About the author
English Catholic historian, politician, and moralist (1834–1902), Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. Acton is best remembered for the maxim 'Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.' A lifelong champion of liberty and conscience against the encroachments of the modern state, he viewed the rising doctrine of national self-determination with a wariness that has aged strikingly well.
Synopsis
An essay arguing that the modern theory that political boundaries should coincide with national ones is a danger to freedom. Acton contends that a state coextensive with a single nation tends toward absolutism, because it recognises no limit higher than the nation's collective self. A state that unites different nationalities under a common law, by contrast, protects minorities, checks the state's power, and provides a school of self-government.
Quote to notice
Direct quote · Public domain“The combination of different nations in one State is as necessary a condition of civilized life as the combination of men in society.”
Acton inverts the nationalist ideal: diversity within a single state is not a problem to be solved by partition but a positive safeguard of liberty. Where the nation and the state are made identical, he warns, the individual and the minority lose any ground to stand on against the majority — so pluralism, not national homogeneity, is the friend of freedom.
To avoid a bubble
Pair with Mazzini or later nationalists who held that each nation deserves its own state, and with Renan for the civic-but-still-unitary conception of nationhood Acton is implicitly warning against.
Reading note
Dense but rewarding nineteenth-century prose. Read it as the liberal worry about nationalism stated at its sharpest, and set it directly against Renan: both are 'liberal,' but Acton fears the unitary national will that Renan's daily plebiscite could license.
Best paired with
Ernest Renan, What Is a Nation?; Yael Tamir, Liberal Nationalism.