Everyone who knows Lord Acton knows his most famous claim, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The context is less well-known. That sentence appears in a letter, written on April 5, 1887, to Mandell Creighton. Acton had written a critical review of Creighton’s history of the Papacy in a journal that Creighton himself edited. Creighton printed the review, but privately objected to Acton’s complaints about white-washing the papacy. That’s where the famous passage comes in:
“I cannot accept your canon,” Acton wrote, “that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favorable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely . . . . There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.”
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