Lord Acton, Juez e historiador de las ideas

Lord Acton, The Judge and Historian of Ideas

Abstract

Liberals of all ages have always attached a great deal of importance to ideas in history, and Lord Acton is no exception. On the contrary, he argued that ideas are very powerful historical forces that shape the world. They are the causes of political events, and the most important of them all is the idea of freedom. This is a moral idea, understood as a freedom of conscience from which all others are born.

Today he is considered one of the leading exponents of the discipline of History of Political Ideas precisely because of his recognition of the leading role played by ideas in human societies. However, Acton's historical thought contains a series of controversial and contradictory statements. He recognises the imperfection of our knowledge and the complexity of history and the ideas that help to explain it, while simultaneously making the historian an inflexible, objective and impartial judge who has to judge not only historical events and the ideas that caused them, but also the historians who narrated them. T