Happy Fourth of July!
This weekend, as we celebrate our freedom as United States citizens, it is important that we remember the words of Lord Acton. He may have been British, but he was known as one of the most articulate defenders of religious and political freedom — Sir Harold Butler noted:
Acton was better equipped than any modern English thinker to expound the true nature of the problems which now beset us. … democracy was a revolt against the political autocracy of absolute monarchs or dictators, but democracy itself might breed a new kind of despotism. ‘Popular power may be tainted with the same poison as personal power.’ The authority of the people must be restrained by constitutional checks and balances [Acton in later life came to admire the American constitution] to safe guard freedom and the protection of minorities. ‘The will of the people cannot make just that which is unjust.’”
Here are some of the great thinker’s insights on freedom and liberty:
- Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.
- Liberty is not the power of doing what we like, but the right to do what we ought.
- Teaching men to treasure the liberties of others as their own, and to defend them for the love of justice and charity more than as a claim of right, has been the soul of what is great and good in the progress of the last two hundred years.
- By birth all men are free.
And perhaps our favorite Lord Acton quote here at the Acton School of Business:
- “..Washington and Hamilton…Their example…teaches that men ought to be in arms even against a remote and constructive danger to their freedom, that even if the cloud is no bigger than a man’s hand, it is their right and their duty to stake the national existence, to sacrifice lives and fortunes… On this principle of subversion they erected their commonwealth, and by its virtue lifted the world out of its orbit and assigned a new course to history.”
Happy Independence Day!
