Lord Acton (placeholder)

With extraordinary knowledge of intellectual history and political history, Lord Acton (1834-1902) wrote insightful, inspiring essays about the history of liberty. Standouts include “Nationality” (1862), “The History of Freedom in Antiquity” (1877) and “The History of Freedom in Christianity” (1877). He championed the view that moral standards must be applied to rulers at least as much as, if not more than, they are applied to everybody else. His most famous line occurred in an 1887 letter, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”