Selected Writings of Lord Acton: Essays in the History of Liberty. Essays in the Study and Writing of History.

Sir John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902), stands among the most distinguished historians of the Victorian age, a scholar whose vast erudition and moral seriousness shaped modern thinking on liberty, conscience, and the responsibilities of historical writing. Educated at Munich under Ignaz von Döllinger, Acton brought a Continental rigor to English historiography and emerged as a leading voice of liberal Catholic thought through his editorship of The Rambler and The Home and Foreign Review. His opposition to the doctrine of papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council crystallized the conviction that would animate his life's work: that conscience must judge power, and that the historian's task is fundamentally a moral one. Appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge in 1895, he conceived and planned the Cambridge Modern History, a monumental undertaking that appeared after his death. His writings survive principally in essays, lectures, and correspondence, gathered posthumously in Lectures on Modern History (1906), The History of Freedom and Other Essays (1907), and Historical Essays and Studies (1907). From his 1887 letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton comes the celebrated formulation that power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely — a maxim whose enduring authority reflects the depth of the historical intelligence behind it.