nurtured a great fondness for Whig politicians such as Edmund Burke, but Acton soon became a Liberal. His time with Döllinger also broadened his appreciation and understanding of Catholic and Reformed theology. Through his studies and his own experience, Acton was made acutely aware of the danger posed to individual conscience by any kind of religious or political persecution.

Through the influence of his stepfather, Acton pursued electoral politics and entered the House of Commons in 1859 as a member for the Irish constituency of Carlow. In 1869, Gladstone rewarded Acton for his efforts on behalf of Liberal political causes by offering him a peerage.

Earlier, Lord Acton also acquired the Rambler, making it a liberal Catholic journal dedicated to the discussion of social, political, and theological issues and ideas. Through this activity and through his involvement in the first Vatican Council, Lord Acton became known as one of the most articulate defenders of religious and political freedom. He argued that the church faithfully fulfills its mission by encouraging the pursuit of scientific, historical, and philosophical truth, and by promoting individual liberty in the political realm.

The 1870s and 1880s saw the continued development of Lord Acton's thought on the relationship between history, religion, and liberty. In that period he began to construct outlines for a universal history designed to document the progress of the relationship between religious virtue and personal freedom. Acton spoke of his work as a “theodicy,” a defense of God's goodness and providential care of the world.

 In 1895, Lord Acton was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University. From this position, he deepened his view that the historian's search for truth entails the obligation to make moral judgments on history, even when those judgments challenge the historian's own deeply held opinions. Although he never finished his anticipated universal history, Lord Acton planned the Cambridge Modern History and lectured on the French Revolution, Western history since the Renaissance, and the history of freedom from antiquity through the 19th century.

When he died in 1902, Lord Acton was considered one of the most learned people of his age, unmatched for the breadth, depth, and humanity of his knowledge. He has become famous to succeeding generations for his observation —learned through many years of study and first-hand experience—that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”