On June 19, 1902, an English lord who had coined the most famous phrase of modern politics died by a Bavarian lake. In 2026, that phrase resonates more sharply than ever—a journey of discovery in seven stages.
A deathbed in Tegernsee
It is a mild June midday in 1902 when a sixty-eight-year-old Englishman closes his eyes forever in a house overlooking Lake Tegernsee. The dying man was John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton of Aldenham, Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge—and he died where he had spent his childhood summers: on the shores of the Bavarian lake, within reach of the Catholic upbringing that had shaped him while simultaneously placing him in lifelong conflict with Rome. His death on June 19, one hundred and twenty-four years ago, is one of those dates that goes largely unnoticed in the German-speaking world. Yet anyone wishing to describe power—power in its modern manifestations, from the corridors of authority in Washington and the Kremlin to Budapest and Jerusalem—cannot overlook the man who formulated perhaps the most frequently cited sentence in political ethics. It is a sentence that must prove its validity anew for every generation; and in the summer of 2026, as this text is being written, it is doing so with startling force. The German-language press of the time noted his death briefly, almost perfunctorily—a learned Englishman with Bavarian roots, nothing more. It was only later that English historiography gradually elevated him to his rightful rank: as one of the great liberal thinkers of the 19th century, whose work remains compelling precisely because of its fragmentary nature—as a sketch of a freedom yet to be written.
The Sentence and Its Genealogy
"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." — Thus wrote Acton on April 5, 1887, in a letter to the Anglican historian and bishop Mandell Creighton. The occasion was a theological dispute: how harshly should a historian judge the Renaissance popes? Creighton, who would later become Bishop of London, had just published the second volume of his monumental history of the papacy; Acton, asked to review it, delivered a sweeping critique rather than a friendly notice. Creighton advocated for a professional moderation that judged the mighty more leniently the more powerful they were; his position was that men holding the highest offices, in particular, should not be measured by the standards applied to ordinary people. Acton disagreed, with a sharpness unusual for the academic correspondence of the time. The historical observer, he argued, must not lower his moral guard simply because his subject commanded a crown, a tiara, or an army. Rather, the ethical standard must rise—not shrink—under the pressure of responsibility. From this emerged the famous formula—not a political slogan, but an epistemological insight. To describe power is to describe a variable that corrupts everything it touches: the judgment of the powerful just as much as the powerful themselves.
It is worth reading the sentence not merely as an aphorism, but as a diagnosis. Acton was not speaking of bad people, but of a structural tendency: *corrupt*—not as a static state, but as a process of change. The language of economics is familiar with this concept; the language of virtue ethics, until then, was hardly so. Power is not a thing one possesses, but a relationship that shapes—or distorts—anyone drawn into it in a specific direction. Anyone familiar with the history of the twentieth century will find little to object to in this view. Nor did anyone who followed the election campaigns of the early 2020s.
A Catholic Liberal in the Shadow of Rome
To understand why Acton—of all people—coined this phrase, it is worth taking a look at his life. Born in Naples in 1834 into the House of Dalberg on his mother’s side—Bavarian high nobility with branches in Frankfurt—he grew up bilingual and studied in Munich under the church historian Ignaz von Döllinger. His years in Munich—and Döllinger’s lectures, delivered in a hall filled with English, Italian, and French students—shaped Acton far more profoundly than his later time at Cambridge ever could. It was Döllinger who taught him the method of source criticism; it was Döllinger who taught him that the truth of the Church could only be defended if one were willing to acknowledge every one of its historical errors. It was this teacher who instilled in Acton the distrust of the concentration of ecclesiastical power that would later make him the keenest observer of the First Vatican Council in 1869–70. The proclamation of the dogma of infallibility—the doctrine that the Pope speaks without error *ex cathedra* on matters of faith and morals—represented a critical historical turning point for Acton. He was a Catholic, and he remained one. Yet, in the concentration of ecclesiastical authority in a single man endowed with absolute competence regarding the truth, he saw a political doctrine that—in the modern world—stood as the very antithesis of liberalism.
Döllinger was broken by the dogma; he was excommunicated and has since become one of the forgotten heroes of Old Catholicism. Acton remained within the Church—but he carried with him the realization that an institution he loved had, during that summer in Rome, decreed the very opposite of what he held to be the cause of truth. The maxim from the 1887 letter has its roots here: it is not the witticism of a detached outsider, but the distillation of a profound biographical shock. To read Acton without this experience is to misread him.
Montesquieu and the Architecture of Moderation
Acton does not stand alone. Behind him lies a broader tradition, a key voice of which was the Baron de Montesquieu. In *De l'esprit des lois* (1748), the Gascon jurist articulated an observation that every subsequent Western constitution would take for granted: "C'est une expérience éternelle, que tout homme qui a du pouvoir est porté à en abuser; il va jusqu'à ce qu'il trouve des limites" — It is an eternal truth that anyone who possesses power is inclined to abuse it; he pushes on until he encounters limits. Acton never quoted this sentence without admiration. It already contains the essence of what the later, more concise formula would express.
From Montesquieu’s diagnosis came his constructive proposal: the separation of powers. The legislative, executive, and judicial branches were to limit one another, for only power could check power. It is a proposition that, in its mechanistic clarity, belongs to the political Enlightenment—yet is, at the same time, nothing more than an attempt to translate an ancient, tragic insight into a blueprint for governance. Whoever fails to share power becomes its subject. Acton adopted this fundamental idea and expanded upon it with a philosophical-historical insight. In his lectures on the "History of Freedom"—the unfinished magnum opus that preoccupied him throughout his life—he described liberalism as a centuries-long struggle to resist concentration: the concentration of power in the Church, the monarchy, the nobility, the bureaucracy, industry, and, ultimately, the modern mass state. For Acton, freedom is not a static condition but a process of distribution. Where distribution succeeds, freedom exists; where concentration triumphs, tyranny begins—regardless of whether it invokes the will of God, the people, or history.
Snyder, or: The Defense of Institutions
This is where Timothy Snyder enters the picture. The American historian—whose book *On Tyranny* (2017) became one of the most widely read political works of the decade—advances a thesis that reads as if distilled from Acton’s lectures: institutions do not defend themselves. They survive only if people defend them—judges, civil servants, journalists, citizens. And they die if one waits for someone else to defend them.
In their simplicity, Snyder’s twenty lessons from the twentieth century serve as Actonian admonitions for an era that has forgotten its own mechanisms. Defend an institution; do not obey in advance; keep a passport ready; believe in truth. The last of these maxims—believe in truth—is the most important, for Acton stands within that very tradition where political power and the question of what counts as true share an old and unhealthy alliance. Anyone who has studied the First Vatican Council knows that the definition of truth is the true battlefield of power. This, too, is an Actonian insight *avant la lettre* that Snyder brings back to the fore in the guise of contemporary politics: the question of who distinguishes truth from falsehood is never an epistemological question, but always a political one.
Snyder’s achievement lies in having reformulated this insight for a post-totalitarian world that assumes its security is guaranteed. In *The Road to Unfreedom* (2018), he showed how Russia became the school for the kind of politics he calls the "politics of eternity"—the assertion that there are no alternatives, no history, and no truth, but only destiny and the enemy. Where this politics prevails, Acton becomes superfluous: there is nothing left for power to corrupt, because everything has already been surrendered. Snyder warns that the politics of eternity is traveling outward from Moscow; Today it is in Budapest, knocking at the doors of Washington. Acton would have known what to say: where moderation vanishes, freedom vanishes. It is not a question of the individual, but of the architecture.
The Legacy of the Lord from Tegernsee
There is a common trope in the reception of Acton—a convenient one that oversimplifies the man. This convenient Acton—raised eyebrow, a touch worldly-wise, a touch weary—declares that whoever sits in the seat of power will ultimately prove slightly worse than the person who had wanted to see them there in the first place. This interpretation casts Acton as a liberal skeptic who sprinkles the cold ashes of experience over all political hopes. It is incorrect.
Acton was not a man of resignation. He was a liberal of forward momentum, spending his entire adult life writing a "History of Freedom"—a work he never managed to complete because he knew too much, was too conscientious, and was too reluctant to draw final conclusions. What he left behind was not pessimism, but a blueprint for construction. Power corrupts—so we build institutions that set limits on corruption. Absolute power corrupts absolutely—so we tolerate no absolutes: not in faith, not in law, not in office. It is a lesson for architects, not for cynics.
In 2026, this lesson is not antiquated; it is urgent. Anyone circling Lake Tegernsee in Bavaria can pause at a spot where, one hundred and twenty-four years ago, an English lord died—a man who, in an 1887 letter, provided the one diagnosis our present truly needs. It is worth standing there for a moment. Not out of historical reverence, but because from that vantage point, one can see the path that liberal democracies have yet to travel. Acton mapped it out. Snyder updated it. It is up to us to walk it.
Sapere aude!
S.
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